Bath time

These days Uncle Jack only comes out of his room once a week, for a bath. The rest of the time he sits in his chair in front of the television, wailing. You can hear him all over the house. It sounds very peculiar, as if we are keeping a tethered discontented beast somewhere in the house. Muffled by intervening doors, the regularity and strangulated tone of his wails sometimes reminds us of the strident bleating of a sheep. Sometimes it does my head in. I go in and say, ‘What’s the matter? What are you making all this noise for?’ And he’ll look up at me with a belligerent light in his eye and say, ‘I’m bored.’

I can’t say I blame him, actually. He sits there day after day with nothing to occupy his mind, apart from the bizarre delusions which visit it now and again, and daytime television, with no way of distinguishing between the two.