Lamb, halloumi, roasted veg

This afternoon mum was noticeably quiet and seemed unhappy. At last she confided that she was having trouble with her waterworks, and she didn’t know what to do about it. I gently told / reminded her that that’s what the colourful¹ new tablets she’s taking are for, and the relief was obvious and instantaneous. If only everything I repeat in a day received such a happy response.

(Thank you, BTW, to everyone who wished mum a rapid recovery: I passed on your good wishes but, as she doesn’t really understand what my blog is, the meaning escaped her. I very much appreciate it, though.)

At some point in the afternoon, while we were waiting for the groceries to arrive, a harassed-looking person came up to the front door, asking “am I finally in the right place?” – I didn’t get the story behind that, but it sounded like it was an interesting one. He turned out to be a courier bringing the belongings I had requested from the flat I surrendered to the mortgage company, including the little plastic angel pictured above.

This little thing was bought for me by my brother-in-law on the morning of my dad’s funeral, “so you’ll always have someone to watch over you”. 🥺 It stayed with me through a nervous breakdown, a year of recovery and a further six months of job hunting, two lockdowns and the loss of my sister, the ensuing years of chaos, then spent a year sitting in my flat alone before I finally got it back today. I’m not ashamed to admit my eyes filled at the sight of it.

Dinner tonight was another traybake, this one of Mediterranean veg, halloumi (for me) and lamb chops (for mum, as she’s not keen on “squeaky cheese”, as my sister called it). I finished off the chops in a hot frying pan to give them the colour the recommended oven bake denies them, and they smelled good enough to eat: the little one I had tasted almost as good as it smelled, although there was barely a mouthful of meat to actually enjoy.

So that’s another day done, with not much achieved, but an angel come home. I can live with that.

1. Royal blue and neon yellow. They’re not going to be hard to find if dropped, anyway. ↩︎