It is unfortunate that just as dad's phone calls take a decided turn for the worse, my patience and time have decreased just as decidedly. I've got about as much work as I can handle at the moment, and am having to be patient with and conciliatory to other clients who want things I cannot give them. The social life has been upgraded too. Time is disappearing for me, just as dramatically as it is disappearing for mum and dad, though in a completely different sense.

So, when I get a call from dad which begins as follows:

'Mike, ahhh. I, I just would like you to tell me... why I wanted to speak to you.'

I feel like pretending it is a wrong number and hanging up.

Dad has no idea how frequently, how pointlessly, how unproductively he calls. He doesn't understand that while at times it is very easy to drop in on him and mum, at other times it has got to be really necessary before I'll even consider it. For me it is this constant interruption that is the burden of having aged demented parents, not the necessity of having to manage doctor's appointments, shopping, repairs, etc. As long as I get to plan ahead I am fairly happy. Three calls in half an hour about absolutely nothing at all and I am not happy, no matter who is calling.

Dad is not the only unwelcome caller these days. Suffice to say that sometimes relationships end cleanly and sometimes they end messily. The phone always seems to feature prominently in the messy ones (as do SMS and email too, nowadays). So it was that at about 10 am today I decide that the world would be a better place for everyone if I just switched my phone off and pretended it wasn't there, pretended I wasn't there. When I came back on the air again at about 3 pm, it seemed that everything was still working smoothly and the sky hadn't fallen in, but in the mean time I had had five clear hours to think straight and actually do something.