Front Page · Family Desk
Adult Children Declare An Hour With Their Mothers, Audit Finds Nine Minutes
Children were asked to guess first. Their guesses have been kept and are now the more useful figure.
The reminder is titled "Mum". It repeats every week and has no end date, which nothing else in that calendar can say. He has never once moved it, which he counts as devotion. He has ended it early every week since he made it. That he counts as housekeeping.
Most of these calls are taken from a bathroom, and the register has a field for it.
The block in the calendar ends at 19:20. The wind-down starts at 19:17, early enough to notice and too early to mention. "I'll let you go, you'll be wanting your dinner." The clock is behind her and she does not turn round. She agrees at once. She always agrees at once, and he has decided this means they are close.
A national register now asks adult children how long they spend on the phone to their parents. It tells them the real figure afterwards. Most people write down something round, generous, and comfortable to say out loud. A few go back and lower it, because the first answer looked like a lie to the person writing it. The audited figure is nine minutes.
Parents were written to first. Most put the letter on the fridge, beside the bin days and the pencil on its string. That is where things go that will be dealt with. Nothing was dealt with. The register found this encouraging.
The document does not use the word call. It uses "contact event". A contact event has a start, an end, and a party responsible for the end. In almost every household the party responsible for the end is the child, and the register records this without comment. "We are not here to say who rings whom," says page one, above a table showing exactly that.
The register logs what was discussed, and in most households the longest item is the parent's own body. There is a box for bowel, a box for hip, and a box for other. Other is where the rest goes, in the parent's own words, with the dates. Children are then asked to record what they said in reply. Almost all of them write "mm".
Most of these calls are taken from a bathroom, and the register has a field for it. The field is called "in transit", and children tick it honestly, because they are in a sense going somewhere. A flush has never been mentioned by either party. Both of them heard it. Both carried on.
The register does not ask what is in the child's glass. It asks only whether the glass was refilled during the event, and in the great majority of households it was. Households where it was not have been marked for follow-up. Something else must be wrong there.
Fathers are handed the phone at the end, for the last part of a conversation that is already over. Their figure is kept separately. It is worse. Nobody has asked to see it.
There is now a minimum standard, given in minutes a month. Below it, a household is what the register calls "in arrears". Arrears carry no fine and no interest. They are simply carried, which the register says is the whole point of them. The balance is discharged at the funeral, in full, by attendance. Attendance is not checked.
One box has been made bigger since the register opened. Not bowel, and not hip. The mothers are writing about their sex lives. The register files these under "matters arising outside the event" and keeps them well away from the figures. Staff who read them are entitled to a break. It has written to the households concerned. The mothers have written back.
The register holds no phone records and has never asked for any. It does not need them. The figures arrive from the parents, on the pension form, in the same envelope as the winter payment. They have been arriving for years. The handwriting is very neat.
The mother keeps her own record on the calendar by the fridge, in pencil, beside the bin days. Her column is older than his reminder and better kept. She has never asked him to stay on longer, because asking would spoil the figure. She has a number in mind. She has decided not to tell him what it is, and not to tell his sister either.
She ends the calls herself now. She gets there first, and she is very warm about it. Ending it makes the number hers.
This newspaper sells the advertising that runs once the Sunday calls are over. It is the most expensive slot we have and it has never gone unsold. Funeral plans take nearly all of it. We do not set the start time. The register sets it, from the figures the parents send in.
She sets our rate in pencil.