Good evening everybody,
I hope you had a great weekend, I know we did. Our friends returned to London this afternoon and since then we have sat around in the lounge watching Oscar play and half-watching a film. I’m going to keep today’s post brief as I think I have talked myself out over the last 24 hours.

Seeing Stephen, Alison and Rick was a real tonic and swept away the grey clouds for a while. There was so much fun in watching Oscar chase them around the house squealing with delight. He really enjoyed the rough and tumble they provided although we are unsure who was tired out first.

I’m not sure if you have seen it, but we all sat and watched Borat last night. Whilst we all found it very funny, it is definitely not for the faint of heart. Unfortunately, the wonderful lady who looks after me throughout the night arrived to find us all in fits of laughter, as two hairy men wrestled naked around a hotel room! Sorry Pat!

What made it all the funnier was that only minutes earlier we had commented about Pat walking in at inappropriate moments during my previous watching of Rome and The Sopranos! The things she has to put up with!

I’ll leave it there for tonight as I have no other news and I am fairly worn out. As I keep telling people, talking is like running for me and I’m currently at the half marathon stage.
All my love,
Neil x

Pat, one of our night sitters, was a very special lady in our lives. Neil really trusted her. The two of them would have conversations while the rest of us slept. She would help him drift off into his imagination, as they would discuss places they would like to visit and what drink they would have at the bar when they got there. She was happy to blur the lines of protocol and join in with our sense of humour, which was exactly what we needed, making it very comfortable to have her in our home. She even posed for a photograph at Neil’s request to mark the momentous occasion he filled the pee bottle to millimetres from the top. He was very proud of himself for managing to make Pat panic that they would run out of bottle space. Sadly, I have no idea whose camera was nearest at hand, so it’s a photograph lost … probably for the best! There was one time Pat tried to be too professional by staying in the kitchen until Neil was ready to go to bed, so we took all of the chairs out of the kitchen leaving her nowhere to sit down and she had to join us in the living room. She didn’t try it again.

We hadn’t seen ‘Borat’ before, the DVD had been given to Neil as a birthday present and hung around since July, the kind of film we never seemed to be in the mood to watch. When poor Pat came through the door that night she had no idea why her arrival had caused us all to have tears rolling down our cheeks, and not one of us, not even my mother, had the breath left in them to explain why. All we could do was point at the TV, but what was on the screen wasn’t as funny as the fact that Pat had walked in whilst we were watching it. We all felt like a bunch of kids who had been caught watching something beyond our years.

I don’t know how Neil survived that without choking. I don’t know if any of us would have noticed or been able to help him without still laughing had he done so. - Louise (2013)