Gammon with rarebit melt, cheesy mash and sweetcorn; apple strudel and ice cream

Once again my day today started far too early, when mum got up to go to the loo and woke me (the head of my bed is the other side of a thin interior wall from the toilet, so I hear far too much of what goes on in there 😬): I rolled over to check the time on my phone (6.03) and mum somehow, through a closed door and without the hearing aids she refuses to wear, heard the click of me setting my phone back down and knew I was awake. She pushed open my door and tearfully told me that she didn’t want to go out for lunch, and I think I replied with some polite version of “FFS, we’ll sort it later, go back to sleep”.

Two hours or so later she woke me again, to tell me she was staying in bed because “what’s the point of getting up?” Thankfully the GP, when I spoke with him, agreed with my amateur diagnosis of depression and has prescribed some meds that should be turning up at the door any time now.

Eventually I managed to chivvy mum up, into clothes, and on the outside of her usual meds, and by the time her friend turned up her mood was brighter enough that she agreed to go out “for a little while”. That “little while” allowed me to make many, many phone calls (well, five, anyway), one of which was to a very sympathetic man at Carers Isle of Wight, who has deemed our situation urgent, “not because of your mum but because of you”, which was a comforting recognition of my situation.

We now have to wait until they have time to assess our case, which shouldn’t be long thanks to our ‘urgent’ status, but he gave me some useful sources of possible help to assist in the meantime. I need it, too, as I have answered the “when / where / what is church?” questions far, far too many times for one afternoon.

Our groceries arrived around the time I usually start cooking dinner and, once we put the groceries away (except for the apple strudel which, tragically, wouldn’t fit in the freezer so had to be cooked and eaten today), I had to have something easy to cook. Thankfully these days I tend to buy for ease almost as much as taste, so we had bacon steaks (mum doesn’t like gammon but does like bacon, so that’s what I called them – thanks so much to whoever gave me that renaming tip) with rarebit melt. The gammon / bacon was very good, lean and tender with a good flavour, and the rarebit had a nice mustard kick and a strong cheese flavour that was sadly masked by the cheesy mash, which was also very good. Mum ate all of her portion except about a quarter of her gammon, which is always a good sign.

Then we had the strudel…

Sorry, we’ve just had the church conversation again, trying to convince mum that yes, she’s going to church on Sunday, but tomorrow is not Sunday so she won’t be going to church, and I kinda lost my train of thought. I think it was sweet thing = good, and not much more complex than that.

So that’s today, which has left me simply hoping that I don’t get another early morning wake-up. Please, please, don’t make it three days in a row – mum jokes (in her usual passive-aggressive, not really joking way) about how much I sleep, but it’s not as much as I need rn. 🥺