In the Kitchen with the Fat Lady

8th July 2011 Friday

I have been in the kitchen most of today - my true home. Before breakfast I make rounds of egg mayonnaise and smoked mackerel sandwiches for my father’s lunch in his room with my sister and the editor of his second book. He doesn’t like going out to eat now like he used to.

After our scratch lunch - we dip the cut off crusts of the sandwiches and lettuce leaves into the left over fillings - I poach black currants and whip a hot sugar syrup into egg yolks to make a parfait for tomorrow’s supper at my sister’s. I’m falling in love with black currants this year - can’t get enough of them - my husband has stripped all the bushes at the allotment but there is still a box in the freezer for jam.

Later I take my scissors into the garden to cut wands of rosemary and suddenly I’m at a ‘Monkey’s Wedding. As a child growing up in Africa we used to call it that when it was raining and the sky was dark but the sun was shining at the same time. This evening in a small English garden the rain drops are a shimmering curtain of beads pattering onto the geranium pots. I snip my sprigs and dodge back into the kitchen. The pussy cat watches me from behind the patio doors. He seems his usual serene self and I’m relieved he hasn’t been sick for two days.

I chop the rosemary and toss it into the baking tray with lots of garlic and olive oil so the potato wedges and carrot sticks and onion quarters are all speckled green and sharply fragrant before I put them in the oven.

While the kitchen fills with the aroma of supper - and my father’s joint of beef is pot roasting above the potatoes - I start reading the book I ordered from Amazon recommended by a friend called ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’. I’m searching for something to confirm my intuition that a diagnosis is just that - information - and when the neurologist says ‘there is nothing you can do’ he may not be right.

They say, 'It’s never over till the fat lady sings'.......