Sweet chilli chicken, chips, sweetcorn

Today didn’t go as badly as I was expecting, in that mum sulked for only a couple of hours after the visit of the ECG technician, as opposed to most of the day yesterday. At one point I told mum “do what you like, I’m not playing this game again”, and she responded by slamming open the curtains, then pivoting to perfect cheerfulness as she went to make a cup of tea.

For a short while I wondered if I had fooled myself and it was actually that easy. It wasn’t, of course.

Late in the afternoon I told mum that I was heading out into the garden to take a video call.

“I didn’t know you were leaving me,” she almost sobbed. “Where are you going, when will you be back, what am I supposed to do?”

No amount of firmness or gentleness, or even a frustrated “for goodness’ sake, mum, I’m only going out in the garden” stopped the endless stream of panic.

Forty minutes later I came back inside and was greeted with “there you are! I’ve been so worried!”

There followed a summary of the headlines as relating to mum: it was hot, her head hurt, her knee hurt, she was sweating too much, she had toothache, Suki was hiding behind the sofa, it really was ridiculously hot, and so on and on and on. When none of that provoked more than a vague “oh, what a shame” from me, mum switched to “I don’t want to see Lady Friday tomorrow, don’t I get any say in who comes to my house?”

Seeing my brief break disappearing, I took the bait, reminding mum that she likes Lady Friday. Eventually mum agreed to see her, as long as I “help”. Whatever that means.

Before I could get any further, my phone rang. One of the crisis nurses from yesterday had been advised by their doctor that I should really be getting help from the Memory Service, aka the very same people who referred us to the crisis team. I left that little conundrum to the nurse to sort out.

For dinner I cooked some ready-to-cook sweet chilli marinated chicken pieces, from Tesco (of course). I intended to make some sweetcorn fritters to go with it, but by this stage I was so fed up with mum’s incessant complaining, and the authorities’ incessant buck-passing, I just couldn’t be bothered.

The last few chips and some sweetcorn from the freezer had to do the job instead. The raspberry tarts I got out of the freezer were still frozen, so I followed it with my favourite ice cream (Ben & Jerry’s Caramel Brownie Party) instead.

To finish the post, a bit of random etymology. Do you know why that rude noise made with the mouth is called “a raspberry”? It comes from traditional rhyming slang – ‘raspberry tart’ was… a rude noise from a different area of the body that rhymes with ‘tart’.

😝