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It wasn’t the best time for me to encounter Giles Fraser’s essay on the importance of family, which he bizarrely linked to the iniquity of Remainers, freedom of movement, and children who have the temerity to live more than a bus ride from their elderly parents.
I read it while I was snatching a break away from the hospital where my father has lain for weeks; a hospital hundreds of miles and across a sea from my own home. He’s there as a result of malnutrition not caused by an inadequate diet, hypothermia not caused by a cold house, gastric problems and a skin disease that has gone undiagnosed and become rampant – in part because it is so difficult to get oneself in front of one of the NHS’s increasingly rare dermatologists. I have been here for weeks.
Sparking Fraser’s fury was an unnamed woman who had rung her father’s doctor to request help changing his shitty pants. I picture her as one of those Midsomer Murder characters who you know is a wrong’un because she arrives in Badger’s Behind in a convertible sports car and red lipstick.
Sparking my fury was the utter dissimilarity between what Fraser subsequently described – the idea that, busy with our exciting, narcissistic lives, we children are all too keen to offload the grim bits to any passing care worker, however low-paid or temporary – and the grinding reality of what I, and millions like me, are experiencing as we desperately try to care for our loved ones.
Far from “casting off our responsibilities”, our daily reality is the fear of missing the subtle changes in our relatives’ conditions that an expert would know spelled danger. Our reality is knowing we would go to the mattresses for them, even as we sideline other parts of our lives, knowing that this in itself causes the sick and frail distress.
For here is the truth: bottom-wiping is easy. Nobody wants to do it, but everyone can. That a bum-cleaning refusenik can be produced is not an argument for societal and familial breakdown. Even the one who so infuriated Fraser and his GP friend might have her good points: I admire her persistence, for example, in actually getting through to her father’s surgery and to a medical practitioner. Fortunately, she wasn’t asking for an appointment, for which, at my own father’s practice, the wait stands at two weeks.
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