avevale_intelligencer | You couldn't make it up: part 1

So my mother-in-law, the Dowager Countess, has been in Kings Lynn Hospital for the past week or so with what turned out not to be a heart attack after all. They've been trying to get her home since about Wednesday, but various administrative foul-ups kept her there till Monday. The upside of this is that Jan finally got to talk on the phone to Eileen Preston, who comes in and does for the DC several times a week, and she seems to be nice people. In the course of the conversation Eileen mentioned that she was going away this weekend for three days, and going on holiday the following weekend. This became an issue when we discovered that the DC had given Eileen all her front door keys.

The hospital would not send the DC home unless she could get in. We don't have a key; the DC doesn't trust us enough, and you can understand why. We decided the thing to do was to get in touch with the wardens, see if they had a key. and drive to Sutton Bridge so as to be there to make sure the house was warm and there was food in. I located a phone number for the wardens on the Internet, and spent a few days trying to get through, without success. This all culminated on Monday, when I discovered that the number actually belonged to a retired gentleman of foreign accent who lived in a completely different street.

By now we were committed to going, because I had taken money from the savings and booked a night in the Travelodge at Long Sutton, filled the car on Friday with enough petrol to make the journey both ways, and we were semi-packed. Cue a succession of long and angst-filled phone calls to various local authorities, from one of whom I got three more numbers for the wardens, none of which worked. What with all the phoning and waiting on hold ("Your call is important to us, honestly, even though we have no idea who you are or what it's about, or even (if you want to be picky) that you are currently trying to call us at all...") and explaining the whole thing over again, our departure time gradually slipped, and it was two o'clock when I finally got through to one of the wardens, who explained that all the DC would have to do was go to the community centre and pull the cord, and one of them would be there to let her in. (Whether the DC herself was aware of this was another matter...)

At half four, when we were finally ready to set off, I rang the DC's own number, and spoke to her.

And then to Eileen.

Who was going away *next* weekend, not *this* weekend, and had been there the whole time except for when we tried to ring her.

Pausing to take several deep breaths, I packed the car and we set off.

"The drive there will probably be the least fraught part of the whole business," said the Countess gaily, and my heart sank.

Continued in our next...