Jacket potato with baked beans and cheese; apple; yoghurt

Do you ever have one of those days where you’re just hungry? Where you finish one meal and almost immediately your stomach starts grumbling for the next? Because that’s me today: feed me!

I didn’t really fancy either of today’s two meal options – fish cake with parsley sauce or tomato and basil pasta bake – so I was very grateful when today’s member of care staff (yep, another name I’ve forgotten 🤦‍♂️) reminded me that jacket potatoes are always available as an alternative.

And just look at this beauty!

I don’t think I need to do an in-depth review of a jacket (baked) potato: you’ve probably eaten one or two in your life. I can say it was properly cooked, soft all the way through, with more cheese and beans than the photos give credit for – not enough for my “is there actually a potato under there?” tastes, but more than it looks – and a nice, crunchy, fresh side salad that I promptly drowned in hot sauce because I like lettuce with hot sauce. (Strange, I know, but it really works. Or maybe I’m so spice-deprived that anything with hot sauce tastes good to me atm.)

I wolfed it down with more enthusiasm than manners – it’s probably a good thing I generally eat alone in my room – then gnawed an apple down to its core, then finished with a strawberry yoghurt. I was eating the last couple of mouthfuls of the yoghurt, and wondering if having a flapjack from my under-bed stash would be too greedy, when the physios turned up for my daily game of “are my legs going to hold me up or not?”.

The answer today was an unmitigated “kind of”: they carried me as far as my bedroom door (the furthest yet), then insisted on being wheeled back to their usual sitting place (along with the rest of me, obviously).

In the process, though, they enabled me to answer another question that has been lk bugging me for a while: can I really see the sea when the door to the room opposite is open, or is it the roof of a building?

It’s the sea. Just look at this view. I know where I’m retiring to when that day finally comes!

(If you’re familiar enough with the Isle of Wight to be able to identify my location from this photo: 🤫 – please don’t dox me!)

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Scores:

• Jacket potato: 8/10 – needed more cheese and butter, but still a very good JP.
• View: 10/10, faultless, I’m more than a little jealous.