It's only yesterday since I last had dinner with mum and dad. Just recently I've been making my weekly trip later in the day and taking them to a restaurant rather than making sandwiches for them. This is better for dad, who recognises it as a treat, but for mum it has both costs and benefits. However, the subject today is food.

Each week, I order the same thing for mum and dad - children's portions of fish and chips, freshly squeezed orange juice, ice-cream with chocolate sauce, and English breakfast tea. I usually have a glass of wine, a salad, chips, and a cappuccino. Mum has no idea what she ate the previous week, and dad can barely remember. Practically everything else on the menu seems fraught with complications and the regular prospect of eating the old standby, fish and chips, seems guaranteed to cause excitement, much like the mention of a cup of tea. Greg usually gives them the same thing at the weekend. Funnily enough, I can remember my mother saying, 'now, you're not living on fish and chips, are you?' when i was away at college.

Mum has done some peculiar things recently. Yesterday I discovered that the cats had been offered dried food swimming in dish-washing detergent. Nothing really wrong there, just a waste of detergent. A couple of weeks ago we were having tea at a cafe and I only just managed to stop mum putting the spout of the teapot into her mouth. She frequently drinks her tea with a spoon, as if it were soup. She eats off other people's plates. She uses her hands to eat foods that once she would not - such as fish. She sometimes needs guidance with the knife and fork - knowing neither how to hold them nor what to do with them, it seems.

Not long ago, as I drove the two of them to the cafe we normally use, I heard crunching in the back seat. I turned around and saw that mum had secreted a couple of biscuits up her sleeve and was now eating them.
'We're on our way to a restaurant, mum. You don't need to eat those,' I said.
She just grinned back at me as if she had somehow stolen a march on whoever it is that can't be trusted with her food. She may just be putting food in random places because she has no idea where it belongs any more, but it sometimes looks as if the squirreling away of comestibles has a purpose. I found a piece of pie wrapped in a tissue, lurking at the back of the cupboard, last week. It smelt OK, actually, so we ate it. Just like squirrels, she usually forgets where she puts it.

Greg told me that about a month ago both mum and dad were eating chocolate-coated ice-cream on a stick. In this case dad also appeared to show signs of forgetting what to do; he kept putting his ice-cream down in the table. Mum, on the other hand, was eating hers, but holding it by the ice-cream itself, rather than the stick. She often tries to dip her cake in her tea.

Now, when we sit down at the table, I make sure that anything that might cause confusion is both further than arm's-length away from mum and, preferably, also out of sight. Unless I first squeeze the lemon over her fish, and then remove it, she will try to eat it whole - a quarter lemon. She will try to drink the tartare sauce from its dish. She will grasp the glass that contains the sticks of sugar and try to tip the contents into her mouth. She will try to drink milk straight from the jug. She will forget what a straw is for and try to drink from the glass without taking the straw out of it. All teaspoons, condiments, straws and similar distractions must be removed.

Most of these problems were much less severe or even non-existent when I was last writing regularly in this blog. Clearly, and as expected, things are now much worse.