The Home

I have been doing battle with forms and I have been being creative with writing. It's all quite tiring and the first one is trying and tiresome. The more you look at a form the more complicated it gets.

This morning when I visited my friend in her nursing home, I brought her down to the ground floor where there is a living room type of area. We sat and talked and I noticed that opposite us, three women in wheelchairs were lined up one behind the other as though they were in a train or on a bus.
After a while, an alarm starting going off intermittently. An orderly dashed out and checked to see if the lift was stuck, or a smoke alarm was going off, and then she noticed that one of the ladies in the wheelchairs, the middle one, was pulling an emergency cord on the back of the wheelchair in front of her.

The nursing home is both hopeless and hopeful. The state of some of the people tears at your heart and makes you wonder what their experience of life is at this point. But the staff are cheerful and patient and the nursing home seems so much more lively and present than the old folks' homes of yesteryear, or maybe of Britain.

Still, not quite sure why we call it a home.