Apologies to everyone who has been disappointed that I let this blog lapse so deplorably. The slide began at the beginning of February and accelerated quite rapidly. Here are the reasons:

Other interests took over. At the end of January I began a relationship which rapidly grew to take over all my interest and pretty much all my time too. That relationship did not last and was followed by an amicable drifting apart. However, last month an even deeper and more intense relationship has formed - and its development and colour is as gripping to me as the fading away and greyness of mum and dad's lives is depressing. I could have sacrificed my own happiness and focussed instead on creating contentment for mum and dad, but I didn't. And aside from the romantic, there have also been professional distractions. As many of you will recall, I work as a freelancer, and alternate between periods of complete professional inactivity (which I enjoy immensely) and frenetic, client and authorities deadline-driven work that requires absolute concentration and attention to detail. It's not the kind of work that one can put off for a couple of days when it is there. And even if it were, that would mean a loss of income. It is both necessary and desirable that I work as hard as I can when given the opportunity. So, as with the relationships, when there is work in the offing, mum and dad get neglected.

So far so good. I've been able to take time away from them and no disaster has befallen us. The social services converged on a modus operandi that works, Rachel came to Sydney and took over a lot of the menial support work and, together with Greg, we have settled into a predictable weekly routine that seems to be adequate for the time being.

The second reason I left off writing is that I simply got fed up with the necessity of having to deal with mum and dad as some kind of provider. I don't think I exaggerate to call it resentment, but whatever it is, it was amplified by the act of having to talk about it. Dealing with mum and dad was no fun, and talking about having no fun began to lose its appeal too. I clearly lost my sense of humour over the whole thing, and have still not really got it back.

So I now find myself in the position of having to do something I really don't want to do, and then trying to convey exactly why I don't like doing it any more. Obviously this is not conducive to dancing prose.

However, having got all the apologies and explanations out of the way, what am I going to do about it? Well, given that one of the reasons I started this blog was to have a record of how things ended for mum and dad, I really have little excuse for not carrying on. So, I am hoping that I will revive the blog somewhat and, in any event, do promise to do something fairly substantial right away. Namely, I will recap the last few months, over a number of posts, each dealing with a single aspect of what's been happening. And here, in a list that is likely to change, are the items I'll cover:

- dealing with food (in new and creative ways)
- dealing with toilets (and things that resemble them)
- remembering people
- strange tales (including dad's incredible walks)
- convergence of behaviour on repeated patterns
- cognitive descent
- medication (and doing without it)
- speech
- emotional instability
- contraction of the known world
- tissues and ways in which one can fiddle with them
- general health
- financial and care measures we are taking