Entertaining Mother

Christmas Eve, and for the fifth year running I set off early to pick up my Mum. She spends three days with us, and normally enjoys the change, but after a year of failing health I was expecting this year to be more of an ordeal for her. Looking on the bright side, it would have been worse had we still been at the old house, which had many more stairs to negotiate. With deteriorating hip joints and muscle wastage in one leg, she finds stairs increasingly difficult and had at one point declared that she would sleep on a sofa because she wouldn't be able to get upstairs.

Having assembled the portable pharmacy she needs to carry with her these days, we set off back home just after 11am. The roads had been relatively quiet on the way down, but by this time everyone had woken up to the fact of it being the last shopping day, and the journey through Stockport was very slow.

The journey from Nottingham takes about two hours so we arrived at the predicted time and gave Mum the ground floor tour, leaving the upper floors until my cousin and her husband arrived. I needn't have worried quite so much about the stairs - turns out in the last couple of days Mum has improved slightly and developed a way of getting up that is slow but effective.

Trish and Rob stayed for tea and sandwiches and headed off around 6pm leaving us with the evening telly. There was a time, and I'm sure this is not a rose-tinted memory, when our whole family could sit and watch TV quite happily together. Maybe the lack of choice back then (when I left the parental home there were only three channels available) forced us to be less discerning and/or more easily satisfied, or perhaps it's a complex combination of factors, but I find it almost impossible to watch in the company of my mother for any length of time. So much has changed since those days of my adolescence. Back then television was our main form of entertainment. Now, while my Mum remains glued to the same narrow spectrum of programs (soaps and crime dramas such as Poirot and Morse), we barely watch an hour's TV per night, preferring instead to spend time online, playing games, reading, or with friends.

Even when our telly habits overlap - as with soaps - it's not always a good match. We watch EastEnders; she doesn't. She watches Emmerdale; we don't. And our attitudes to the storylines couldn't be more polarised. David Platt's exposure of grandma Audrey's affair with Bill Webster, for instance, which took place over the family meal on Christmas Day in front of Bill's wife was greeted by us with cries of "Excellent!" and howls of laughter. My Mum sat stony-faced and muttered: "He needs a damned good hiding."

And once the soaps are over for the night, there is very little we can find that will satisfy our mutual viewing needs. Mum's lived on her own for 13 years now, and is used to having sole charge of the remote. Since we're not prepared to sit in front of endless rehashes of Midsomer Murders or The Inspector Linley Mysteries, whatever we choose to watch is punctuated by regular tuts or exasperated exhalations from Mum's corner of the room followed shortly with "I think I'll go to bed, John." No, it's never relaxing watching TV in the company of the aged P, but in some strange way it has come to represent the distillation of 21st century Christmases.