Marks and Spencer makes amends
To continue the story of Marks and Spencer from Fifty Shades around Marks and Spencer.
Well, they did make amends for not making amends. A large bunch of flowers arrived for mum the next day but for some reason she thought they were for me. Well maybe they should have been, given the amount of time I spent with a very nice lady called Ashley trying to sort the whole thing out.
The story goes that after my initial call the store put a bunch of flowers and chocolates in a taxi to be delivered to mum. The taxi driver said that mum was not in when he arrived so he left the flowers and chocolates with a neighbour.
He also said that he told the neighbour which address they were for. However, there was no information about which neighbour took delivery of the items.
There are a few choices; the 80 something lady next door who knows mum well but who mum has a rather difficult relationship with. She is the one who told me “your Mum will pick up the phone if she wants to speak to you”, mentioned in The keys to life post.
Or there’s the gentleman on the other side who I don’t know and neither does mum really. Or the lady who lives opposite but we know it couldn’t have been her because Mum was out shopping with her at the approximate time of the delivery. Anyway, mum says the flowers and chocolates didn’t arrive.
I then went through a pretty farcical 30 minutes with mum trying to explain why she should go and ask her neighbours about the delivery. Eventually she agreed but after a while she came back on the phone saying that no one had them. Did the taxi driver have an elderly Mother with a birthday, I wondered?
In the midst of all this there were some hopeful signs. Mum started telling me that a letter had arrived from the solicitor and that she wanted my sister to see it. “Let me tell you where I have put it”, she said, “in case I forget.”
“It is on the heated trolley, (is this an antique, I mused, does anyone actually use these things?) under the crochet doily. You can see the letter through the holes.”
Right, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t forget that! As we were on such a positive note regarding forgetting things, I asked Mum where she was keeping her keys nowadays.
“Around my neck”, she said. Good, I thought. Best place for them but then on a more practical note, asked what she did when she took a shower. This was actually a ploy so that if she loses them again I would know where to tell her to look.
But I was not so lucky. “In the sideboard behind the left hand door under the bubble wrap”, was the answer. The very place I foolishly hadn’t realised she used for hiding things on the last lost key day.
Oh well, let’s hope they remain safe and do not go walking like mum’s birthday cards which have already disappeared and are nowhere to be found!
Postscript: within days, everything had turned up including the flowers and chocolates. The gentleman next door neighbour had taken them in and for some reason had not gotten around to delivering them (maybe he forgot!).
He popped up, literally, at mum’s window to tell her that he had them. She very kindly told him to keep the flowers but she would take the chocolates. When she reported the story to me an hour later, she had already eaten half the box!
So don’t despair of Marks & Spencer they do made amends, it’s just that dementia can sometimes make it appear that they don’t!
