This Sunday is Mothers’ Day, which used to be called
Mothering Sunday in the days when television was in black and white. Of course I’ll
be going to visit my mam, but there’s no reason for me to take chocolates or
flowers or perfume as a gift, as her place of residence is North Tyneside
General Hospital, where she is being detained as part of a Deprivation of
Liberty order that first came into force on December 20th; the
Saturday before Christmas. She was initially admitted to hospital as she was suffering
from confusion caused, we thought, by a Urinary Tract Infection, but when tests
showed no infection, the inescapable conclusion was dementia and at that point,
we lost any control or influence over her future. We’d recognised she was
getting older, frailer and in need of extra specialist help that we simply
could not give; hence, we got carers to visit, 4 times a day at the end, as
well as district nurses visiting twice a day for medication, but it wasn’t
enough. She needs 24 hour supervision to stop her from harming herself. Falls
have been a constant issue as well.
Despite the fact I promised her faithfully at my dad’s
funeral back in 2009 that I’d always look after her and that she’d never end up
in care, I finally have to admit defeat, which makes me feel worthless and a
failure, but there is no way I can argue with the opinions of the medics who
have stated my mam lacks competency in the areas of nutrition, hygiene and
safety. In short, this means she can’t look after herself, she can’t ask others
to look after her and she can’t recognise she has such needs. Despite
struggling with mobility issues because of severe osteoarthritis, her dementia
has given her the strength to wander and this is the real deal breaker; several
times in the autumn she was brought back to her sheltered accommodation by
local residents and even the police on a couple of occasions, but she managed
to keep it from us, in her moments of infrequent clarity. Her dementia has
caused this decline and she’ll never recover mental capacity ever again. I can’t
even begin to express how this makes me feel. Suffice to say, unlike last year,
Laura and I won’t be taking her out for Sunday lunch and a few drinks. Indeed,
we’ll never take her anywhere ever again. The next move for my mam is to either a care home, if we can find a suitable one, or a secure EMI (elderly mentally ill) unit, but that’s not the end of the story. Not
only do I have my mam’s situation to contend with, I’ve also got the fact I am
starting to show symptoms consistent with early onset dementia myself, which
will require a complex series of tests before I get to the bottom of things. You’ll
probably understand why I’m not going to the pub on Sunday, as if I start
drinking, I don’t think I’ll ever stop.
But don’t let me put you off a leisurely afternoon in the
boozer, with or without the old dear. It’s the accepted way to spend Mothering Sunday
in 2015. The world has changed and sometimes I find it a strange and terrible
place. Have you ever wondered just how Sunday turned from being a day of
inertia, where all forms of recreation were legally stifled by the intolerance
of Christian legislation into the bacchanalian weekly festival of excess it has
become? Pubs are as busy on Sunday afternoons for food and football as they are
on Friday nights it seems. Certainly some of the credit for Britain throwing
off the straitjacket of enforced religious morality must go to the 1988
Licensing Act, which liberalised Sunday hours to the extent they changed from
12-2 and 7-10.30 to 12-3 and 7-10.30. This
curious anomaly of a bygone era of Christian observance utterly out of step
with the reality of late 20th century life persisted until The Sunday Hours
Licencing Act permitted all day opening 7 days a week from 1995 onwards. This modification of the 1988 Act came as a
result of pressure from both those in the pub trade, who identified a
potentially lucrative market in family lunches on the Sabbath and the retail
sector, who had gained the legal right for shops to open every day of the week
via the 1994 Sunday Trading Act and saw a clear potential link between the two
areas of consumer consumption. In an era where the mammoth Friday evening
check-out queues at supermarkets have largely been replaced by a Sunday snarl
up, it seems hard to recollect an earlier time when the Day of Rest was
precisely that. Walking through the almost entirely deserted centre of
Newcastle on a Sunday afternoon in the late 1980s and early 1990s, any
potential customer would be restricted to spending their hard earned on either
the wares on offer at Boots the Chemist by Grey’s Monument or RS McColl’s
newsagent’s at the top of Pilgrim Street.
Other than for international tournaments, Sunday football
was, of course, in its infancy back then as well. Two games against Manchester United, a
goalless league fixture in November 88 and a 2-3 loss in the FA Cup fifth round
in February 90, as well as a draw with sunderland in a morning kick-off,
insisted on by the Police, a fortnight prior to the latter game, were the only
fixtures played on a Sunday at St James’ Park before the advent of Sky TV’s
takeover of the national game via the Premier League. Keen students of
chronology will note Newcastle United were not in the top flight in the Premier
League’s debut season, but ITV got in on the live broadcasting act, by moving
home ties with Swindon, Millwall, Derby, Birmingham, sunderland and Leicester
and away games at Brentford, sunderland, Barnsley, West Ham and Tranmere, for
live transmission. A dozen games, all free to air; could you imagine that
now? The season after, following NUFC’s
promotion, the anachronism encapsulated by Sunday closing could clearly be seen
by gangs of blokes hanging around in city centre pub doorways waiting for
opening time and Sky’s second showing of that afternoon’s game. I distinctly
remember queues similar to those seen at the Gallowgate turnstiles outside
every pub on the Haymarket, waiting for access to the re-run of Andy Cole’s
famed hat trick in the 3-0 demolition of Liverpool in November 1993. Bearing in
mind such enthusiasm and the potential for turning a dollar by packing the pubs
for the live showing of games, it would be foolish to discount to influence of
Rupert Murdoch on the British political establishment in terms of providing a
vastly increased market for his product, in the days before domestic satellite
and cable television was the norm. Nowadays, everyone has access to Sky Sports;
hell I’ve got it for free on my phone. However, what has been introduced into
the British weekend experience is the concept of going to the pub on a Sunday
afternoon to watch the Sky game, whoever may be playing.
Actually, the good news is that Everton v Newcastle isn’t on
the telly this Sunday, so I might yet hold a pint glass in my shaking hands…
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