Salt and pepper prawns, chips, salad; vegan ice cream

I woke up this morning, just after 10am, with a quite urgent need to use the bathroom. As I forced my legs to function and carry me to the room next door, mum called from her bedroom “I missed you. Can I have a hug?”

As I said in the title¹, it’s nice to be needed, but sometimes it would be even nicer to be able to go to the loo in peace.

The clinginess is probably the part of mum’s illness that I find hardest to cope with: I can’t go anywhere, inside the house or out, without mum wanting to follow me. It’s only her anxiety about going away from the house that gives me any time alone at all.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned, just in passing, that I would need to go to the mainland to get the Motability car I now desperately want, and tears instantly welled in mum’s eyes as she all but wailed “but what will happen to me?”

(I mentioned this to family friend R, who immediately promised that, when that day comes, she will stay with mum to hopefully distract her from my absence, which makes the whole thing seem more possible,)

I’m writing this as I have nothing much else to report for today. The highlight (or lowlight) was the arrival of a letter re-confirming mum’s hospital appointment on Monday, which started the usual anxiety spiral as she “didn’t realise” the appointment was at the hospital. I can’t imagine what she thought I’d booked a taxi for if the appointment was at home. 🤷‍♂️

Dinner was pretty boring: salt and pepper prawns (from Tesco, very tasty) with chips and salad, but I followed it with Ben and Jerry’s non-dairy raspberry and chocolate brownie ice cream (called Bohemian Raspberry as a slightly odd tribute to Queen). I would honestly never have known it was vegan ice cream if it hadn’t said so on the tub. The brownie pieces weren’t as nice as in the non-vegan varieties, but otherwise it was a really good bit of fancy ice cream, and I don’t now feel a bit sick after eating it, which is about as good a recommendation as I can give.

So that’s another day done, mostly peacefully, if wearily for me. As always, see you tomorrow. Unlikely I don’t, of course.

1. And I didn’t realise until just now that I forgot to put a title on yesterday’s post. Oops. ↩︎