Jacket potato with bbq butter and emmental, with salad
Mum seems to have an amazingly accurate internal radar for the powering up of my laptop. She’ll say she’s not feeling well and is going to have a nap, so I’ll get my laptop out to do a bit of work on something. Mum will sense this, change her mind about the nap, and come and pester me until I turn off my laptop and do whatever she wants me to do instead.
And so we cleared the top of the little Victorian-style1 cabinet that houses the tree at Christmas and random stuff for the rest of the year. Mum moved it further away from the wall to make room for the branches, I dusted it.
Then mum got the box containing the Christmas tree and cut it open, I took it out and put it together, mum positioned the branches. I got out the lights, draped them carefully around the tree, and turned them on.
We both decided, at much the same moment, that the tree needed more lights, and we didn’t have any more. So I grabbed my phone and ordered more from Amazon, and for now the tree has a few lights, a star, and nothing more until the new lights arrive on Monday.
It was a fun few minutes, though, and the tree looks pleasantly colourful as it is for the time being.
For the rest of the afternoon it was whack-a-mole, with multiple conversations along the lines of:
- “I feel terrible – my head hurts so much.”
- “I know. You’ve just had some painkillers and it will be better soon.”
- “I suppose so. I just feel lousy.”
- “Your headache will ease off soon now you’ve had the painkillers.”
- “My head’s fine. It’s my stomach that’s hurting me.”
I won’t continue the recitation as you can doubtless guess how it goes – round and round in circles with me never getting it right.
Worse, though, are the moments when mum allows herself to dwell on her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and starts getting tearful about how she can’t remember anything and how it’s only going to get worse. My repertoire of comforting responses doesn’t contain anything that’s a suitable response to that. I can only hope that mum will get the promised counselling sooner rather than later, as she clearly needs to talk to someone who’s not so closely involved as I am.
And, on that depressing note, to dinner. After a day involving a shower, Christmas tree shenanigans, emotional whack-a-mole, and grocery put away-ing, dinner couldn’t be anything other than super-simple. So I microwaved our potatoes (slightly trickier since I put our mini fibreoptic Christmas tree in front of it – not my finest idea), oiled and salted them, and put them in the oven for 40 minutes or so to go crispy.
I topped mine with bbq butter (which is just normal butter with some of the bbq spice mix from today’s door of my spice advent calendar2 sprinkled over it) and a couple of slices of emmental. ‘Twas very tasty.
Now mum’s watching Strictly and hasn’t yet registered that I’m doing something on my laptop. Long may it last, and that’s not something I often say about the yearly sequin-fest.
Is it pineapple sponge today? 