Autumn sausage traybake / sausage roll, hash brown bites and beans

Sunday

A two-for-one mum special this morning. Mum woke me up several times to tell me she wasn’t feeling well and was going to go back to sleep, then spent the rest of the morning telling me she was too unwell to go to the post-service coffee session at the church. When her friend turned up, though, she grabbed her shoes and coat and sailed off in the general direction of the church with barely a backwards glance.

While mum was out, I signed up for OpenLearn (the free courses section of the Open University), and spent some time going through the list of courses picking out the ones that interest me (“that one… that one… yeah, why not that one… that one could be interesting…”). My saved courses list includes everything from ecology to languages to philosophy, because knowledge for knowledge’s sake is kinda my motto.

I eventually enrolled for and started my first course, and got two minutes into the first video in the first section when mum arrived home and wanted to talk about church, and her friend, and the previous night’s episode of Strictly, and anything and everything else that crossed her mind. I will go back to it later, and finally hear the end of what the bloke on the video was saying.

For dinner I made an autumn sausage traybake, a favourite I have made several times as it always gets a “yum” from mum: it’s pigs in blankets (the UK kind, which are sausages wrapped in bacon, not the US kind, which I believe are wrapped in pastry) roasted with cubed potatoes and quarters of eating apple. Served with green veg, which mum wasn’t keen on as the mix I bought was mostly broccoli and peas, neither of which she likes. It meant more for me, which is why you can barely see the traybake under all the greenery.

Monday

Today was an early start as I had an appointment at the hospital in Newport, the county town which is about 25 minutes away by car. (And I’m noticing myself starting to slip into the Isle of Wight thing of thinking that that’s a long journey, to be done as rarely as possible, even though I used to commute much further than that every day while I was on the mainland.)

The appointment, at the Pain Clinic, wasn’t immediately helpful in reducing my pain as the conclusion reached was that I need referring on to other services, all of which of course have lengthy waiting lists. (One of which was, once again, physio. Maybe the physio team will agree one of these days.) It was, however, interesting in its own right, as the doctor quickly realised that I’ll never accept an easy answer if there’s a more interesting difficult answer available.

The resulting conversation roamed over comparative health care and outcomes in various European countries, attitudes to chronic illness with a side-trip to ancient philosophy, the role of nutrition in recovery from illness, the pathologies of various neurological pain conditions, ways of learning languages, and much more. I don’t tend to realise how much I miss intelligent conversation until I end up in the middle of one. (Not that mum isn’t intelligent – she is – but even before her memory problems she never shared my interest in this kind of directionless discourse.)

The early start and long conversation left me so weary I forgot that I was meant to have a telephone meeting with the Job Centre at 1pm (oops). Not that I had anything new to tell them, mind: it’s not like I’ve magically regained my health in the past two weeks.

When I did my last grocery order I included several things that could be used on the well-trodden freezer – oven – plate route. Tonight was sausage rolls (Greggs brand, because you can’t beat a Greggs’ sausage roll imo) with hash brown bites (what in the US are called tater tots, I believe, which is a much better name) and baked beans. Baked beans are an “urgh” food for mum so she had salad instead.

We both cleared our plates. Highly processed foods are, as everyone knows, not at all good for you, but they sure are delicious.

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As a little bonus to the day, I’ve just had a phone call from the breakdown company and, after making things so complicated, mum’s membership was cancelled with a couple of clicks of the mouse. They’re even sending us a refund for the last three months of unused coverage. Now I’m going to spend the rest of the evening explaining to mum the concept of a ‘cheque’, and of ‘online banking’, and that said online banking can be done anywhere and not just on the antiquated PC in the corner, and no I’m not angry with her for asking, and so on and on and on…

Roll on bedtime. 🥱