No life
Amorous intentions
Jeremy Clarke We'd been standing in the queue at the supermarket checkout for what had seemed like a very long time. A three-toed sloth on Mogadon would have been quicker at locating the bar codes than the young trainee at ' the till. My heart went out to the lad. Born and raised to maturity by loving parents, and given just enough education to enable him to read advertisements and final reminders, here, on his first day at work, was the 21stcentury equivalent of the mill-hand.
There was a newspaper rack nearby. The headline on the front page of the local paper, I noticed, was: 95-YEAR-OLD MAN RAPES 99-YEAR-OLD WOMAN. Returning to the queue with a copy, I read out the report to my ex-girlfriend's mother to pass the time.
Rapist and victim lived at a residential home for the elderly. The man, who has Alzheimer's disease, was currently being held in the psychiatric wing of the local hospital. The woman was in a state of shock but said to be comfortable. Had she heard of the residential home, I asked my ex-girlfriend's mother? She had, she said. Her father was in there. In fact, it was her father who had been detained. Could I lend her 50p or something for the phone?
I live in a residential home for the elderly as well. Apart from myself, there are only two other residents now: a gentleman of 91 and a lady of 103. The lady of 103, whose mind is still as clear as a bell, remembers marching around the nursery and banging a toy drum in celebration of the Relief of Ladysmith. She is a spinster, and the gentleman a fastidious bachelor, so I should be very a if it came to light that one had been forcing themselves on the other in the night. But in the past, when we were full, amorous octogenarians have been something of a problem.
Not that there's anything wrong with residents of old people's homes having a cuddle, of course. If they were in their right minds we would have stood back and cheered. But with those who are suffering from Alzheimer's disease — which, they tell us, affects one in three of those who make it past 60 — there is the complication that their appetite for sex is a peculiar manifestation of their illness rather than the result of a direct hit by Cupid's arrow. And in cases where the lady or gentleman resident has previously led a blameless and upright life, priapism or nymphomania in old age is particularly grotesque, not to mention upsetting to the children.
I first saw evidence of this in my twenties, when I worked on a psycho-geriatric ward in a large mental hospital. We wore shorts, trainers and vests and ran between dormitory, lavatory, shower and day-room with the patients draped over our shoulders as if they were sides of beef. It was undignified for the patients, but the only way to keep them relatively shit-free. But the point I'm coming to is that the day-room was often like the end of a school disco, there was so much snogging going on.
'Don't get old, son,' said some of the saner ones in their more lucid moments. I solemnly and sincerely promised them I wouldn't.
At the residential home for the elderly where I'm living now, the most spectacular case of Alzheimer's-induced nymphomania was Mrs Crisp. And the focus of her amorous intentions was our 90-year-old Commander, Jim Fisher. Commander was the perfect gentleman, though unfortunately he had no recollection of anything at all, not even his own name. More than once I took a cup of tea up to his room to find Mrs Crisp performing a seductive striptease in front of him. Commander would be seated comfortably in his armchair, looking on with an expression of polite amusement at the unexpected turn of events. He accepted the cup of Earl Grey and Rich Tea biscuits as if refreshments were all part of the deal.
But why on earth the staff at the residential home in the newspaper article had called in the old Bill was difficult to fathom. The publicity was all the more embarrassing for my ex-girlfriend's mother because her father had been a church deacon and a pillar of the community. Was it because the staff had so little knowledge of Alzheimer's disease that they were morally outraged? I suppose people who are paid £3.70 an hour for wiping bottoms can't be blamed for paying little or no attention to the subtleties of mental illness.
The trainee checkout assistant had pressed the wrong button on his till yet again and was ringing his bell for help. My ex-girlfriend's mother went to look for a pay phone while I kept our place in the queue. I told her that if, when she got back, I was busy making intimate suggestions to other members of the queue, she mustn't worry. It was probably the onset of Alzheimer's, that's all.
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