It is not often you wake with a vivid memory of your dreams but last night I seemed to have one of those episodes that appear (though no doubt haven’t) to have have gone on all night. I was responsible for making sandwiches for room service. All the time letters would appear through the letter box of my front door and they would give me instructions as to what the sandwich filling was to be. Consequently I woke feeling tired (well you would be tired if you’d made as many sandwiches as me).

I am no expert on these things, and to be honest I don’t necessary want to look deeply into the meaning of these things. However I have felt slightly disengaged today, a feeling made worse by the 2 conversations I had with the same woman this morning and afternoon. I am beginning to gain an insight into the type of person the professional campaigner for saving hospital services might be. Well how they are round here. Elderly, busy being busy, slightly confused in that they can’t remember either what you have told them or what they have told you, therefore a lot of rambling is involved. I am however kind, I am happy to listen to the rambling (for a while), happy to kindly put them right on certain aspects of accuracy, like the fact that you can’t report on a public meeting before it has happened and like the fact that I don’t know the opinion of local GPs and midwives about a service before they have voiced them. I was also happy to say that just because an elderly gentleman of her acquaintance would like a maternity service reopened, he interestingly is unlikely to use it and therefore is not the person I need to hear that from. Its a crazy world that I now inhabit.

Sometimes your mother has the habit of winding you up slightly (well mine does and has done). I would be true to say that I am not entirely sure what she said that made me so irritated, apart from her assumption that her grandson’s poor showing in his maths GCSE is the end of the world. she has been on holiday so is only just catching up on news, but I had to firmly tell her that his other results were in the main very good and that maths could be and must be retaken and that actually he was completely up for this. Of course my strange night and stranger day might be affecting my ability to hold a reasonable conversation and not feel irritated and of course he is my son and I am going to stick up for him.

I am not sure I should be allowed to engage with the professional public activist when I struggle so much with my own mother, but then sometimes you are left feeling you have never quite grown up and stopped being some kind of disappointment.