The chiropodist's tale

When Dad went for his long assessment at the outpatient clinic, Bad Sight of the Day was his feet.  Take your socks off, said the physio and off they came, very laboriously.

Dad's feet looked as if they'd been in solitary confinement.  Flaky, discoloured and obviously neglected.  The physio began to poke around between his toes and little gobbets of gunk started dropping out.  They appeared, she said, to be some kind of fungal growth, mixed up with bits of sock.  Obvious conclusion; while Dad may get his feet wet in the shower, he doesn't actually wash them.  When we saw how long it took Dad to put his socks back on, especially on his left foot - it's hard for him to bend that side, over the place where he cracked his hip a few years ago - the thought obviously occurred to me: maybe he doesn't change his socks all that often.  Sleeps in them, who knows?

If I hadn't washed my feet in weeks and suddenly found myself having to show them to a nurse, I hope I'd have the decency to be embarrassed and make some sort of excuse.  Not my Dad.  They were his feet and that's what they look like.   Nothing to be said, it's not as if they hurt or anything.

Does he actually have a chiropodist, asked the nurse, with good reason: though as with many old people his nails have become very thick and I doubt, what with his difficulty in bending, that he'd be able to cut them properly himself.   Oh yes, said Dad, she comes every couple of months.  Perhaps, said the nurse to me, I would like to contact her and have a little word?  (meaning: ask her what the hell's been going on).

Turned out that the chiropodist was due to call in a fortnight's time and - not surprisingly - she'd noticed Dad's decline over the last few visits.  Not to mention the state of the house.  She cleaned his feet every time and told him to look after them, but knew damn well he wouldn't, and confirmed my suspicions as to the frequency of his sock changing.

His state of mind wasn't her problem.  She was there to look after his feet, not suggest he might tidy the place up a bit.  I suppose it's no different from me as a clergyman going to do a funeral visit, finding different branches of the family at daggers drawn and wanting me to make sure I didn't mention the first wife or make any reference to Wakefield.  As in prison.  I'm there to plan an act of remembrance, not to do family counselling or hear confession.  There's a time and a place; and if you're a chiropodist, your client's mind is someone else's problem.