Trying to be a great neice

I visited my great aunt last week. She is in a nursing home in a small village called Steeton, just outside Keighley in West Yorkshire. A sign by the side of the only road into Steeton, reads “Welcome to Steeton. Home of the Steeton Male Voice Choir.” The home is big and seems to be a hotbed of geriatric militancy. My great aunt, who has always been forthcoming with her opinions, had made a window in her busy schedule that day to air her grievances at the residents’ meeting but, when I got there, she was fast asleep in a dusky pink velour armchair, looking much smaller than when I last saw her.

Lillie is 89 and very distressed to have been involuntarily relocated from the house she has lived in all her life. But she was putting a brave face on it and is much perkier than I had expected.

One day she had come across a “big black African man… very good looking” rummaging around her bedroom drawers. When she asked if she could help him at all, he said he was looking for her bra and knickers. My aging spinster aunt, understandably taken aback, asked why. “Because I am going to give you a bath… come on, love!” Lillie, bless her, took it all in her stride and afterwards told Mum, “Ooh, it were a right grand bath!”

Not everything in the home seems to be as satisfying as being bathed by a big handsome man. Lillie decided to vary her diet one morning and ordered the 'poached egg on toast' for her breakfast. When the meal actually arrived it was nothing but a poached yolk, with not a speck of white to be seen, plonked, breadless, in the middle of a large white dinner plate.

The health authority has been assessing Lillie’s abilities to look after herself, before deciding whether to let her go back to her own house again. She has had to prove that she can wash herself standing up at the sink, from head to foot, and that she hasn’t lost her marbles. She got ten out of ten on the intelligence test, which included having to write the word ‘world’ backwards. Lillie thought this was very pedestrian and told the assessor that she could not imagine anyone not being able to do this. “You’d be surprised” came the jaded reply. I'm not surprised at all! Nursing homes are seething with vague old codgers for whom mild dyslexia would be the least of their problems. There’s a lady in Glenside who sometimes stops my grandpa in the corridor when she’s zimmering towards the bathroom and asks in a quivery voice, “Is this the way to Newton Poppleton?”

One of the key parts of the competence assessment involves checking whether the patient can make a cup of tea for themselves. It is so good to be in Blighty!