Cheese and ham chicken kyiv, chips, sweetcorn; syrup sponge, mince pie, pistachio ice cream
Today has been a less than good day, all things considered. Mum had her long-anticipated haircut late this afternoon, turning her anxiety (which she mostly still denies she has) up to 11. Practically from the moment she got up she was pacing around the house, asking repeatedly if it was time to go yet, how she was going to get there, or were “they” going to come to us, would she miss dinner, what about the tablet she has to take every evening, and was it time to get ready yet? She came back happy to have her hair back to her preferred length but obviously tired, which, as is often the case, leaves me playing the distressing – on both sides – game of trying to guess what “how do I label her?” means.1
I woke up feeling quite down and in need of a hug and some reassurance it will all be OK (although it clearly won’t), but as a carer what I get instead is to give constant reassurance to someone else, and the frequent repeatition of sentences at ever increasing volumes until I get told not to shout. Hugs and comfort for me are hard to come by. đ
With only a rough idea of when mum would be home, I opted for the easiest possible dinner, of yellow / orange items from freezer packets. I’m a little disappointed, but not at all surprised, to note that mum cleared her plate.
Then mum and I split the rest of yesterday’s syrup sponge pudding (still good the next day) with ice cream: coffee (as always) for mum, and pistachio (also Tesco Finest) for me. The pistachio ice cream is far less green than I expected and, with the exception of a few rather chewy bits of nut, not very pronounced in flavour either (although I will admit pistachio is a rather subtle flavour, so might be better alone than with other sweet things that drown out the flavour).
A pistachio anecdote: when I was a kid, my family often went on holiday to Freshwater Bay, just down the road from where I now live. Every evening of the holiday2, before we all had dinner, dad and I would go to a hotel with seating overlooking the bay (The Albion, to anyone who knows the area), where he would have a pint of Island-made beer, and I would have a virgin Pineapple Delight cocktail (pineapple juice and lemonade, with a paper umbrella in the top), and we would share a packet of pistachio nuts and talk about nothing.
Pistachio nuts still taste of nostalgia and “I miss my dad”, so maybe it’s just as well the ice cream didn’t taste much like them.
And on that note, as someone on The Repair Shop just said, I will stop trying to write this, and watch the tv, and listen to mum reading out her emails, all at the same time, and cut down my multi-tasking by one thing.
See you later / tomorrow, all.
Is it pineapple sponge today? 