What if Derek, Dolly Parton lived next door?

A very pleasant day spent at Gosfield Lake watching the wake boarders on the water with my mother and Ann.
It wasn't the sunniest of days admittedly, but it is such a very peaceful, picturesque place to have a picnic and to relax. There was a large mixed age party of South Africans to our left having a family reunion over a BBQ and to our right, some campers, but you couldn't hear anything from either of them.
Mother watched the wake boarders with great interest. Some were taking lessons and learning and some were very proficient at boarding. Mother told Ann how 'none of them were as good as my eldest, her grandson, as he was very fast and could go up in the air doing somersaults.'
I did have to explain to mother and Ann, that this was where he made a bad error in his judgement and hit a strong cross wake which threw him. The impact of the somersault blacked his eye and gave him quite severe bruising down one side of him for quite a while!
Mother is getting very confused nowadays, with real life and things that she has read.
As she was telling us how she used to play with Shirley Bassey in Tiger Bay and they both got hauled off by the police back home for playing around the docks. The fact that mother is 19 years older than Ms Bassey didn't seem to register. Plus mother lived in Ely, which isn't that close to Tiger Bay. I'm sure she was taken by the ear to her Auntie Phil about something or other, as she was quite a handful by all accounts, but not involving Shirley Bassey.
She then found a picture of Dolly Parton in my magazine and told us how she also lived next door to us in Cardiff for a while. When I told her gently that Ms Parton was American, she just told me to ask my sister, as she'd remember living next door to her. Us, her children never lived in South Wales at all, only mum before she married.
I'm not sure whether you should correct them or just go along with someone with dementia? I'm going to have to read up about it, as I wasn't comfortable with laughing or questioning her.

Still daft ideas obviously run in the family, as I found myself agreeing to Ann's brain storm of 'Glamping' there at Gosfield.
Now if you don't watch 'The Only Way is Essex' and don't know what glamping is, then let me fill you in... glamorous camping... camping, but with all the pretty and essential bits needed in life and not roughing it at all.
For a whole 15mins I was caught up in it, ignoring the patently obvious flaws like small problems about my overnight oxygen, my daytime oxygen, my nebulizer and the fact I have the weakest bladder in Essex. Yay a holiday!
That was until I rang Julie to tell her Ann's amazing idea... see I'm completely blaming her now... rendering Julie speechless.
I am the girl who panics about a night out and here I am again, wanting to put myself at risk and doing something that I actually would hate doing even if fit and healthy and that's camping, which means sleeping in the outdoors, which I don't do... Duh, ok point taken!

I drove round to Julie and Derek's after I dropped both mother and Ann off and waited for Julie's usual term of endearment for when I've said something stupid and was rewarded today with the term 'knob chops!'
We sat talking about how I hated sleeping outside, but loved looking at the stars and somehow the conversation got on to Incas, Aztecs and bizarrely enough chocolate and the Maya prophecy about the world coming to an end in 2012. Derek pointed out that was when he would retire and I pointed out that knowing my luck it would be when I finally got my transplant.
Can you imagine the irony in that?
'Here's your new lungs and heart and bang, Oops... by the way the world has just come to an end!'
I would be one sulky angel if that happened. I would be standing at the gates with one very pouty bottom lip.
We then moved onto to our next subject, that maybe in 2012 that the big change in our world would be that we would lose some islands, but maybe some others would be born from the sea, considering all the extreme weather conditions that we had been having this year alone. And then we moved on, as you do if you have my butterfly brain, to islands that kept getting invaded.
Now Derek is always sensible when holding these conversations, me on the other hand... not a chance.
If there is a chance of trying to wind Derek up, then I'm there. My nickname should have been 'What if?'
I painted a very vivid picture of me as 'Boadicea' as Derek reckons that I am a totally control freak and can be a bit scary when using my sarcastic tone, but I might actually lose a bit of my scariness with a blue mobility badge on my chariot!
Thank you Derek for giving me the ammunition of coming up with sensible solid answers and loving the challenge of my childlike 'What if' theories and yes when the doctors are asking me questions about how I feel about having new organs, I won't unleash all of my weird theories on them.
A pretty good day all round today.

Lots of love Debbie x