My Dear Old Dad is losing his marbles; one by one they slowly roll away. I believe he was always mental and my mum shielded him from all of us, but now there's no buffer between us and his delusions.
I heard he was planning to sell his house and move to the Orkney Islands, a group of remote islands off the far North coast of Scotland.
"So you're moving to the Orkneys Dad?" I asked him.
"Well I have no family" says D.O.D. Um, ok...
"Dad, remember last time I was here and you called the bank and it was a Scottish person and you said to them 'Can you say that again in English please' because you couldn't understand them? You know that if you move to Scotland they will all have Scottish accents?"
D.O.D mumbles unintelligibly. I try a different approach.
"So you are moving because you feel lonely right?" D.O.D nods his head.
"To one of the most remote places on the planet???" More mumbling, and he is definitely starting to get the hump."Just don't sell the house right away Dad; rent a place for a couple of months and if you really like it, then buy a place and sell the house." The stacks of information from real estate agents in the Orkneys are piled around his chair...
It's hard to know what's coming next with Dear Old Dad. The last day of my trip he gave out the wrong phone number -he's had the same number for almost forty years- and he was incredibly rude and nasty. I asked him why he was so grumpy and he said "You treat me like I'm incapable of organizing my own life".I said "You're not doing a very good job of it; you don't even know your own phone number!"; not to mention his plans to get married again/move to the arctic circle...it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye or moves to the tundra. Good times.
