A Good Day

Today counts as a good day. Small things make it so.

I let Robin's 'voices', always bad first thing in the bathroom in the morning, wash over me...give him a hug instead of closing my ears.

I spray the sticking front door lock with WD40 - it works. I feel triumphant.

I change the sheets on the bed. Remember my father who was always so grateful and smiley when I put clean sheets on his bed. I remember his big hugs.

I speak to a man at the Driving Assessment Centre and he says he'll send us a letter. I was waiting for our Neurology Professor to refer Robin  - emailed him and found out I can self refer. Much better than waiting for someone else to do it - taking charge.

I make Sugar Coated Cinnamon Almonds with Robin before he goes off with his walking group. The care worker who collects him is early.  Gives me an extra 20 minutes.

While I'm waiting for the nuts to finish cooking, I sort out the stack of cardboard boxes in the shed which I use to store the apples - getting ready for the gardener to come and pick the apple tree this afternoon. I tidy the shed a bit, brush away the cobwebs everywhere and sweep the floor which makes it look better even though it still needs serious de-cluttering. Realise Robin may never use a spade or a rake or an electric drill ever again. Or ride his bicycle.

 In the fruit and veg section at Aldi I remove a few of the inner dimpled linings of the apple boxes for my apples and put them in my trolley along with the bottles of fizzy water and jars of olives. These cardboard pocket trays are perfect for keeping the apples from touching each other - I've been collecting them the last few weeks whenever we go to a supermarket.

When our gardener still hasn't arrived I ring to find out from his wife that he can't come today - his other job over-ran -  he didn't have my phone number.  The apples will keep on the tree for a few more days and it gives me the bonus of an afternoon I didn't expect.

At the allotment I pull the last of the carrots - black ringed with carrot fly now - and the last few tomatoes and runner beans. Everything is wildly overgrown, abandoned and neglected.  I feel sad about it - all Robin's work and enthusiasm lost in a wilderness of weeds.  I don't feel hopeless though just indecisive about what to do next. And I'm not going to decide now.

I've been trying for ages to find somewhere in the Cotswolds for us to stay for a few days in October as we haven't had a summer holiday. I've been regularly trawling the holiday websites ( and losing the will to live) for a cottage - must be private and have two loos and not share a garden and not cost the earth and be close to as many National Trust properties as possible so we have somewhere to go in the long days.

 This afternoon I found a perfect cottage and booked it. Something to look forward to so long as I remember that our 'normal' now isn't anything like it used to be when we went on holiday.

Supper is already made - something left over from last night - and The Great British Bake Off on telly. So that counts as a good night as well as a good day.

Long Slow September Feeling

 On Sunday we visited Tapeley Park near Bideford in North Devon. It's billed as "The sustainable  stately home in the making".  It's run by a passionate farmer and activist, Hector Christie, emulating his grandmother Lady Rosamund, a close friend of William Morris...

We walked around the walled kitchen garden and the permaculture garden - all chemical free....visited the chickens and the turkey, the small black pigs and the shaggy horned cows - from a distance -  and ate our picnic on a bench in the sun on one of the Italian terraces below the house which has been in the family since the early 1700s. Signs of autumn everywhere... virginia creeper a blaze of red and gold, sunflowers bending their faces to the ground and pumpkins and squashes ready for picking.

This afternoon I conjured autumn in the kitchen....peeled and quartered the heap of fallen apples which I've been collecting every morning from the wet grass - roasted them with honey and orange zest....boiled  up last year's borlotti beans from the freezer and when they were soft, almost breaking up and still hot, tossed them in a pool of olive oil, crushed garlic lemon juice and masses of chopped flat leaved parsley  - a salad for tomorrow.

I stirred the remainder of the borlottis into my spicy Coconut Tomato and Pumpkin Laska, (loosely based on Nigel Slater's recipe in The Kitchen Diaries ) thickened with sweet potatoes and carrots and another squash. We had it for supper piled onto nutty brown rice laced with rainbow bright chard leaves.... shutting out the night and turning the heating on for the first time....wrapping myself in that long slow September feeling...

A Different Voice

 On Saturday this Robin came to sing to us while we ate our picnic

next to this three pronged spreading tree,

in the  gorgeous gardens of 

Lanhydrock House near Bodmin in Cornwall,

the Victorian home of Thomas Charles of the Agar-Robartes family - he and his wife Mary

had ten children,

 and their own chapel and graveyard 

in the grounds.

Not sure why they had to  chop off the tops of these yew trees....they look sad to me.

This Times Newspaper from 1915....reading it brings that time to life for me.....even more than photos of the period...

A jug in the dairy - one of the many rooms making up the downstairs kitchen area - all very Dowton Abbey.

We don't spend long in the house....or the gardens...but have a cup of tea and a flapjack in the cafe before heading back down the A30. Increasingly these trips seem to tire Robin out although he says it's what he likes to do more than anything. We don't always turn the music on in the car as it often triggers " the voices" but he manages Paul Simon for a while because it's me who needs to hear a different voice.

This afternoon I lie on a couch while the lovely Kinesologist tests all my internal organs and says I'm much better....but  need to keep on with no dairy or sugar....which doesn't seem such a hardship any more. Especially after these Beetroot, Carrot, Walnut and Feta Cheese Patties I made for supper.

Avoiding A Nervous Breakdown

We are standing in the queue in the middle of the mobile phone shop in Exeter that used to be Orange but is now EE. I want to change Robin's contract which is years old and ridiculously expensive.  There are eight young men in yellow and turquoise T-shirts, in individual booths,  all deep in conversation with their customers, all buying phones which need lots of explaining and signing of contracts, which take a long, long time. And no-one at the front desk.

Robin engages with the friendly people in the queue behind us.When it gets too weird for me I distract him  - explaining his arm and shoulder exercises which he's very good at doing but can't remember the sequence.  I've persuaded him not to go to the loo just yet in case we are called. He waves and grins at the little girl with the ballon in the queue in front of us. I feel totally ignored as a customer. I want to shout at one of the busy young men, 

For God's sake hurry up. Why aren't there more of you?  Can't you see the queue is out of the door and we've got another appointment. 

Just when I think I'll explode one of the young men comes and asks us how he can help.

He apologises for his running nose  - I feel sorry for him and his tiny, wet, screwed up, inadequate tissue. He says it's hay fever.  Robin says What's hay fever? I explain but he still looks blank.

But I'm more interested in sorting out the phone contract. It turns out he's tied into it for another 2 months but then it can be reduced from £30 a month to £10 a month which is a great relief. 

The young man says we can arrange it by phoning the head office which will save us coming into the shop and save me from having a temporary nervous breakdown in the queue....provided they answer the phone of course.

An  hour later we are waiting in the doctor's surgery to see the lovely Physiotherapist about Robin's weakness in his shoulder and arm. I don't stop Robin going to the loo this time, I'm trying to read Hello! magazine, listening out for his name to be called and distracting him from joining in with the little girl and her mother who are playing with bricks on the other side of the waiting room, by reminding him about his arm and hand exercises. 

And all the time I'm thinking about the hours this afternoon when Robin will be in the company of my lovely brother-in-law and I can potter about in the kitchen and clean out the fridge...get the last of the plums in the oven  - maybe roast them with brown sugar and blackberries and shards of orange zest....and scrub the straggly bunch of little carrots from the allotment which have been languishing in the salad drawer for ages....maybe grate them up and make them into Feta and Beetroot Burgers for supper...

Multi tasking....dreaming up recipes in my head, seems a good strategy for avoiding a nervous breakdown in all the queues and all the waiting rooms of my life.

Sleeping

Lyme Regis on Sunday - brilliant hot sunshine. We've had a glorious Indian Summer week. It was 21degrees this afternoon.

Robin sleeps his way through the day at the Mede Care Centre....and again after I pick him up this afternoon he sleeps long into the evening. I'm trusting it's what he needs to do. When I come back from my Deeksha mediation tonight he has picked the blackberries at the allotment like I asked him to. But his supper's still unmade. I prepare the salad and the beans on toast for him while he's in the bath. And have a long talk to my big sister on the phone.

I need to sleep too. This afternoon, after all that market shopping, I eat my huge salad and left over veggies lunch at the table on the patio, the sun almost too hot on my face. But I can't keep my eyes open... retreat inside and fall asleep on the sofa, waking up in a panic thinking I'd overslept and would be late to pick up Robin. But it was only half an hour - not enough to reach deep into my cells where tiredness has taken up squatters rights  - made its home there.

Best to let it be....chasing after the longing to rest, to escape, is just another stress....but going to bed now...trusting it's what I need to do.

Crab apples .......I think.