Between thoughts about Margery

I want to tell you some more about Margery, but two things happened this week that made me laugh, so those first.

I'm (fairly) sure my cognitive processes are ticking along nicely — I can think all right — but my inner librarian, challenged by the steady flood of incoming data to process and store, often gets overwhelmed. I don't really notice until I need to call upon her for a piece of information, such as the name of a person or a product of some kind. Then she rummages distractedly through the numerous loose papers on her desk, hunting for whatever it is I require. The results can be approximate, but she does her best to fulfil my request.

Like this.

Sorry, my drawing isn't very good, but now we have AI watching closer than our guardian angel, I no longer dare search for images on the interwebs. They have become like spiderwebs — sticky.

Back to my inner librarian.

There is a laxative I take when necessary (I have to be meticulous about gut motility because of all the health problems I've had), called Movicol. It has an ingredient in it called Macrogol (I think). There's a similar but different laxative called Miralax. So they all begin with M and they all have three syllables. Quite often if I am hunting in vain for the name of the one I want (Movicol), I put in a request to my inner librarian to supply it PDQ. Accordingly, flustered and harassed, her pencil behind her ear and loose strands of grey hair escaping from her bun, she peers through her glasses frowning, searching the Archive of Possibilities for what I want. "Miralax?" No. "Macrogol?" No.

And then, one morning this week, "Mollycoddle?"

Well, she does have a point. 

We got there in the end.

*        *        *

The second things that made me laugh — yesterday I called by the house where I used to live, to collect from my daughters some official-looking letters that had been sent there by some bureaucratic institution that had only my old address. 

That wasn't of itself very funny, of course, but I stayed to have a cup of tea and a chat, in the course of which our Alice said she'd answered the door to the postman the other day, and he seemed a bit concerned. He wanted to ask her, what had happened to the old lady? The one who used to talk to him. She had always been there, but he hadn't seen her for ages. He'd been worried about her.

Alice was bewildered. What? An old lady? Here? In our house? 

Then light dawned. The postie wasn't hallucinating and hadn't got the wrong house.

"Oh!" she said. "Oh — you mean Mum!"

So she was able to set his mind at rest. The old lady hadn't died or been incarcerated, just moved house. 

Yes. That old lady.