Roasted roots with bacon
The new carer started today.
As I expected, mum complained bitterly: “I didn’t know this was happening, I don’t think I want this, why didn’t you tell me this was happening?” Thankfully, today’s carer was the proactive type, which is a relief as I am still mildly traumatised from the time earlier this year when I was sitting in A&E, dosed up on painkillers, waiting for results of a scan, and responding to calls from the care agency asking what mum would like for dinner and where they would find the food.
This carer, though, handled the essentials and, except when she had valid questions (such as “where are your mother’s tablets kept?”), insisted I retreat to my room and leave her to it.
She gave mum her meds, which mum took without argument. She changed mum’s foul-smelling sheets (the muffled “urgh” from the neighbouring room told me I wasn’t imagining the nasty, stale water smell). She got out the toaster I bought and have never used, fearing mum’s response to the new thing in her kitchen, and toasted some crumpets for mum. She tried repeatedly to call the pharmacy about mum’s lichen sclerosus cream, which was ordered 10 days ago but still hasn’t been delivered, and commiserated over the difficult balance of wanting to support a local business while acknowledging that their customer service is currently pretty terrible.
It was weird but really quite pleasant to just sit in my room, respond to some emails, and know that someone else was there to persuade mum to eat actual food and to absorb her various complaints. As George Ezra sang: I could get used to this.
Then, after a brief break, the gardener came round. Mum kept asking me what she wanted done, but eventually gave in and started using her words after my third “I don’t know mum, it’s your garden!”
After he left I treated myself to a lunch of hot buttered toast (sprouted grains sourdough toast, as I’m bouji as heck), and reviewed options for parking a mobility scooter near the flat I’m viewing tomorrow. If parking a mobility scooter on the street is allowable – and I will contact the council to ask if I decide I’m interested in the flat – then I can park right outside the flat. If that’s not possible, I might have more of a problem.
I also booked my taxi for tomorrow. They aren’t accepting bookings during the hour before my viewing, so I booked it 45 minutes earlier and will just have to sit in the pub round the corner for a while. What a shame, eh? (The pub is a Wetherspoons, which is British shorthand for ‘cheap and cheerful’ (or ‘crap’, if you’re being less charitable), but it will do me for 30 minutes or so.
For dinner I cooked some ready-prepared mixed roasted roots, and added rashers of bacon. Mum ate a bit of parsnip with curiosity, and without “urgh”, which is good to see even as it deprived me of one of my pieces of one of my favourite veg.
Tomorrow we get to do it all again, with more pub and less complaining. Well, I can hope, anyway!
