Butter chicken kebabs, veg curry, flatbreads

Today I solved a minor but noisy mystery: why are the herring gulls around here so loud?

If you know herring gulls then you will know that they’re not a bird known for a subtle, melodious song. They SHOUT. They’re the avian definition of ‘raucous’.

But even by herring gull standards they have seemed unusually audible recently, and a rare trip into the upper part of the garden this morning showed me why: they’re nesting on our chimney.

I love all birds, and don’t really object to them living there, but the squawking echoing down the chimney is going to make for some un-peaceful mornings for a few weeks.

Before the discovery of our new house guests, the day started with mum informing me that I need to buy more fruit and fibre cereal. Which would be fine, except I bought that cereal for me, because mum kept eating my fancy granola. Which we also need more of, because mum has eaten it all.

The reason I keep a large cardboard box of snacks in my bedroom is that, unless it’s something like tuna which mum doesn’t care for, anything I buy for me tends to disappear before I can eat it. This was the case before mum’s drastic, med-induced increase in appetite, and is even more the case now.

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The weather being rather lovely today, I took the opportunity to climb up to the upper part of the garden to see what’s growing in dad’s old veg patch. This part of the garden is only one step down and three steps up from my bedroom, but the three steps are made of uneven concrete, covered with bird poo from the bird nests within the tangle of greenery that is low enough that I have to duck¹, with plants growing over the sides, and generally a dangerous nuisance to negotiate on crutches.

It was a lot of effort just to discover that, apart from a load of purple sage, there’s not much in the veg patch but grass and forget-me-nots. On the positive side, a peek into the old greenhouse revealed a load of plastic plant pots, so when I won’t have to buy more to pot on the tomatoes when / if they germinate. (Seriously, you lot: come on, get on with it. Grow, darn you!)

Also on the ‘get on with it’ list: washing machine repair people. I’m now on my third company, the first two having failed to respond. This one at least says on their website that they’re closed over the weekend, so I’m not expecting a response until Monday.

Which gave me time to plant some flower seeds out in the front garden. One of the packets had another, smaller packet inside, as is often the case with plant seeds. It refused to open to my struggling fingers: I tore it in multiple directions, poked at it, shook it, and finally got it open to find no seeds inside. Whether the seeds escaped during the struggle, or were never there in the first place, I have no idea. But if you live on the Isle of Wight and find love-in-a-mist flowers randomly popping up in your garden, we’ll know it was the first option.

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Dinner was butter chicken kebabs (from Iceland’s bbq range), butter vegetable curry (from a Patak’s kit), and flatbreads. Mum looked at the chicken kebabs and said, “they look nice, but you know what I really like? Jacket potatoes!” (Well, she actually said “those round things”, which can mean anything from an apple to a tub of ice cream to a hot cross bun or, in this case, a jacket potato.)

I also like a jacket potato, but not every day, and I’ve already got them planned in for tomorrow. (And there’s a rare spoiler for tomorrow’s post: rare, because I don’t usually know for sure which of the options on my meal plan will turn up on the table on any given evening.)

Despite mum’s inclination to negativity, including a dour observation that “there’s a lot of food here”, she cleared her plate and even honoured it with an almost inaudible “mmm”.

Now I just have to get through the rest of the evening of mum worrying about going to church tomorrow, and fidgeting around wanting to do more things in the garden until it’s too dark to go out there. At least at that point our feathery house guests will have gone to sleep and we’ll have no more squawk. At least until the morning.

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1. Quack? 🦆 ↩︎