[Leica] IMG: Difficult days

[Douglas Barry]

I had to visit my mother in her nursing home for the first time in a 
couple of months, and unbelievably forgot my camera, so had to use my 
old iPhone 5S. I'll upgrade next year at some stage, and get a roughly 
similar sized phone with a better camera. Her nursing home is only four 
km away as the crow flies, but I don't have a flying car, despite all 
the promises of my childhood tv programmes. Very disappointing really. 
Traffic was very heavy, ominous really, as the closetted world emerges 
and goes shopping for Christmas. What frightening jump in plague figures 
will greet us in the early weeks of January?

  As for my soon to be 97 year old mother, she was in her usual vehement 
fettle, as I met her, not in her room as before, but in one of a row of 
garden sheds set up in the basement car park of her nursing home. We 
were separated by a full perspex screen that split the shed, and each of 
of us had microphone and speakers. The shed was tarted up like Santa's 
grotto and was a somewhat  incongruous situation as she complained long 
and very loudly about being imprisoned by this virus, expounding about 
how she was spending the tail end of her life like the Count of Monte 
Cristo, and most definitely wanted to go home. Sadly, that's impossible 
with the current plague. She's perfectly sharp intellectually, but, 
following a fall late last year, needs someone to keep an eye on her. We 
had someone calling in very day, but then the pandemic hit.

It's difficult being charged with the other member of our family diarchy 
with looking after the best interests of a rational adult. Anyway, she's 
not the Count or even the Countess of Monte Cristo, but maybe has a 
claim to be the Countess of Mounting Tinsel.
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/DouglasBray/Xmas+2020+FF+Mum.jpg.html

Douglas