Breakfast: scrambled egg, bacon, wholemeal toast. Lunch: mushroom stroganoff, rice, prawn crackers, banana and custard with oatmeal cookies

Today’s review is brought to you by Clapham Junction Care Room. “It’s not that I’m not glad to see you, it’s just that you’re the eighth¹ person to knock on my door in the past two hours.“

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Right, let’s see if I can get this review written before someone else comes along and derails my train of thought. (This is the third time I’ve started writing it as I found when I came back to it that I had no idea where I had intended what I had written to end up. I figure this is now at least an hour overdue, which is on trend for British rail travel if nothing else.)

So, anyway. I’m still in the south of the Island, my trip over to home in the west having been cancelled for reasons beyond my control, but apparently within my misunderstanding. (It’s a long and boring story of me thinking someone else was doing something, and them thinking I was doing it, and as a result it not getting done at all.)

Instead I had a long talk with one of the OTs about fatigue management, and the need for me to conserve my energy wherever possible. As a neurodivergent person who spent most of their undiagnosed young life being repeatedly criticised and occasionally punished for being lazy, I had a good (if somewhat bitter) laugh at the irony of that.

Breakfast

Wednesday is cooked breakfast day, so out with the Weetabix and hot milk and in with the scrambled eggs and bacon. I’m delighted to say I got two rashers of bacon today: they were a bit chewy, and blackened around the edges, but even not-very-good bacon is still delicious. The scrambled eggs were… I hate to say ‘rubbery’, but my fork genuinely bounced off one piece I tried to cut. 😬

The toast was cooler and bendier than is typically considered ideal, but I doused it all in tomato ketchup and rather enjoyed it, bouncy grey-tinted eggs and all.

Lunch

Lunch was a hangry-inducing disappointment: I passed on my feedback to the nice person delivering the food already so, sorry kitchen staff, but I’m going full Hulk-critic on this one!

Today’s options were sweet and sour chicken or garlic and mushroom stroganoff. Being not keen on sweet and sour, and very keen on mushrooms, I chose the second option but asked if I could have some of the prawn crackers which came with the chicken. I’m pretty sure stroganoff and prawn crackers don’t go together, but I like prawn crackers, so why not?

The stroganoff smelt delicious, but I quickly noticed a distinct lack of one of the headline ingredients: where were all the mushrooms?

If you think you can see more than four bits of something other than sauce then you’re being over-optimistic. There were exactly four small pieces of mushroom, one of which was just a thin slice of stalk.

You will notice there is also no accompanying veg, and the rice was cooked in a distinctive style best described as “one slice or two”, and that was my lunch. I will say that the sauce tasted as good as it smelled, but to be a meal it really needed something else. And I don’t mean prawn crackers.

Dessert was apple crumble, but I declined on the basis of previous experience with the fruit crumbles here – fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, blame my hopes of a decent pudding; you’re not getting the chance to fool me a third time. I was instead offered, and accepted, a bowl of custard, to which I added one of my own bananas² and some broken oatmeal and raisin cookies (the ‘broken’ bit was my fault for dropping the box).

Banana and custard is delicious and I really should have it more often. The cookies were crunchy and sweet and good.

Then I had a run of visitors and I got steadily hangrier and hu-tearful-er, so I asked a staff member to bring a plate for me to cut up an apple to have with some peanut butter. Which proved to be a messy idea as cut apples are slippery beggars and my hands are having a teenage day (“you’re not the boss of us and we don’t have to do what you say”), but I think I managed to find all the seeds that went flying across the room. Or most of them, anyway. I hope.

No scores, because WordPress is being awkward again, this review is already late, and I’m all out of patience.

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1. Number nine knocked while I was typing that. I didn’t even try to explain why I was laughing! ↩︎
2. I was offered a banana – it wasn’t just “here, have a bowl of plain custard” – but I have my own bananas in my room already. ↩︎