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Helped tidy the house this afternoon. Being a parent is all about making tough decisions and today I had to work out which bits of the piles of schoolwork and artwork I was going to hold on to. There’s so much of it that it’s not practical to keep it all, even if most of it wasn’t just meaningless squiggles and practice writing, but there’s still a slight emotional tug.
You soon get over it though.
I found a paper aeroplane that said “To Daddy†on it and whilst I thought that was cute and I was touched that my daughter had dedicated this craft to me, I barely remembered when it had been gifted to me and found myself screwing it up and chucking it into the wood burner. It’s no way to deal with gifts and as soon as it was screwed up I felt bad. But also once it was screwed up it was too late.
You can’t keep everything, but the destruction of a childish declaration of love always feel brutal. Putting it ready to be burned was adding insult to injury. I recycled most of the things. And kept a few for posterity. Just not the plane to daddy. I may never recover.
Forced again to try out a vegetable that I had never cooked before, due to our weekly veg box. This time some Jerusalem artichokes that had been in the fridge for at least 10 days (maybe 17). Had no clue what they were or what to do with them, but the BBC Food website advises washing them thoroughly, quartering them unpeeled and then roasting them with garlic and rosemary and mace. I don’t know what mace is, aside from something for Heseltine to wave around or to stop rapists (Heseltine with a mace also has that function), and so substituted paprika as that might also be used to stop rapists. It was also meant to have rapeseed oil on it - and I starter to think the the person putting the recipe together was taking the piss, but I used sunflower oil. What I ended up with was basically potato wedges. They were pretty good, apart from one that I maybe hadn’t cleaned enough which was a little gritty.
I made a black-eyed bean dish a few days ago which has lasted for 2 meals for me and Catie and tonight one extra portion for me. It has reminded me of the issue that all these bean dishes create, which was something of a problem when I was a vegetarian student who preferred to cook for myself rather than pay to eat in halls (made great financial sense, but maybe made it even harder for me to socialise (my shy self-consciousness didn’t help), though I did meet the other people who cooked for themselves in the shared kitchen. But probably because of all the beans I was eating they weren’t that keen on me.
What I am saying is that all the beans and fruit and veg we’re eating is making me farty. Not that I needed that much help.
So legumes, grains. veg and no booze for 50 day and I am going into surgery for the first time in my life, which just proves that health food is a load of shit. Right?
Like I’ve said, I am feeling pretty good health wise and there’s a chance this is nothing too serious, though the way to find out if it is serious, is pretty serious.
Hopefully they can just pop everything back in again if it isn’t too bad.
(They can’t do that).
But I am trying to work up some jokes for pre anaesthetic.
When my great pal Tony Brennan went in for surgery to have an eye removed (whatever is happening to me, it’s nothing compared to that) he saw the impressive and scary tool that would be used for this awful procedure. “Be careful,†he said, “You’ll have someone’s eye out with that.â€
That’s the standard of comedy in the fact of tragedy that’s been set. I suspect I will just be crying and begging them not to go through with it.
