Bookworms and coffee

Having all now recovered from last weeks gastro incident, we all felt up to a challenge. Mum and Dad’s combined lifelong book collection has been sitting stacked against a wall at the top of the stairs for most of this year, since the bookshelves collapsed. So we went out, bought a bunch of bookcases and spent the day assembling. Or rather, I spent the day assembling under Dad’s direction, whilst my boyfriend steered us clear of Mum having a meltdown over the internet suddenly going belly up. When it came to putting the books onto the shelves Dad took a more active role by insisting on dusting some of the books and was keen to prioritise shelf space to his travel books over Mum’s French Asterix comic books. Dad seemed happy to look through some old favourites again, clearly remembering which books he enjoyed the most. He is getting confused every so often again though, as demonstrated on Saturday morning when he asked why I had changed out of the brown dress I’d been wearing earlier. This confused me as firstly I don’t own any brown dresses and secondly the only other outfit I had worn on Saturday was my pyjamas. It also immediately made me think of an incident two months ago in a pub when Dad put some sugar wrappers into his cup of coffee, stirred them in and then drank it. Thankfully Dad doesn’t remember much from that period. I will forever remember it as the moment I saw with my own eyes how seriously ill Dad was. As with most people, it’s true that he didn’t always pay attention to everything, but the lunacy of stirring rubbish into a drink before drinking it was not my Father. His brain metastases were still undiagnosed at this point, but all his symptoms pointed to them.