Chicken and mushroom pies, chips, and salad

And so to another busy day, which is just what I don’t need.

I started the day with a mad-run out of the door as my taxi arrived, dead on time, and I wasn’t. I had written mum a note explaining where I had gone and when I would be back but, in my rush, I left it on my bed. Unsurprisingly, mum didn’t see it there, and after an hour, sent me a panicky text message, “what’s going on?”.

Luckily, at that point I was just getting out of the taxi outside our house, having spent an hour chatting with a friend. Said friend will shortly be visiting my home region, where my BIL still lives and works, so I gave him a recommendation to go to the pub where BIL is head chef. I am expecting a very confused phone call from my BIL when a family turns up there one day and says that Cat sent them. 🫢

50 minutes or so later I was off to Newport for the second episode of dementia training. And this is where I hit the first major ethical issue of my blogging life: given that this is a public blog, and it’s not exactly hard for anyone to work out which organisation runs the training, how honest should I be about my experience?

Of course I want to give a real flavour of my life – that’s the whole point of this blog – but I don’t want to publicly call out a small organisation that is doing its best to support a community that really needs its help.

I will just say that the host said, when I asked, that she has never worked with anyone with an Alzheimer’s presentation like mum’s. I will also note that the course was clearly aimed at an audience that is older and more… shall we say, traditional than this queer, non-binary blogger. I can’t say that I felt entirely comfortable or included, so I decided to permanently exclude myself and opt out of future episodes.

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For dinner I intended to cook some curried chicken kebabs, but discovered they take over an hour to cook. As mum wasn’t likely to want to wait that long, I instead cooked some Tesco Finest chicken and chestnut mushroom pies. These do not get a recommendation from me: they look nice, smell nice, but taste of bugger all.

Mum ate about 2/3rds of hers then gave me the rest (don’t judge me, please: all I had eaten today was a cheese scone and two chocolate biscuits). She has since eaten half a pot of coffee ice cream, half a large bar of chocolate, and a microwave jam sponge. It’s lovely to see her feeling so much better and displaying a decent appetite after months of pain limiting her desire for food.

Now I’m going follow her example and have a microwave sponge pudding, with custard and a banana (for health). Probably with added tabby tail, as Suki is being super-affectionate after not seeing me since this morning.

Right, must go: a sponge pudding is calling my name. 😀