Day 3,977 in the Nanny June Care Home

The one with the labels.

Nanny June was cross at the world today. I asked if she was sad and she said yes. She walked off and didn’t want my company.

When my first child started school I went online and bought some ridiculously overpriced sew-in name labels. The second child got the same over priced, personalised name labels but iron-on. The third child got their name hurriedly scrawled in sharpie pen.

However, there is something truly strange and wrong about having to label your mothers clothes.

Nanny June needs new nighties so with a disproportionate level of procrastination (because spending someone else’s money creates a stress because it needs receipts and then reimbursement all with evidence that no one is in the pyjama embezzling trade…) it would be easier to buy it myself but Nanny June would have insisted not and I an desperately still trying to honour the wants and needs of a person hid behind the demented stranger that paces the care home corridors like a woman possessed.

Also, I find the labelling a futile system because (much like school uniforms) the clothes often end up on the wrong person. I can tell when someone else’s school jumper comes home because it just looks and smells wrong.

Nanny June permanently looks and smells wrong but I don’t think that’s because of the wrong clothes. She smells like an old person. Looks like an old person. Because at 91 she is indeed an old person.

But she doesn’t look or smell like my old person.