Mamgu's Tambourine

Even when she was eighty, my grandmother was able to paper the ceiling, standing on a dining table to do so. She dug potatoes from the garden and prepared vegetables for four each day.

Her pastry was a mixture of lard and butter and she made blackcurrant, gooseberry and rhubarb tarts, all fruit she had grown and picked herself. Rice puddings were baked, using a mix of full cream and condensed milk, with rice, syrup and raisins. Fruit cakes had a wine glass of brandy added to them. She took pride in her skills and they were not just practical. I called one evening and she was studying a French dictionary. A visitor was calling, from Paris, and she was revising.

She was not unusual by any means. A lady of eighty three, a one time neighbour of mine, climbed onto her cottage roof and hammered a loose tile back into place,  when a windy day had dislodged it.

I say all this because in Cardiff Royal Infirmary, patients who needed a nurse were told to shake a tambourine. One of the visitors tried the system and he shook for sixteen minutes before someone appeared. ('If the tambourine fails, try the maracas instead', they were told). Sounds like something out of 'Carry on Nurse'.  It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. It's like giving the nursery class a percussion lesson, treating older people like infants, teaching Mamgu to suck eggs.   It's the sheer effrontery of it.

My grandmother's generation had no labour saving gadgets, yet the chores, though sometimes arduous, gave them a purpose in life.    

I have another gripe about some hospitals: the menus.  My contention is this: when people are convalescing, they do not want to be presented with 'healthy' food if they don't like it. I'm talking about a hospital that served brown rice, brown bread, margarine, apples and salad. Food should be appetising to the individual if it is to be enjoyed. This applies to all ages but especially to the elderly, who often won't complain. 

No, I haven't got a degree in nursing and I don't need it to state what should be blindingly obvious.