The Hazards of Toast and Roasties

Mum says, with confidence, over lunch:

'They have found a new disease'.

Mum is a newshound. She watches, listens, avidly.  Podcasts, the television, printed headlines which she labours through. The news has always informed her breakfast time conversation.  

That hasn't changed. Except that now, now she is less reliable in her delivery of the news.

'What's that?' I ask.

I am also a news aficionado; I'm pretty sure I know what she is going to tell me.

'Well they have found it in a small animal', she says, 'this new disease; they get it from toast that is too brown and roast potatoes'.

This conversation is already veering towards the insane.

I am not sure which small animals regularly eat charred toast or roast potatoes.

She means cancer: scientists believe that - along with red wine and red meat and all the other good stuff in life, toast and chips and roasties give you cancer now too.

'Not cancer?', I question, hoping I might rein this back towards something that makes sense.

'No love, not cancer'. She delivers this with patronising authority. Partly because she is certain of her knowledge. Mostly because she is not.

I am beginning to learn not to argue.

But I am a slow learner.

The other day, on a long drive home, through country my mother has driven through only once in her entire life, she told me confidently, 'Oh look!' and she points enthusiastically out of the window at a building, 'that's where we had lunch with A'.

A is my daughter. We had lunch with her, certainly, but not there, not in that forgettable building; we had lunch in another building, in quite another country.

I respond too hastily (because I am too slow to learn).

'No we didn't, Mum, not there, not that building'. And I regret the words as soon as they're spoken.

But she is insistent. Distress is quickly evident in her rising tone. 'Yes we did'.

I try to soften my correction by telling her that we had lunch with A, certainly, and that perhaps the building where we ate lunch looked a little like the one she has spotted.

'I'd know that building anywhere', she says, 'and whatever you say, we had lunch there with A last week'.

She is angry. Partly because she is certain of her knowledge. Mostly because she is not.

I sink back into my seat and feel sick because my mother's memory is in tatters, it unravels in knotted threads of psychedelic colours so that there is no cohesion and because her intellect is so blunted that her arguments are small and infantile now, reduced to what she does remember and muddled by what she does not.

My only comfort is that this conversation, this upsetting, brief, confrontation, will be forgotten by her very soon. As so much is.