I asked Ray if he would like to come in and go into the chat room with me. I have been working in the garden, it is hot, steamy and generally unpleasant but I got quite a lot done. It is a struggle to go out in the heat and I am glad I have a good temperature control as I know a lot of people don't.

Now I am ready to sit down for a while and do something else. Ray is sitting on the verandah reading, he reads Readers Digest magazines and their condensed books which are given to us by friends. What he understands of what he reads I don't know as he never discusses it with me. I don't even know if what he is reading even makes sense to him as he never comments on it. I hope it does, but at least it is a quiet and peaceful occupation of his time.

I asked Ray if he wanted to come into chat with me and he said: "I'm not interested in it to tell you the truth." I want him to be interested, I was hoping from our first couple of experiences with chatting that he would be able to visualize you all sitting out there as we do. We sit side by side in our back room with the screen in front of us and the bedroom to our right, the view to the backyard on our left. I know each of you that read this are doing so in some place you feel comfortable in and just as this is my way of taking a break it is also yours. I know some people read a blog or two before they go to bed.

I was chatting to Sarah (spacie1) last night and we did a bit of "I wish that" that caregivers do. I wish that I could dance with Ray, I wish we could go caravanning around Australia as we had planned, I wish we could swim together, share an embrace ( as opposed to ME hugging HIM) etc. You get the picture. Of course we do things together 24 hours a day, but it is not in that full participating way.

In my head I can see us dancing, twirling, bouncing on our feet, faces laughing, sweating, puffing at the end of a long number. We danced from the moment we met, I met Ray at a dance when I was still in my teens.We danced for a couple of years often meeting at the dance as we lived quite a way apart, I would get a lift there, Ray would drive me home. We danced at our engagement and at out wedding we hired the local two-piece band and danced for a couple of hours before we went on our honeymoon. We taught our kids to dance at local halls at events used to raise money for the school, or the fire brigade or whatever local charity was organised enough to fund-raise in that way. I guess small town Australia and small town USA have that in common from movies I have seen.

Our dancing days finished with Ray's first stroke, he could no longer spin around. The only dancing we did was a kind of two step which we could do holding onto each other and swaying back and forth. It wasn't really dancing and I didn't like it but we did it at weddings when we were expected to get up on the floor. At every other event we pleaded tiredness or something else as an excuse and sat and watched the other swaying and twirling and smiling and circling the floor with their arms around each other and my stomach felt like I had swallowed a cold marble egg and we went home early with the sounds of music echoing in our ears. And some of you will know why I was 42 and crying myself to sleep.

Since then I have tried to find new ways of Ray and I doing things together, some like the bowling lasted a while, some failed after two or three attempts. There doesn't seem to be much that Ray enjoys now that we can actually still do. So I do what I can with looking after him and he sits on the verandah and reads or inside watching tv or he sleeps. There is not a lot I can think of now that we could try.

What Ray said to me is quite a statement of his state of mind if you look at it; just not interested to tell you the truth.