…ice on tv.

Minted lamb chops, roast potatoes, salad

The things I do to keep mum happy. 🙄

When mum woke me at a time I consider barely civilised these days (although I confess that when I was in hospital I would have thought it a very generous lie-in) to ask what time she needed to be awake in order to get picked up for her lift to church (not this early, was what I thought but didn’t say), I knew it was going to be a bad day.

Sadly I was right: I have answered the question “what’s the name of the place I went this morning?” more times than I can count, and watched mum fidget around the house so much that she missed nearly all of Dancing On Ice, which she had been saying all day she was excited to watch.

One of the things that distracted her – and it doesn’t take much when she’s like this – was “the bright patches in the sky” (stars, to those of us fluent in dementia), which she wanted me to see too. So I very carefully wobbled my way on to the front door step to admire what was, I admit, a fairly impressive sky full of stars, including an unusually orange star which I was able to confidently identify as Aldebaran, the fiery “eye” of the Taurus constellation. (Thank you Google!) Mum didn’t greatly care about my star identification skills, and certainly won’t remember the star’s name by now, but I knew it and that’s enough to satisfy me. Those of you in the UK are welcome to use this little fact to anyone who might be impressed by your astronomical knowledge.

Tomorrow mum has an appointment with a mental health specialist at the local GP surgery, which she has been worrying about and hoping she has a good day for. Unfortunately, unless she improves dramatically overnight, I think they will get the less together version of mum to assess, which might be more helpful for medical purposes but which I know will upset her.

She is likely to be distressed anyway when she finds out that family friend who was going to take us to the GP surgery is very unwell – possibly going to hospital any minute type unwell – so her husband will be taking us instead. (Please send thoughts / prayers (depending on your personal beliefs) to said family friend that the current flare-up of her chronic condition isn’t as bad as she fears and she’ll be spared an ambulance ride to hospital. 🤞)

In other bad news, our last remaining cat, smoke tabby Star, is showing clear signs of illness, so I’m trying to work out how to get her to a vet. Everything is so much more complicated when you’re physically disabled, I’m learning. Please send any remaining kind thoughts to our dear little stripy cat: I’ve only just convinced her that I really am a nice friend and not a cat-eating monster, and I would hate to lose her now. (More seriously, we have lost two cats in four months already, and I can’t bear the thought of losing another one. 😢)

Between texts and emails trying to find someone willing to transport one sick cat and one wobbly human (as mum almost certainly won’t want to come) to the vet, I cooked dinner, an easy one tonight after yesterday’s exhausting 30 minute cooking session¹. The lamb was a pack of ready-marinated chops from Iceland, which took only a few minutes in a hot pan: I’m not entirely confident about cooking lamb so three of the four were pretty well done, while the fourth, thickest one (shaped coincidentally rather like the Isle of Wight) was still pink in the middle, and honestly much better for it. The chops were mostly bone, but what meat there was was good – tender even on the well-done chops, with a mint marinade that was more apparent to the nose than the tastebuds – if tricky to get at around the bones. I may have quickly given up on being polite and picked up my chops to gnaw at the bones.

The roasties were the last of the ones from the bag I bought for Christmas dinner (McCain Triple Cooked Roast Potatoes which, after a number of tries, I would now strongly recommend), and the salad was a Mild Mix of Florette brand, which was good as long as I picked around the radicchio. Why do so many companies put that stuff in their salads? It may sound fancy but it tastes nasty: please stop it.

Dessert was Aunt Bessie’s Apple Crumble, which I pretended to mum was a sudden inspiration rather than something I had planned on doing all along. I’m pleased to say it was just as good as last time we had it.

And there I’ll stop as it’s nearly bedtime (for me, anyway – mum has already been in bed for nearly an hour) and I think tomorrow is going to be another exhausting day. Wish me well, dear Pineapples: I’m going to need all the well-wishes I can get, I suspect.

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1. Mostly spent simply sitting and stirring, which is more than enough to exhaust me these days. ↩︎