It's now been almost two months since I met, and started helping, a 94-year-old woman from a country not far from my place of birth.
The circumstances of how I'd come to be doing this will be covered in another blog. What this blog is about is how I've been training her to be more road traffic conscious, to make her less dependent on whoever it is who happens to be with her at the time. At the moment, that person is me five days/week, but I'm trying to prepare her for the time when I won't be able to be by her side, for whatever reason, or if/when she's on her own, which will be most likely most of the time.
One of the things I've been doing five days/week since I first met her is taking her to all the soup kitchen places that I know of. This is to:
* show her where she can eat free meals (thus saving her money, time and effort);
* let her get extra food in the form of takeaways of the surplus food at these soup kitchen meals (after all, they have to throw away uneaten food under Health and Safety rules);
* give her a specific reason for getting out of the house, which is also physical exercise for her, having to make her way to these places;
* give her a change of scene, travelling to new places and meeting new people (even though some of the soup kitchen attendees are rough and aggressive), thus brain exercise as well.
(Another routine is taking her to free energy adjustment healing sessions for her long list of health issues, but that's for another blog.)
I first noticed her inattention when I was taking her back to King's Cross station after a free energy adjustment session. We were standing at a set of traffic lights when people started to cross over when there were no cars immediately in sight (even though the lights were still green for the vehicular traffic), and she simply followed suit. I pulled her back in time from an oncoming lorry. I had to remind her repeatedly afterwards to make sure that the pedestrian crossing light was green, rather than blindly following the crowd.
Subsequent episodes: simply crossing without looking, be it just a back street, or a side road at a junction with a main road.
I started to stand back at the kerb, and watch what she'd do.
The first time, she'd assume I was crossing alongside her and walk on (presumably leaving me to check for oncoming traffic), so I had to call out to her to stop and look.
The next time, she'd stop when I stopped (to wait to see what she'd do), and just stand there, without looking up to see why I was stopping. Again, just blindly following my lead.
After a few more times of this, she's now learned to look up, look right, then left, then right. (The Green Cross Code was a UK pedestrian road safety campaign launched in 1970.)
The significance of her having to learn to look up: she's since explained that she's mostly looking down while walking along, to make sure she doesn't trip over objects left on the pavement, or step on what dog owners let their dogs leave behind. (The littering problem is quite bad in London.)
(London, 2026)
