Southern fried shrimp, fries, baked beans; apple and custard turnovers with ice cream

It’s been a day today, I’ll give it that. Mum had a friend visit her and worked herself into a state of anxiety beforehand, pacing around the house while denying she was at all anxious, and afterwards, saying repeatedly that she’d “made a fool of herself”. She really hadn’t: the only problem she had was her usual forgetting of names, which was where the small size of our house came in useful as, despite me being in my bedroom to give mum and friend privacy to chat, I could hear every word so, when mum called out “what’s it (or he/she/they) called?”, I could call back an immediate answer.

That same lack of privacy can be a problem, though, as I have become reluctantly accepting of the fact that I will never be able to make or receive a phone call in privacy while mum is at home, as she can’t resist coming into my room to see who I’m talking to and what about. Luckily most of my phone calls are deeply uninteresting, such as today’s calls following up my shower stool and rail (rehab officer has been off sick, as seems to be the case for at least half the population of the Isle of Wight, and apologised repeatedly for having been unwell despite me saying no apology was necessary), and asking the GP surgery to provide a prescription for the revised dosage of steroids recommended by the neurologist. It might be more of a problem if (or, more likely, when) I start crumbling under the pressure of everything I’m trying to handle and need to speak to a therapist. My long-neglected car might have to become a temporary phone booth in that case, which will be chilly in the winter and, during the summer, hot enough to fries. 🍟

Which is about as convoluted a link as I’ve ever done, but nvm.

Dinner tonight was what I have long called a “beige meal”, comprising beige breaded shrimp, beige chips (or fries), and beige (well, orange) baked beans. The southern fried shrimp were another Iceland product, with nuggets of chopped prawns covered in surprisingly peppery hot breading. Mum said they were too spicy, but ate her portion so they can’t have been that bad.

The chips were of the oven variety and could have done with a bit more cooking to make them properly crunchy, but I promised mum dinner by 6pm at the latest and she was starting to get visibly impatient so I took them out at the earliest viable opportunity. They were decent fries, although mine were so heavily salted (by me, so only myself to blame as usual) that I’ve resorted to a pint glass to drink water from to attempt to quench the resulting thirst.

I had promised mum a hot pudding after dinner but was surprised when her response to my question of what pudding she wanted was “apple turnovers”, as I had completely forgotten about them in the week or so since I bought them (I swear this memory loss thing is catching sometimes). Luckily they were, like most Iceland products, cookable from frozen, and the result, after twenty minutes in the oven, was crispy pastry with limited but tasty amounts of chunks of cooked apple and vanilla-y custard. I had mine with what was left of the vanilla ice cream, while mum went for the “loaded caramel” one (caramel ice cream, caramel sauce, chocolate rounds with caramel filling) which I had bought for myself, thinking it would be far too sweet for mum, only for her to dive in with enthusiasm. As I bought it with mum’s money, I didn’t feel I had much scope for complaint!

And so that was Friday, as I have confirmed for mum at least a dozen times today. Tomorrow will be more real cooking and less beige freezer food. Not that there’s anything wrong with the occasional beige meal. Or beige biscuit, for that matter, as I will now prove with a sneaky pre-bed ginger nut biscuit (or two, or three) with my nightly hot Ribena. Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the beige-breaded prawns bite.

(And there’s a nightmare image I’ve conjured up out of nowhere. 😬 I wish I would warn myself before coming up with these things!)