Sadly George died suddenly in Beijing
There is a Memories and Comments Site ( http://theworldissaddened.wordpress.com )
where you can add your memories and thoughts and also read those posted by others.
Click through the link to Comments to read and add text.
A sense of duty and a death wish made me drive up from Cambridge to Harrogate to visit the AP before the final phase of this crazy summer. I felt she had only just got to grips with the idea that I have now "left UK", and she is still here. If she hadn't thrown all her savings away of course, she could be going off on nice holdays, but instrad she is stuck in sheltered accommodation in Yorkshire.
Anyway, I took her a bottle of sherry, and showed her some of the photos of Spain In return she gave me a "small birthday present", namely an unwrapped box containing one ballpen and one pencil, gold effect, with fake diamonds on he clips ........ and each engraved "MME" - her initials.
Long standing readers will know only too well how she got hold of these.
Same old AP. Chuckles are few and far
)So, I drove to Essex to see my favourite aunt, the one who cared about me when the Aged Parent gave not a damn. We had a restrained lunch, and talked of China, and Spain, and stuff, and then talk turned to Aged P. I related some of the horror tales, some of the awfulness. FA knows of course, we have shared this bloody woman and her ways before. BUt this time it as more of a "Well, you have to laugh" mood.
She told me I should write book.
I told her I had done that already, but won't publish it till AP is dead.
I must revise "In the Granny Flat no one can hear you scream". New title too, I think. Ideas?
Christ on a crutchWhich is a really rude British expression of exasperation.
OK, so on Saturday, before I came to Holland, I went to see the Aged P. I try to do it, I usually fit in one visit while in Europe, so I see her three/four times a year. She makes an effort to be nice, I make an effort to be tolerant.
Now to appreciate the rest of this post you need to have read the back posts. If you're just passing through, my mother is 92, she lived with me for almost five years, but in the end her sheer nastiness to me, plus her addiction to mail fraud (she gave 35,000 pounds to crooks in the five years, unstoppable) drove me to put her, at her own expense, into a sheltered home.
So on Saturday I was there, drinking tea and eating slightly suspect teacakes, when we for some reason talked about my move to Spain and what the cost of moving would be.
"Well" she said, "I may soon be able to help out there". And she produced a letter. It was the usual scam. Coming from a load of crooks called "Club for the restoration of wealth" or similar. It told her she had been the recipient of 46,500 pounds, from a mystery relative she had never heard of, for reasons she could not undertand. Naturally it had her place of birth (she eagerly fills that sort of information in on fraud questionnaires) and other personal details, and she read this as if it meant the letter was real. She read the whole letter to me. It diodn't matter that it was obviously a fraud (she'd sent them the 25 pounds) printed in bulk, from a post box in Holland, and totally fabricated. She was sure she was about to receive the cash.
It's a mystery. She is still intelligent, can talk politics, economy, theology, languages, cultures, all sorts of stuff. But she refuses to understand these postal frauds. It wasn't an accidental error, she was DETERMINED to believe it.
I took my leave. I am going to live in Spain. Each time I leave I know she may die before I return. But I am no loner going to do anything about her addiction to fraud, she has destroyed herself, despite my very real efforts to prevent it. You see, she never really even liked me, so she always did the opposite of my advice. Even to the extent of her own ruination.
But it still hurts me, it still mystifies me, and I can't help being sorry that her stupidity, hatred for me, and incredible arrogance has left her at 92 alone and very poor in a small flat, while I find my new life in another country.
I went to see the AP today, a brief visit before I return to China. The place was the usual smelly tip, but I'm used to that. I levered myself into the one chair I could get into, and accepted a Sainsbury's sherry. On the table
...were two envelopes, with European postage attached. One to an astology scam in the Netherlands, another to a lotto scam in Spain. Maybe she sensed the frissance as I sat down, for the anticipated request to mail them did not come. But she knew I would sit there, and had arranged them neatly so that I would see them. Nasty old cow.
But if winter does its stuff, I may not see her again. So there.
Next page >>