Tuesday lunch and supper, Wednesday breakfast and lunch

Well, hello there! I’m back: sorry if I’m looking a little flustered, but it’s been an eventful couple of days on top of getting over a (thankfully very anticlimactic) cold. I was just going through my phone’s gallery picking out the photos I want to use, as I do every time before starting to write a review, and was trying to work out when the headline photo was taken as it seems a long time ago.

This morning. I took that photo this morning, less than eight hours ago. So… yeah, it’s definitely been eventful.

What can I tell you?

Yesterday I went back to St Mary’s Hospital in Newport, Isle of Wight, and I will admit I got oddly sentimental at the sight of the window I looked out from for four of the eight weeks of my hospital stay. Pineapple Sponge was first conceived behind that window; one day, when Pineapples run the country, or even the world, it will be a national monument. Maybe.

I can’t / won’t say much about my appointment, largely because there isn’t, atm, much to say: the consultant – an acknowledged regional expert in her field – has managed to identify that whatever is wrong with me is genetic, and rare enough that she doesn’t know if the condition even has a name. Beyond that, though, even she isn’t quite sure and she will seeking advice from a national experts; if it then goes to the European experts I will be asking for royalties!

After that, as those of you in the RMHP group will probably have seen, I had some lunch in the hospital restaurant while waiting for the Patient Transport guys to come and fetch me. There weren’t any of my much-loved and much-missed Graces Bakery chicken mayo rolls, but there was a chicken tikka one so I got that instead and it was nearly as good.

Then I had a typical Island portion (i.e. enormous) serving of chocolate sponge with chocolate custard, something I have never tried before as I didn’t like chocolate, and particularly didn’t like hot chocolatey things. I can’t believe my weird brain has made me miss out for so long on something this good! I’ve got a lot of catching up to do on the chocolate front, and look forward to doing so and writing about it in far too many words.

I was hopeful for a proper meal in the evening as the morning’s HCA offered to ask the kitchen to save a serving of the lunchtime Mediterranean quiche for me. They didn’t – or there wasn’t any left – but they did leave a side salad in the fridge for me so I had that with sausage rolls, a bowl of parsnip soup, and (not pictured) my last two fresh pears, as I knew that if I left one it would go from deliciously ripe to compost bin ready overnight.

Today started out normally for a Wednesday, with my standard cooked breakfast (not just standard here: it’s what I have any time a cooked breakfast is on offer, although I would prefer for there to be sausages as well as bacon). It was good: two rashers of bacon (hooray – one just isn’t enough), scrambled eggs that were firm but not rubbery (and yellow rather than grey: they have only been grey that one time last week, but that’s enough to make me cautious!), baked beans, and a slice of toast.

Lunch was a choice of Chinese chicken curry or sweet and sour veg, neither of which I’m overly fond of, so I asked for a jacket potato with tuna mayo, cheese, and “lots of butter”, and the kitchen very kindly obliged.

I’m not going to go into too much detail reviewing a jacket potato and salad; suffice it to say there was indeed a lot of butter (the potato was sitting in a pool of melted butter, just as it should), and a BIG lot of tuna mayo. It was very tasty.

Followed by a rather smaller than I like to see square of jam sponge pudding – it’s good cake, be generous! – with some oddly tasteless custard. Not that that stopped me scraping the bowl clean, of course, and I intended to ask for seconds except the first of an afternoon of visitors knocked on my door just as I put my spoon down and, by the time they left, the moment had rather passed.

So that’s us up-to-date on food reviews. There is still some potentially exciting news for me to share, which I will try to do alongside a review of supper later, but the trip to the hospital yesterday has left me exhausted and in pain (the joys of having a chronic condition) so it might have to wait until tomorrow. We’ll see.