Louisiana prawn pasta; banana split collapse

It’s been a day of small happenings.

It took me a while to get to sleep last night and, while lying in bed, I came up with the wording for a key section of my book. I wasn’t going to get up to write it out last night, so this morning by cereal got soggy as I was busy writing out the words before I forgot them. (The section involves the first meeting between the hero and the talking cat who will guide them through the main part of the plot. Any resemblance between this fictional cat and my much-mourned rl soul cat Isis is entirely deliberate.)

With fumbling fingers I put up the new suet block feeder I bought for the jackdaws. Within a couple of hours six of them were taking turns on it, queuing patiently until their turn came round. Such clever birds!

I have mostly completed another DWP form to provide them with details of my medical condition. Despite it being 2025 and not 1925 the form is available only as a paper copy (or “maybe” as an audio version), which is a problem when your condition causes problems with writing. Ah well – if they can’t read my writing they have only themselves to blame.

My BIL phoned, prompting mum to start thinking about inviting him to stay again. That quickly turned into the usual whirlpool of anxious thoughts: I tried to explain the concept of rumination (in the mental health sense), but she took it as me wanting her to stop talking about it (“I’ll just try and be silent then”). The resulting sulk¹, and my apologies for being misunderstood, at least distracted her from her spiralling thoughts.

Dinner was another Simply Cook recipe: Louisiana chicken linguine, but with prawns instead of chicken and spirali instead of linguine. It’s one of the best recipes we’ve had from Simply Cook: even mum, who’s not exactly an adventurous eater², declared it “very nice”.

In yesterday’s grocery order we received a week’s worth of bananas, all at the perfect point of ripeness, so mum and I are eating them as quickly as possible before they get too soft and fit only for cake. I turned my second one of the day into what would have been a banana split except the banana collapsed rather than split. Lacking chocolate sauce (I must make some more of the chocolate fudge sauce that I recently rediscovered in the old family cookbook), I put on a drizzle of golden syrup for effect: the end result was monochrome but tasty.

Now mum is lying in bed, occasionally calling out to complain that it’s hot (which is what generally happens in summer, even before humans effed up the planet as badly as we now have), while I impatiently await the thunderstorm the little people in the tv have been promising, which has so far amounted to no more than a few distant rumbles.

Come on, storm, give me a show, please!

1. That’s a bit of an unfair way of describing it, but I can’t think of a better word. Which doesn’t bode well for my novelistic ambitions. ↩︎
2. I made a comment along those lines – no judgement or criticism, just stating a fact – and nearly caused another argument. It’s been one of those days. ↩︎