Rice pudding and teaspoons

...or the upside of having elderly parents.

I’ve been spending more time with my parents recently for one reason and another, and I can’t help thinking how lucky I am that they are still around. They enrich the whole family’s life in ways they probably don’t even imagine.

It’s a funny feeling when you are almost at pension age and you spend some time with your parents. Suddenly you are a child again. It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve been an independent adult, how many children you have reared, how many grandchildren you already have, how many exams you have passed or how much of the world you have seen. Parents never leave off being parents, and my parents are no exception.

So if Mum wants to give you petrol money when you’ve taken her to an appointment or something, you don’t refuse. I’ve tried it, but I get The Look. I feel as though I might get sent to my room.

Mum and Dad have always had a gift for seeing the funny side of things, and they have not lost it. Which is just as well, because as you get older there is much more scope for it. For example, due to certain confused online purchasing by Dad, we have been blessed with an overabundance of rice pudding and teaspoons  Well, we couldn’t leave them to munch their way through the quantities of pudding Dad ordered in error. Then there was the teaspoon incident. There are only so many teaspoons a household of two needs. For some reason Dad decided he was short of a teaspoon or two and unintentionally ordered about a million, only to open a drawer after they arrived to find he had plenty of teaspoons already.

Dad’s tendency to systematically label and number things like margarine tubs, eggs and milk bottles has been noted before. These things can’t be easily explained, although Dad has had a good go and we got a good laugh. And always ready to laugh at himself, he has told most of the family how he recently took Mum her breakfast in bed minus the egg which was supposed to be the main feature of the meal.

There’s something I’ve noticed about visiting Mums house. You always come away carrying more than you went in with. No, I don’t mean we’ve been systematically robbing her. I mean she gives you stuff. Even if it’s only old newspapers to wrap your rubbish in or light fires or something. It’s always been like this. I don’t know where she gets all the excess stuff from. I’m not counting Dad’s over-ordered things. Recently Mum has taken to accidentally buying way too much meat for their Sunday dinner. Rather than using it the next day or freezing it or something, I get a phone call on Monday to ask if I can use the best part of a lamb joint (I can!) or a couple of cooked chicken legs or whatever. I’m the lucky offspring who lives round the corner, so I get this quite often. I’m not complaining! She says its for the dog (yeah right) but he doesn’t see much of it. I don’t know that Mum deliberately buys too much in order to have some to feed her offspring with, but it’s the sort of thing she would be likely to do.

I know they won’t mind me mentioning this, but Mum and Dad keep us all entertained with their bickering. They are famous for it anyway, and have even been presented with a house name plaque ‘The Bickeridge’ by their grandchildren. This is proudly displayed outside their front door for all the world to see, so it’s no secret. Recently I was with them when Dad was due to be discharged from a brief hospital visit. Mum was going to help him dress, the curtains were pulled round the bed, so I went out to make a phone call and left them to it. Returning to the ward ten minutes later I got a bit confused and couldn’t remember which bed was Dad’s. But I needn’t have worried – I soon heard them bickering away behind the curtains.

And where would we be without Mum’s fascinating stories of her childhood and her laugh aloud tales of characters she has met? Yes, I count myself very lucky indeed to have these two still in my life. I just hope they realise how much they mean to all of us.