Crispy chicken and Mediterranean veg

Mum has been very unwell all day today. I do feel for her – UTIs are miserable things – but at the same time my patience has been wearing periously thin. It turns out there is a hard limit to the number of times I can respond to “I feel awful, why do I feel so awful?” with the appropriate levels of sympathy, and I was well over that limit by mid-morning.

Mum spent most of the day in bed, refusing to get up, eat anything, or do anything except tell me how unwell she felt. I sat on my bed with Suki, working on the cookbook, and tried not to respond “YES, I KNOW MUM!!!”

This afternoon Lady Friday came round, and I take back everything bad I have ever said about her. With mum still in bed, I asked Lady Friday to hang up some laundry, then retreated back to my room.

When I emerged, two hours later, the laundry was hanging up, the conservatory had been cleared of boxes, the kitchen cleared and cleaned, and all the washing up done. She even managed to persuade mum to get up and go out for a short drive.

While they were out, I finally finished writing the cookbook, after nearly two years of (albeit intermittent) work. Three possibilities for the cover are up on the Facebook page now, for comment and voting, so please pop over and have a look if you don’t usually.

I told mum about my achievement in finishing an entire book, and she responded with the maternal encouragement I have experienced my entire life – “how interesting”, in a tone that implied the exact opposite. Thank goodness for my Facebook friends that actually appreciate what I somehow managed to do.

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For dinner I went for something that I knew mum would like, chicken and Mediterranean veg. She only managed half of her piece of chicken, although to be fair they were big bits of chicken. Then she had a danish pastry in a lake of cream, and an ice cream lolly. That she managed two desserts is a pretty good sign that she’s starting to feel better.

Hopefully tomorrow, now she has the first antibiotics in her system, she will feel properly better and capable of doing something other than looping on how bad she feels. Please, please no more loops. 🙏