The aged P

Took a day off work to visit Mum today. Our social calendar (at weekends, at least) has been, and is going to be, pretty hectic of late and it was the only way we could squeeze a visit in. I'd been feeling guilty at the amount of time that's elapsed since our last visit (first weekend of March) but I needn't have worried. Her memory is so bad now that I honestly don't think she knew how long it had been.

Example: I call to tell her we're coming for a visit on Friday and by the time she's walked from phone to calendar she's forgotten what I said, and writes it up as Saturday. So she wasn't expecting us until tomorrow.

It's frustrating, because for once we had a heap of news, but while I was telling her all about what we'd been doing and where we'd been going, you could almost see the words entering one ear and exiting the other. With a glazed expression in between, exhibiting no interest at all in what I was saying.

And it reminded me of a thought I've had a lot recently, regarding our sphere of influence and how it resembles a normal distribution curve. Babies and very young children know nothing of the world outside their immediate environment, and to a large extent the world outside their immediate environment knows nothing of them. As they grow and start to attend school, make friends and go out into the world, they take a greater interest and are in turn more well known and recognised by their peers. At the height of their career, in a small number of cases, they might influence and be known by a large percentage of the world's population, but even "regular" people follow world news and are known to maybe a couple of thousand others.

When you start down the other side of the curve, heading for old age, the reverse happens until, in most cases, you end up like my Mum: knowing or caring very little about what happens outside your four walls, and vice versa. Hope I die before I get old, sang The Who famously, and on the evidence before me today I have to say, they were bang on.