Diary – 23 June 2012

A welcome call from son in California: as usual it takes five minutes at least to balance the mental time-of-day differences. In theory, I could call him at four o’clock my time and he’d be awake — just; but I’d have had seven hours to get used to being awake, he’s only just (reluctantly)started. Which is another reason I’m not keen to adopt Skype: it’s bad enough trying to sound alert when you’re half asleep, worse still if you had actually to look bright and focused. Son in question, Jake Lyall, is becoming an actor, day job writing software. It beats waiting tables, I suppose, but I waited table in California myself long ago, and I can still balance a small tray on my fingers; trouble is I never get the urge to demonstrate this skill except when I’ve had too much to drink to make it at all a good idea. Still, ‘come the revolution’ as we used to say, it could come in handy yet.

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All-day meeting of the Geriatric section of the Royal Society of Medicine on sex and older people: I go in the line of duty, as I’m agony aunt for Saga magazine. It is, as Mark Twain said about Hamlet, no place to go for a laugh — well, not unless you have a pretty unclean sense of humour. If the day had a main message, it was that it was quite inadequate for docs and carers to assume that just because people were old, they didn’t have any sexual urges. There are problems, obviously: doctors ought to ask about such things in health checks, but talking about intimate matters is often tricky with reticent older people who have not been trained, when young, to share every gesture and spasm on Twitter.