Yes, chocwatch control - my sister Jane - informs me that the chocolates have arrived. She adds, "And very nice they are too".

I've just rung Thorntons to thank them for the trouble they took. It seemed to be the least I could do.

Jane says that my mother has now been discharged from the hospital. The injury will just take its course now. The expectation is that it will be six to eight weeks before she is fully recovered. She's a bit confused, apparently, but talking positively about going back home, which is a good sign.

The social work team will be meeting next week to discuss her case and Jane will attend on behalf of the family. I wonder if she's told them she's a County Councillor yet.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that getting a box of chocolates delivered would be a fairly trouble-free process? Well, that's not always the case.

My mother was eighty-six last week, and since she's in a nursing home at the moment recovering from her fall, there didn't seem to be any point in getting all that creative about birthday presents. So I decided to get some chocolates delivered.

The nursing home where my mother is currently resident is on a leafy suburban road that was farmland within living memory. And that's where the problem lies.

On the Thorntons Web site, on the page where they ask you for the delivery address for the chocolates, they use a program called Quick Address. I know a bit about this, because it's a program I support at work. All the Web site user has to do is to enter the postcode of the property to which the chocolates should be delivered, pick from a list of choices - if the postcode refers to more than one property - and the program fills in the correct address on the Web page. What can go wrong?

Well, let's suppose that a farmer builds a property on the field adjacent to his farmhouse. He sells it and it becomes a separate property: but if no-one thinks to communicate this fact to the Post Office, they continue to consider the two properties to be one - like a farmhouse and an out-building for example. Over time, the farmer sells all his fields and you finish up with two houses on a leafy suburban street that share the same number and postcode.

Worse, when the chocolate delivery pantechnicon driver knocks at the door of the (wrong) house, he finds that the resident is not in. In fact, she's on holiday. The next door neighbours are also not in, so the driver leaves the box of chocolates with a neighbour far enough down the road not to realise that the name on the box is not the name of the resident of the (wrong) house; and the chocolates are well and truly lost.

Fair play to Thorntons: they are doing their best to sort things out. And I'm taking it in good heart. There are more important problems than chocolate deliveries to worry about in the world. But why did this one land in my lap?

Anyway, hopefully, my mother should get her chocolates any day soon. Before she leaves the nursing home, with any luck.

And talking of my mother, given that she's pretty well immobile at the moment as well as being somewhat confused at times, I've decided that it would not be kind to trouble her with trying to get to my graduation. My sisters and I have talked about it and decided to drop the subject, quietly, from conversation. Even if she could attend, I doubt that she would really understand what was going on.

But things move on. The Liverpool University Registry have contacted me with more details about the ceremony and pointed me to a Web site where I can hire the cap and gown and arrange for photographs. The struggling puritan within is shocked to find that hiring a cap and gown and having your picture taken will set you back £90.00, at least, and protests that it is little more than frivolity and vanity anyway. But my more selfish soul protests equally loudly that I've worked for three years for this and that I deserve my few seconds in the spotlight. A compromise has therefore been worked out. I will not be buying the DVD.

Oh! Did I tell you I'd passed? Well I have: with distinction.

I've always told my children that they must attend their degree ceremonies to receive their degrees: not because it will do them any good, though. Degree ceremonies, I tell them, are not for the graduands. They are for the parents of the graduands. So I was rather hoping that my mother would be able to make it to my degree ceremony in Liverpool in December. It's looking increasingly unlikely, though. I think I mentioned that she had had a fall, and that it was taking some time to get better - or at least less painful. Since my sisters would be away on holiday, I voluteered to hold the fort whilst they were away.

So I arrived in Rotherham last Friday and rang the Abbeys Nursing Home where she was supposed to be, who told me that she had been moved to another Nursing Home. I rang them and confirmed she was there and arranged to visit the following afternoon. When I got there, they told me that she had had another fall and had been taken off to A & E at Rotherham General Hospital. Fair play to them, they contacted the hospital and confirmed that my mother would be taken to ward B3, "Within 20 minutes". So we packed a bag for her and off I went to Rotherham General. From what the nursing home said, mum had tried to get out of bed for some reason, and had fallen in the attempt. They found her on the floor, apparently.

Anyway, I arrived at Ward B3, Rotherham General, at the same time as mum - which was convenient. The doctor came to see her whilst I was there, and the story from A & E was that she had broken her hip and would have to have an operation either to put screws in or perhaps a plate, depending on what they found when they operated. The doctor assured me that this was a completely different injury to the one sustained previously. As I left, the nurse told me they would have a case conference in the morning (Sunday) and if they decided it was an emergency, they might operate straightaway - otherwise, it would be a day or two. So I agreed to phone at midday Sunday to find out the score.

Midday Sunday, the hospital told me that the surgeon had studied the X-Rays and decided that it wasn't a break. They therefore thought that she would be well enough to go back to Broom Lane Nursing Home the following day (Monday) if transport was available. Mum was a bit confused when I saw her (she thought she'd, "Had the operation"), but then again, so was I by this time; but she was otherwise well when I left her on Sunday afternoon.

When I arrived home late on Sunday, the phone rang: Rotherham Hospital phoning to say that mum had had another fall. She had apparently tried to get out of bed and had slipped on the polished floor. How she could manage to get out of a high hospital bed with the sides up when she's supposed to be so immobile and in such pain, I don't know. According to an eye witness (the lady in the next bed who was just returning from the toilet as mum fell), she slipped, but caught hold of the side of the bed and so simply slid more or less gracefully to the floor. So calling it a fall might be overstating things a bit. Anyway, the hospital said they wanted to keep her in for at least another day just to ensure no damage had been done.

I rang the hospital again on Monday (she'd been moved to ward B2 by then, apparently). They said that she was fine in herself and that she would be returning to Broom Lane on Tuesday. "The ambulance is booked". And, in fact that's what happened.

The rest of the day was spent phoning the Nursing Home and the Social Services to make sure everyone knew what hospital out-patients appointments had been booked and generally trying to get things tidy for when my sister returned.

My sister got back on Tuesday night, and I spoke to her briefy then, and then again today. Physically, my mother is slowly on the mend, but mentally probably not. That decision I spoke of before is getting closer and we know it.

So I think my mother will miss my graduation.

Pity.

It's been a while.

Two things have happened to cause me to write a new entry.  Firstly, the University of Liverpool has decided when and where the graduation ceremony will be.  Tuesday 12th December, 2006, in the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall is the big day, and I've been asked to check that all my personal details are correct and up-to-date on their records: which they are.  I still don't know whether or not I've passed, though.  The Exam Board sits towards the end of this month, so there's not that long to wait.

The other event has to do with my mother.  I'm conscious that I haven't written at all about my mother's side of the family.  Perhaps it's because my mother's still alive.  I don't know: but recently we've had to face up to the fact that she is getting more forgetful and is finding it increasingly difficult to look after herself.  Then last week she had a fall and chipped a bone in her hip.

An injury like that is unpleasant for anyone, but at eighty-six years of age it's quite frightening.  Despite the best efforts of my sister, Jane, who lives nearby, my mother has been so frightened by the pain when she tries to move that she ended up back in hospital and then in a nursing home where she remains at present.  The therapists are going to make an assessment by Wednesday as to whether or not she is fit enough to return to her flat.  As far as I can tell, this means judging whether or not she can get herself up in a morning.

I may have mentioned that I used to work with, mainly, old people.  I found that there were two types of widow and widower: those who succeeded in getting on with their lives after bereavement, and those who were too deeply scarred by it ever to recover fully.  I remember visiting one elderly lady in Bridgend who had lost her husband fifteen years previously.  He had gone down the garden to fetch something from the shed and never returned.  He just collapsed and died in the garden shed.  I recall how this lady talked about him, and how she said as I left after one visit, "I still miss him, Mr Bradley".

My mother is in this category.  Although it is twelve years now since my father died, my mother is still quite deeply traumatised.  As time goes on, she is becoming more and more dependent on Jane, who lives close by, which is not fair on Jane.  She lost her own husband, Oz, some five years ago, to a brain tumour at the age of fifty-two, and is trying hard to re-build her life: and with some success.  I feel quite strongly that Jane must be allowed that.

My other sister, Anne, lives in Stockport with her husband, Dave.  She does what she can, but she works for a living and she is thirty or forty miles away so she can't be visiting my mother every day.  I, of course, am two hundred and ten miles away.  They say that a daughter's a daughter all of your life, but a son's a son till he marries a wife.  I'm determined that should not be the case.

So the time is quickly approaching when we, the family, will have to make decisions as to the level of care my mother really needs, and how to provide it.  There's no shortage of money or anything like that, so we are fortunate enough to be able to pick and choose: and of course it is my mother who gets the final say.  It is her life after all.  Being fair to everyone is not easy, though.  And being fair to the elderly person is often the hardest thing of all.

As we grow older we stop being what we were - not out of choice, but because we can no longer choose.  The mother I remember making clothes for my sisters out of remnants of cloth, the person who unpicked worn out jumpers and re-knitted them into other items, the energetic secretary of the amateur dramatic society is gone.

I remember another of my customers; another lady in Bridgend.  Her body so warped with rheumatoid arthritis, she could no longer stand or move around.  Her fingers so bent she could barely raise a cup to her lips between the knuckles of both hands.  This woman who had been a seamstress: whose hands had been her living.  Every morning, her niece came to get her up, bath her, give her breakfast, turn on the television and prop her up in a chair, surrounded by cushions.  At lunch time the Meals on Wheels came and left her dinner and tea - on a swivel table attached to her chair.  At night, her niece came again to undress her, turn off the television and put her to bed.

One day I arrived to find her sitting in her chair with an elastoplast across the top of her eye.  The day before, after lunch, she had begun to slide forward in her seat.  Her arthritic joints did not permit her to arrest her fall and she slipped beneath the swivel table onto the floor, banging her forehead on the way and cutting her eye.  She had been on the floor for six hours or more when her niece found her.

But she never complained.  The last time I saw her I remarked on this, jokingly.

"Oh! I never complain, Mr Bradley", she said, "I think I'm going to get better".

She died the following day.