Vegetable and cheese tartlets, giant couscous, veg pasta; ginger cake and coffee ice cream

I have been feeling a bit down today. I have never been one to look ahead to the future with keen anticipation – I’m not a pessimist so much as an optimist who has been squashed down too many times – but even in my more depressed moments I didn’t picture my future like this. It’s not all bad by any means, but needing to plan two days’ rest after a half hour outside the house, and having to remind my mother of the names of common garden birds multiple times a day, is just not how I imagined things even 18 months ago.

There are things I’ve gained – this blog and its wonderful readers, for a start – but I’ve lost a lot too, including my independence, my career, and my dear emotional support cat Isis (😥), so I suppose the occasional low day is no surprise. The best I can do – indeed, pretty much the only thing I can do – is to just carry on.

This morning, while mum was at church, I made myself do some research on my assigned wrecked ship¹ (which I’m pleased to say everyone escaped from alive, and were even able to go back to get their possessions the next day before it sank completely). While I was trying, so far unsuccessfully, to work out how to search the digitised archives of the Lloyd’s Shipping Register, I glanced out of the window and spotted this little fella, digging away in the soil and fallen leaves, until a noise in the road startled him from his breakfast.

After mum came home, and I fixed the broken zip on her coat (it was slightly more involved than just tugging the fabric in the right place, but only slightly), I went back to my usual mobile phone gaming (I have one of those “earn money by playing games” apps, and am working towards the next payout threshold, for £50), and watched the first half of the Six Nations rugby match. Then mum got bored and decided she would rather watch last night’s episode of Gladiators, which she had already watched last night: while I’m not a huge rugby fan, despite my late father’s best efforts, I would rather have watched that than a repeat of something I saw less than 24 hours ago, but watching my choice of tv is another thing I’ve had to accept losing.

At least I’m back in the kitchen, something I was desperate for while in hospital, even if on days like today the stuff being cooked came from packets.

The tartlets came from Tesco, and straight from the box looked… well, “splat on toast”, was my immediate thought! Once cooked, they smelt nice and were nicely flaky and crunchy, but didn’t honestly have a great deal of flavour. The Mediterranean veg giant couscous, from Merchant Gourmet, was exactly the same as last time, which is of course the point of frozen stuff. I added the leftover veg and some of the pasta from last night’s dinner, which I decided not to have for lunch.

Then mum and I both had some ginger cake with coffee ice cream (no, I didn’t get some of mum’s: I finished off the pot I bought her from Sainsbury’s, which she didn’t like as much as the Tesco one so didn’t finish). It doesn’t sound like an obviously delicious combination, but it really works. Not that I’ll get to try it again for a while, mind you, as that was the last of the second best coffee ice cream, but at least I’ve tried it. Tomorrow I will do the next grocery order, as I’m running low on things that can go from freezer to plate with minimum input from me: pies may be included, but none of them will contain any common songbirds, I can promise.

1. For anyone who missed it and wonders what I’m talking about, I’m a volunteer for a historical research project gathering information on lesser-known shipwrecks around the British coast. It sank nearly 200 years ago: its fate had nothing to do with me. ↩︎