Gammon steak, roast potatoes, sweetcorn, honey mustard sauce

Please excuse me if this post is even more littered with errors than usual (if that’s possible: no-one would suspect from this blog that I’m an experienced proofreader). I’m writing this on my laptop as my phone charger went from unreliable to completely unusable when the USB-C plug snapped off in my phone. (Thank goodness for tweezers, which allowed me to extract it.)

The cable that came with my phone has never worked, so we’re now down to mum’s single cable to charge all our devices (except my laptop, thankfully). I’ve ordered a new one from Amazon, but we don’t get next day delivery on Sundays so it won’t be here until Monday. (The very epitome of first world problems, I know.)

After years of being on call to mum at all times, I am so accustomed to having to have my phone charged and ready that I develop mum-type anxiety symptoms if the battery goes below 20%. Even though I don’t really need to have my phone on hand to the same extent now – if mum wants me, she can just shout from the next room – the anxiety persists, so I’m just trying to not use it as far as possible.

Before that minor catastrophe, we went out and got mum’s haor cut. The lovely hairdresser made sure I had a suitable chair to sit in, and a cup of cofffee to drink, while I waited, and mum now looks less like the world’s most adorable mushroom with her fringe shorter and thinner.

Yesterdaay afternoon, mum started complaining that it was cold in the house, and why wasn’t the central heating on? I attempted to investigate the thermostat in th3e hope of answering this question, but quickly got called off with a sharp “be careful with that!”

I apparently did something in those few moments, though, as the heat was still pouring out of the radiators at 11pm, turning the house temporarily tropical. I sneaked out of my room and, by the light of my phone screen, managed to reset the system back to normal.

Or so I thought until I woke up this morning to find the radiators cold, and had to promise mum that the first thing I would do when I got back from the hairdresser’s was to fix gthe heating. Which I did, and when mum commented this afternoon that she was feeling cold I quickly changed the subject.

Dinner was all stuff from the freezer, made a little fancier with a homemade honey mustard sauce: the gammon pan juices mixed with all the honey left in the bottle (about a teaspoon and a half, I think), the same amount of wholegrain mustard, a generous splash of cream, and a couple of shakes of Aromat seasoning with a splash of water in place of stock.

I thought it was delicious. Mum ate hers without comment, but I must have done something right as she very generously, for the first time ever, allowed me to have a bowl of her beloved cofee ice cream. Very tasty it was too.

Now, while mum watches Strictly, I have time to do something constructive. Or, more likely, play some games on my laptop rather than on my phone.