Mum singing 'Riding Down from Bangor'

When I arrived at the nursing home this morning I tried to connect with my brother in Texas and was successful on the first go. He showed mum and I one of his Second Life avatars - a black fox - and told us the story of how it had emerged. The story had to do with the brother of an acquaintance of my brother's who had died of cancer This man turned out to be the person behind a Second Life character named Shady Fox - who my brother knew - and so he adopted the black fox out of respect for this man.

My brother has always led a full life online, and he keeps in contact with a wide variety of people there. His network of online acquaitances dates from before the advent of social media per se, of course. Back in those days they had bulletin boards where people congregated to find company and exchange ideas. My brother has been involved with these platforms from the early days of networked computing.

He also at my instigation found a YouTube video of 'Riding Down from Bangor', the rather racy poem I mentioned recently which my mother had been singing. Mum was thoroughly entraced when the two singers started their rendition, leaning right forward in her recliner chair and focusing intently on the iPad's screen in order to catch the words as they emerged. When I had finished the FaceTime call that included my brother I took mum out to the park and we sat on the second bench. But there were no dogs at first. So I got mum to try to sing the song off the top of her head. Here is the video in case you're interested in watching a woman with dementia struggle with a long poem - it is a song strictly but the way she recites it, it sounds more like a poem.