Low life | 24 September 2015

I was looking after Oscar, my five-and-a-half-year-old grandson, for the day. We’d played football in the garden, then we’d come indoors and played three games of chess, one game of Battleships, and several memory card games. I lost the football by 25 goals to 11, all three games of chess, saw my entire fleet sunk one after the other by a succession of direct hits, and my performance in the memory card games was irrefutable confirmation of my early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

After that we drove to the leisure centre for a swim. In the pool I was required among other things to crawl about on all fours underwater and be ridden like a horse. Back at home and ravenous after swimming, we ate beans on toast, and while we ate we played ‘I spy with my little eye’. I lost that too. Oscar spied with his little eye something beginning with ‘e for egg’, and after casting my exhausted little eye over every item on view in the kitchen or visible through the window, I had to give up.