Today we went to visit Chris's Auntie Joan. The story of how they met again after many years is something definitely best read on Chris's blog rather than me attempting to tell it.
Auntie Joan is even taller than Chris which was a surprise! We were going to visit her and her son, but also to visit her husband Fred in hospital who had been taken in a short time beforehand. The trip was straightforward but we had to wait a bit in the hospital entrance while her son Stephen parked the car which was problematic due to the number of parked cars.
We went up in the lift to the second floor where we found Fred in bed in one of the wards. Chris introduced me and Fred said hello to me, having never seen me before of course. I sat there quietly for the most part, Stephen (their son) went off to find what was going on with Fred whilst Auntie Joan chatted to Fred, a task made unnecessarily difficult as the staff had lost Fred's hearing aids and had not got him any replacements!
We stayed for about and hour or more, it's often hard to tell in hospitals where I find that time always seems to run in its own way and bears little relation to the outside world - especially true in some of the wards I visited years ago in Brighton's main hospital which had no windows and so looked the same on a brilliant summer's day or in the middle of a wild winter's night. Very confusing.
We left and hit all the evening traffic going home which meant that it was a very slow journey out of the town centre. We did though have Stephen singing along with the words to New York, New York and a few other Sinatra songs of which he'd recently learnt the lyrics!
Auntie Joan is lovely and very different to my own Mum despite being close in age. She calls me "mate", a term I don't think I've ever heard my own Mum use to address me or anyone in the whole of my life.
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