Cheat’s roast dinner; coffee cake and ice cream

Early this morning mum woke up in pain, unfortunately at the same time I had woken up to go to the loo. That meant our paths crossed, and I found myself doling out mum’s tablets, sans contact lenses so the boxes were just coloured blurs.

Then I went back to sleep and didn’t wake up until gone 11am. Mum was feeling no better and asked my permission to go back to bed: asking permission to do things in her own home is a new habit and one I hate, as it shows how little confidence she has in herself that she needs me to confirm she’s not doing something wrong.

She stayed in bed for most of the day, leaving me with lots of time to research a new chair to replace the highly uncomfortable one I currently have, courtesy of the NHS. (I found the same chair online and it costs nearly £200, an extortionate amount for something so uncomfortable.) Then I played endless rounds of my new mobile game obsession, a word / card game that I know from experience I will play at every available opportunity for a few weeks then never touch again.

Mum finally got up mid-afternoon, confused enough that I had to go and change the tv channel for her as she couldn’t remember how to do it. I changed it to a nature documentary about tigers that I thought might interest mum; I spent an hour going “oh, it’s just like a cat!” as it crouched to spring with a wiggle of its behind, then “go tiger go!” as it sprinted after a fleeing deer, while mum completely ignored what was on screen.

I woke this morning from a dream of barbed wire piercing my feet, and the nerve pain that inspired the dream has lasted all day – it’s very annoying to me that all of me loves hot weather, except for the nerves in my feet which react with fiery hatred to the first sign of warmth. (Mum said “poor you”, then promptly went back to the topic of her own health problems, for which she doesn’t want me to call the doctor as it’s “too embarrassing”. There’s a lot you can tell about our relationship from that one sentence, sadly.)

Dinner was a repeat of the cheat’s roast dinner that went down so well last week. It was received even more enthusiastically this week: mum spotted the chicken pieces and said “ooh, I like those”, said the same about the mini Yorkshire puddings, and cleared her plate except for a small piece of chicken that she’s kept for tomorrow. (Or, as more usually happens, for mum to refuse to eat two days in a row, and for me to then eat before it goes off.)

That piece of chicken started out as a larger piece which to me looked distinctly Isle of Wight shaped. Mum was totally uninterested in its shape, so I’m sharing a photo here because I like to share my madness.

Now it’s bat watch time – we get at least three of at least two different species zooming around every night, which mum always gets very excited about – before mum settles down to sleep and I go and do some more of my word game. I wonder if I can find a bat in there, too?