Cheese tortelloni with tomato, aubergine and ricotta sauce

Today was ticking along quite nicely: the painkillers prescribed to mum seem to be helping with her back, the second load of antibiotics have fixed the UTI, and mum seems both physically more comfortable and mentally more aware. Occasionally I would be lulled into forgetting that mum isn’t the same as she used to be – I have to be careful about the jokes I make, as a lot of my sense of humour just confuses her now. I also had to do a bit of parenting my parent, firmly telling her that she’s not allowed to do any gardening until her back is completely better.

On the whole, though, today was a good day and I thought I would end up writing about the fact that my planned transport to tomorrow’s hospital appointment fell through and I was passed from taxi company to taxi company (nearly all local taxi companies are one person businesses, and they all pass customers between themselves if they can’t do any particular job) before finally finding one who can take me.

But then, as if to fulfil my need for content, mum shouted from the kitchen, where she was doing the post-dinner washing up, “time’s moving really quickly!” I “mm-hmm”ed, assuming this was a general statement¹, but “no, it’s moving really quickly, look!” I turned to look and saw that the hands of our kitchen clock (one of the ones that takes its time from a radio signal) were spinning round like the graphics of a time travel movie.

I will spare you the complete narrative of confusion and panic, but it turns out that mum is now fuzzy on the difference between a clock and actual time, and, once the hands stopped moving, was convinced it really had somehow gone from ten past six to ten past twelve. I thought explaining the changing of the clocks to BST a while ago was difficult: explaining that we had a broken clock and not a magical time change was a whole different level.

I hid the clock in my room so mum didn’t keep looking at it and getting confused all over again; when I checked it 20 minutes later it had gone back to normal. A few minutes ago mum said that she is aware that sometimes she needs to slow down and listen rather than panicking – definitely one of those “glad you said it not me!” moments!

[I took a photo of my coffee because I liked the pattern it made. I think I’m starting to get a little stir-crazy being stuck inside all the time!]

Dinner was four cheese tortelloni with jarred tomato, aubergine and ricotta sauce, both from Tesco. It was fine.

So, tomorrow I have a hospital appointment so may or may not post. If you don’t see anything from me about this time tomorrow, you’ll know that either I’m not posting or that I was wrong and mum and I really are caught in a mysterious time anomaly.

1. And not an inaccurate one: how the heck is it nearly May ready?! ↩︎