Keeping tabs

One of the Saturday rituals is that I nip round to my parents to cadge a meal and a read of the paper and while I'm there I load up my mum's pill box for the week. She's perfectly capable of doing it herself but it makes me feel like I'm doing something useful. Given all the tablets they're both on I'm astonished they don't rattle but I'm assured this is the norm these days (they couldn't all be placebos, could they?)

The packaging and wrapping of the tablets are just as illogical as any other modern consumable. There are teeny, tiny white pills in teeny, tiny blister packs that can only be opened with a pair of tweezers and a jeweller's glass. There are blister packs that appear to hold big, old-fashioned Zoobs and just disgorge teeny, tiny white pills. The huge red bottle is mostly huge, white stopper. And the horse tablets, two to be taken twice daily, are in the smallest packet in the bag o'pills.

All jammed into the appropriate compartments of the pill box it looks like a child's kaleidoscope. Until the other week it all had a nice retro feel to it: lots of whites and creams, big two-tone capsules in crimson and brown, puce lozenges and capsules in a lovely combination of biscuit yellow and a pale Hooker's green that always reminded me of Ford Anglias. Alas, they've been replaced by a rather garish buttercup yellow and bottle green. I complained about this to my mother.

"They used to be pink and white, I prefer this colour," she replied.

"Why is Thursday morning still there? What happened on Thursday?"

"I've no idea. Don't worry about it."

My dad reminds me that Albert Scanlon was buried on Wednesday. "It's funny to think that I played against him when he was playing for St. Wilf's," says my dad, who was a useful inside-right in his time. I doubt if they've seen each other since then: when the corporation knocked down the old slums to build new ones the lost tribes of Hulme were scattered to the four winds.

When I left they were debating the pros and cons of having Christmas pudding with their tea tonight. There are times when they scare me to death, but I suspect they're getting by rather better than I am.