My mother has given me a set of cutlery that she doesn't want any more. The design is heavy in the handle. I noticed the difference when I had lunch at her place today, during which we used a new, slim style set of knives and forks.

Mum is 80 this year and has severe scoliosis (curvature of the spine). It's pushing her organs out of alignment and in the past week or so has started to cause her pain in the shoulder. She takes pain killers daily to combat the unease it generates. It's hard to sleep with chronic pain.

But she still visits dad in the nursing home, where he was placed a few months ago due to advanced Alzheimer's disease. She prefers to go there in the morning, as sometimes he gets a bit nasty after lunch is over and the afternoon has started to wear on.

Mum has started to plan her first solo voyage, but she's talking with her best mate, Georgette. They would go together. The idea is to take a cruise liner to Western Australia and travel back by train.

I'm not sure when she plans to do this, but I'm already planning what to do over the quiet time around Xmas and the New Year. Dad's memoir, titled 'Growing', is dated 2002. Tonight I picked up a selection of CD-ROMs mum had stored away. Each has a version in it. It's my plan to compare them to find the most recent version, and offer it to a publisher.

Then there's dad's old Toshiba laptop, which contains a bunch of files he used to work on until he became unable to concentrate on anything too demanding.

Mum is planning to ask a local computer guy to put the editable files onto CDs so that we can take stock of the computer's contents. Then we'll just put the old machine back in the garage.

It's full of stuff, plus mum's new Toyota. It's a silver Corolla and she seems to enjoy it. The pain makes enjoyment of anything problematic, however. Let's see what the publisher says, I tell her. We'll talk to them and decide how much editing we want to subject the manuscript to.

I think dad would be sorta chuffed to know that his words are destined for print. Tho he may have had something to say about wasting a perfectly good set of cutlery on a grown man; but that's another story.