discontinued the model, so he has been struggling to master the controls ever since. The operation of the oven in particular has been a problem, sometimes resulting in the food being burned and sometimes not cooked at all.
‘Not bad,’ he said, with a shifty sort of grin. ‘I’ve nearly got it beat.’ Since he can blame nobody but himself for the purchase of this unsuitable cooker he has personified it as a cunning adversary which has somehow intruded itself into his house and against which he must pit his wits. ‘But just when I think I’ve got it sorted it comes up with another little wrinkle,’ he said. ‘It turns out that the grill doesn’t work if you close the flap.’
‘No, with the flap closed it becomes a second oven,’ I said. ‘I told you that, Dad.’
‘It’s no use telling me things at my age, you have to write them down,’ he said.
‘All right, I’ll write down a few basic instructions for you,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you go and get changed?’
While he was upstairs I went into the kitchen to make a few notes about the cooker. It was in an appalling state, like the whole room, coated with grease, inside and out, which he had made a few ineffectual attempts to scrape off. There were circular scorch marks on the Formica work surface next to it, left by saucepans that must have been nearly red hot when he put them down, and a great plume of soot was imprinted on the wall above the hotplates where a pan of cooking fat had obviously caught fire. I opened the fridge and found it full of bits of food, cooked and uncooked, wrapped in greaseproof paper and tin foil, the more unwholesome of which I disposed of in the dustbin outside the back door. An awful feeling of hopelessness and helplessness enveloped me. It is obvious that Dad can’t go on living on his own indefinitely, that sooner or later he is going to either set fire to himself or poison himself. But he will never leave the house willingly - and, in any case, where would he go?
When he came downstairs he was transformed, wearing a heather-coloured Harris tweed jacket, grey worsted trousers and a clean striped shirt with a tie. There was a food stain on the lapel of the jacket, but, I told myself, you can’t have everything. On his feet were a pair of polished brown brogues. His thin grey hair was combed back neatly from his forehead.‘Very nice,’ I said approvingly, scraping the congealed food off the jacket with my fingernail on the pretext of feeling the cloth.
‘You can’t get material like that now,’ he said. ‘Cost me five quid in Burtons. That was a lot of money then.’
‘Where d’you want to have lunch?’ I said.
‘The usual,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t like a change?’
‘No,’ he said.
The usual is the cafeteria in the local Sainsbury’s supermarket. Suggesting a change was just a token gesture: I’ve given up trying to persuade him to go elsewhere. Most of the restaurants in the neighbourhood are Indian or Chinese which he ‘wouldn’t touch with a bargepole’. I managed to lure him into an Italian trattoria once but the prices on the menu shocked him, and he claimed to dislike the taste of garlic and olive oil in the food. He looked sour and unhappy throughout the meal and I didn’t repeat the experiment. Pubs he regards as places for drinking beer, which he has given up because he believes it exacerbates his prostate condition, not somewhere to go for a hot dinner, which he wouldn’t enjoy anyway, surrounded by people enviably quaffing pints. So by a process of elimination we have ended up going regularly to Sainsbury’s.
‘OK, I’ll ring up and reserve a table,’ I said, but that was another quip he didn’t hear and I didn’t repeat.
‘What?’
‘I’ll ring for a minicab.’
There was a time when he would have bitterly opposed this extravagance, but of late he has grudgingly allowed me to pay for a cab on the outward journey on the understanding that we return by bus. As usual he said, ‘Have a glass of sherry first?’ and as usual I accepted. I don’t like his cheap syrupy sweet sherry, but the Sainsbury’s cafeteria is not licensed and I need a shot of alcohol to get me through the lunch. When we’d had the sherry I called the local minicab office and they said it would be five minutes, at