During the Olympics:

Multiple cumulative and unrelenting events of the day have left me sad, emotional, frustrated, thankful and eventually knackered. Most of today was spent grappling with various aspects of NHS primary and secondary care for two elderly and increasingly frail individuals. I shaved, groomed and fed my Dad and witnessed him being subjected to numerous necessary indignities, having to restrain the urge to get in there and take over when the lovely but inexperienced junior doctor tried and failed to cannulate a vein which I was itching to have a go at. Corralled, organised, fed, circularly conversed with and taxied my Mum – briefly losing her when I nipped out for a sanity restoring walk down the river bank and returned to find all the doors open and an empty house. She eventually emerged from the opposite direction clutching the inevitable bunch of flowers that she had half-inched from someone else’s garden to put in yet another vase in the living room. Now both of us are drinking sherry, eating chocolate and watching fetchingly muscly men in tiny pants hurling themselves off a diving board.