in which the story is outlined, the main characters introduced and we set off on a voyage of discovery…
I was living in the south of France, where the skies are blue nine months of the year, where the Saturday market sells fresh oysters—for those who like such things—and the ice-cold rosé wine is best drunk in the shade…
I’d gone away to write a book. My two daughters were grown up, I was, let’s be honest, no longer young, but for the first time in a long time, I was free, and single… and still searching…
Until, one sunny day in November, when everything changed…
I caught a plane home to England the next day and began spending long hours by my father’s hospital bed. He was mostly asleep or unconscious, but from time to time he’d wake and I’d tell him everything was okay…
Everything was not okay…
My mother was in a care home, and I realised…I had a choice. I could fly back to France and leave her there…or I could stay…and take care of her myself…in the home she once shared with my father…
I was fifty-five years old when the call came, divorced, with two grown up daughters, and free of responsibility to anyone but myself. Or so I thought. Too busy to do much in the way of reflection, I was by chance reading Homer’s Odyssey.
The story opens with Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, charged with defending his mother Penelope whilst all the time desperately seeking his father. All at once, I saw the irony, and the parallels. I was about to become a carer to my mother – who had Parkinson’s dementia – in my father’s place, a man I had fought with all my life
I realised, I too was setting out on a kind of odyssey – a very modern odyssey – navigating the stormy waters of family and facing my worst fear of all – life in suburbia.
You can subscribe and listen where you like and when you like, I’d appreciate your company…