Lamb and mint burger, roasted Mediterranean veg, cubed potatoes; banana fruit cake and ice cream

Mum was, thankfully, feeling much better today, and headed back out into the garden once the noise from next door’s tree pruning had died down. Shortly after she started work, one of her friends came to visit, so mum put down her secateurs (or “orange snippy things”, as she usually calls them) and made a point of telling me where she’d put them.

When the friend left, heading home to make soup from week’s chicken carcass (a lady after my own heart in that regard, mum began the search for her secateurs. I told her where they were, and got the predictable, irritable “no, they’re not”.

While mum searched the house in increasing panic, I put on my shoes, grabbed my crutches, hobbled out to where mum had left her secateurs, and brought them back inside.

“Thank goodness,” said mum. “Where were they?”

“Exactly where I said they were,” I said.

Mum was well enough, and in good enough spirits, to laugh at herself as she thanked me for finding them.

While mum was feeling so bad yesterday, I decided to buy her a new streptocarpus for her collection. I found several companies selling attractive species, but each in turn lost my custom when I saw the prices they were charging for delivery, which in several cases exceeded the cost of the plant. We’re on the Isle of Wight, people, not in Antarctica.

(I did eventually find a company that could send me a very attractive plant, with tricolour flowers, without charging me a decent proportion of my weekly PIP income just to get my hands on it. I’ll try to remember to take and share a photo of it when it arrives.)

After my currently habitual Sunday afternoon film (Jumanji, one of the first films I saw at the cinema, today: mum didn’t enjoy this one, giving a quiet “thank goodness” when it finished), I headed into the kitchen to cake-ify two very overripe bananas. While gathering cake ingredients from the cupboard, I noticed that, during her most recent tidy-up, mum put the squeezy bottle of golden syrup back upside-down. Which wouldn’t matter if I had closed the lid properly, but apparently I hadn’t. Of course golden syrup is well known for being sticky, and had accordingly stuck a couple of jars of jam, a tin of cocoa, and a bag of sugar to the shelf.

Dinner was lamb and mint burgers, veg and ready-prepared cubed potatoes, all cooked together on a tray in my current favourite style of cooking. I had a slice of my cake, still warm from the oven, with some honeycomb ice cream (from Mackays of Scotland, and truly delicious): the cake might have had five to ten minutes too long in the oven as it’s a little dry, but the mixed spice and sultanas I added this time gave it a lovely flavour. Mum told me several times how good it looked but, in the end, it was no competition for good old coffee ice cream. If I felt a little hurt that she didn’t even want to try the cake, that’s a secret that no-one will ever know.

Except anyone who reads this post, of course.