This Tuesday was slightly more chaotic than usual; unpacking after Tescos I discovered that Mum and Dads freezer had at some point started to defrost, then refrozen.  It took a while, two knives and a bucket to get the excess ice off to get the drawers out…then back in.

Getting mum washed and dressed resulted in more heated discussions on the appropriate number of pants to wear (Me: not three, Mum: definitely three).

Mum and I cooked kedgeree for their tea; a dish Mum used to make, but insisted she’d never had it before.  She seemed to approve of the end product though.

Then it turned out that at the weekend when we’d all gathered for a tea party for Sister 1 and 2’s birthday, and I’d forgotten that I’d put camembert and part baked bread in the oven:

…for over an hour.

Even though I thought I’d cleaned it, it wasn’t enough, and the fumes the next day had nearly finished Dad off, so I cleaned the oven properly…with oven cleaner and everything (creating more fumes and banning Dad from the kitchen until about August).

And the moss on their driveway was becoming a slip hazard so Dad asked me to buy bleach at Tesco to kill it. That didn’t seem like a good idea on any level though, so instead I took some garden tools and a bit of elbow grease to get rid of that.

And then we went to the hospital to see one of Mum’s many doctors, who basically said ‘it is what it is’.  So that was time well spent 🤷‍♀️.  We did see a man in handcuffs being brought in by two police officers with what looked like a stab wound in his neck though, which added a certain something to the day.  I’m not sure what the something was, but I thought it worth a mention.

What was interesting was talking to Mum about the past.  I asked if her Mum had made her birthday cakes for her as a child.  She said no – her Dad had done all the baking.  This is very likely as Grandad was a chef in the army in India in WW2, and then later in the local hospital. I wonder how many other men baked cakes in that era…?

And as the past was obviously a more welcoming place than the present on this particular day, I asked a random question:  I’d recalled a fuzzy memory a while back from the 80’s. The memory was Mum sitting at her sewing machine in the evenings sewing covers for coat hangers.  They were all padded and silky on the outside, and she used to get very, very frustrated making them.  I had a vague idea that she made them for Harrods, but that couldn’t have been right, could it?  Mum did remember sewing the covers and how cross she used to get doing them and which of her friends had got her involved and even where that person had lived. But couldn’t remember who they were for.  Dad remembered though, and I was right.  Mum used to spend evenings getting very cross with coat hangers (‘because they had to be perfect’) to ultimately supply Harrods!

From kedgeree to cakes, ice to moss, doctors to prison inmates and all the way to Harrods….all in one Tuesday 🙂