Cooking Up A Storm

As the weather makes spending time in the garden a lot less fun, I turn to my other happy place, the kitchen. 

There's something about Autumn that has me stocking my shelves and filling my freezer  - maybe it's the animal urge to stockpile against the dark and hungry winter. I'm basically a squirrel with a vast store of nuts. Or perhaps a very fat bear planning to hibernate, but a bear with access to a freezer.

Yesterday was one of those intensive cooking days. Unfortunately, I stood for longer than my knees can tolerate so today I'm stuck on the sofa writing about food rather than making it. Still, Mark's here so I've a reasonable chance of a cuppa being brought to me, and I still have some of the Lindor chocolates I bought myself as a reward for going to my various medical screening appointments three weeks ago.

I made some fishcakes first of all - I poached salmon fillets, microwaved two baked potatoes and scooped the flesh out, finely chopped some fresh dill and a spoonful of capers, mixed it all with an egg yolk and shaped it all into patties. The whisked egg white is also in the fridge, to dip the patties in before coating them in panko breadcrumbs and frying them for dinner tonight. Depending how cold I'm feeling they will either go with a nice crispy salad or I'll do french beans from the freezer (thank you, veg garden!) with some of the spiced tomato sauce Mark made yesterday for patatas bravas.

Next up was roasting things for the next three meals - on one tray, slices of aubergine for melanzane parmigiana, and on the other slices and chunks of a butternut squash. If I have to have the oven on for around 40 minutes, I want to make sure I'm using it fully. Electricity is too expensive to waste on a partially empty oven.

For the melanzane parmigiana, I do a modified version of this recipe.  Having some black beans added to the standard parmigiana means it's more filling and more nutritious. My Very Excellent Mate Alison will roll her eyes, because of course I use Bold Beans, and yes, they are ubiquitous. I don't care, I still think they are the best food product to hit the shelves in forever, and I'm delighted to see they are so successful. "I knew them before they were famous" and all that. (That's entirely down to my Very Excellent Mate Kirsty, who shared her freebies from a Bold Bean insider and made me a bean evangelist before shops were stocking them.)

The butternut chunks went into a new-to-me vegetarian lasagne recipe. There was half a jar of butter beans in the fridge, so that went into the butternut and sage layers. I took mascarpone out of the bechamel layer and instead added ricotta to the spinach layer. So it's squash and beans, spinach and ricotta, pasta, bechamel with parmesan (or pecorino, I forget which I had in the fridge). 

The slices of butternut squash will go into this lovely squash, leek and bean gratin from the Riverford Organics website. I made it a couple of weeks ago and it was a big hit with Mark, Zach and I. And yes, I know, there's more Bold Beans in it. 

Another recipe I really rate is Matar Paneer by Manali. I've used a number of her recipes over the last 6 or 7 years and they are excellent. It is honestly the nicest Matar Paneer I've had other than from a restaurant, and better than quite a few of those! I prefer my paneer fried, and I use tinned tomatoes rather than fresh because the fresh tomatoes are tasteless except in summer. I tend to make a double batch because it freezes just fine. I freeze curry in individual portions so I can have a veggie curry while Mark and/or Zach has a chicken one and we can have the same side dishes.

Speaking of side dishes, I went overboard and spent nearly 6 hours making the House Daal from the Dishoom cookbook earlier this month. That's an awful lot of simmering and stirring. A damned fine daal, though. We are lucky enough to live in a very multicultural city, so getting urad daal (black lentils) isn't the challenge it can be in some areas.

And black lentils reminds me of another (mostly) successful recipe I tried this year  - Black Chickpeas with Baharat from Ottolenghi's website.  It's very similar in structure to his Confit Tandoori Chickpeas, which has been an absolute favourite of mine for ages, but with a more Middle Eastern/North African style of flavours. Basically, bung the chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, a gargantuan amount of olive oil and the appropriate spices into a lidded casserole and stick it in the oven for 75 minutes on low. I've done it as a solo meal for me (with chicken alongside for Mark) and as part of a mezze celebration when my much missed Very Excellent Mate Emma came back to Leeds from Edinburgh briefly, alongside other middle eastern dishes, and it worked very well both ways.

 I said a partial success, because I've served to to Penny, Emma, Rajni, Gillian and Zach who all thought it was delicious - and several of them made it themselves. But Mark didn't like it because of the amount of cloves in the the seven-spice mix that makes up baharat.  Also, I grated the orange zest rather than adding strips of it, because a number of comments mentioned the strip of peel being rather bitter. And yes, it's a Bold Bean tie-in, and I'm starting to see Alison's point. (Still don't care, I love them). 

Incidentally,  the recipe works very well with regular chickpeas. The black ones have a nice nutty taste but  regular ones are also just fine. I vacillate between using jarred chickpeas (easy but expensive), cooking dried ones in the pressure cooker (very cheap and good but time consuming) and just bunging a tin in (mostly cheap but not as good.) If I can be faffed doing it, simmering a tin of chickpeas  - or any other bean - on the hob with a pinch of bicarb for 10 minutes really improves them. But some days, who cares? It's all good anyway.

Oh dear. While I've been typing Mark's fallen asleep in the chair, so I'm on my own to get a hot drink after all. Drat.

Souper Trooper

We're well into the 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' (thank you, A-Level English Lit curriculum for lodging Keats in my brain forever) and I can no longer pretend it's still summer. On the whole I am not a fan of  autumn and winter because the garden is dormant, it gets dark too soon and it's soggy much of the time.

 However, there are some positives about the cold and dark even a solar-powered soul like myself can appreciate. One is that it's time to get the beautiful Welsh woollen blanket on the bed once again. The other is that it's soup season. 

It's a very good blanket 

I love soup. I really, really love it. Not just 'quite like' but actually think about and look forward to it. It's a wonderful, comforting thing. It can be healthy or indulgent, quick or take ages, smooth to soothe a sore throat or hearty and veering towards stew. I don't care, I love all of them.

One of my favourites has been sustaining me since I was breastfeeding my second baby (who is now 24) and never had time to get a proper meal. I actually fed him with a tea towel over his head while I ate this soup because there was nothing more likely to wake him for a feed than the presence of a warm dinner for me. The soup is nourishing because of the lovely Puy lentils, and helps cut through a bunged up nose or general winter blues with the kick of sour lemon juice and heat of chilli flakes. 

Hot and Sour Soup with Lentils 

1 diced onion
1tbs olive oil
200g mushrooms
300g Puy lentils
1.5l vegetable stock
3 crushed garlic cloves
lemon juice
chilli flakes

I fry the onions in the oil until they're lightly golden, then add the mushrooms and cook for another 5-7 minutes. I add the garlic for the last minute then pour the lentils and stock in, cover and simmer for about 30-40 minutes until the lentils are fully cooked but still hold their shape. Then it's adding enough lemon juice and chilli to fit your palate - in my case about 4 tablespoons of lemon juice and a heaped teaspoon of flakes, but I like things on the punchy side.

Other days it's nice to have something creamy and comforting. Leek and Potato is obviously a winner. Cream Of Tomato soup reminds me of snowy lunchtimes in Canada when I was a kid, dunking my grilled cheese into the soup bowl at the kitchen table in our house on Ann Street.  However, most often I make soup with a single type of vegetable, roasted until sweet.

A change to these old favourites I've adopted recently is to add white beans to all my smooth soups. When they are pureed it just adds a bit of velvety smooth texture while boosting the protein, iron, minerals and fibre of the soup. Beans are ridiculously good for you and cheap, so it seems a no-brainer.

Roast 'Something' Soup

An oven tray of roughly chopped vegetable (eg butternut squash, carrots, parsnips or cauliflower)
2 tbs olive oil
vegetable stock
1 tin or jar of chickpeas or butter beans or cannellini beans
spices and salt and pepper
cream (optional)

I toss the squash slices (or carrots etc) in the oil and tip them into an oven tray which goes into a medium hot oven until the vegetable is tender. How long depends on big or small you've cut your veg, but typically it's in there for 30-50 minutes. Then I tip it in the blender with the beans and add stock slowly until it's a soup and not a puree. With squash and pumpkin soup I like to add cumin; carrot likes coriander; parsnips benefit from a dash of horseradish.  This is the time to check the seasoning and add a dash of lemon juice to brighten the flavour of the soup. Then it gets portioned up with anything not getting immediately eaten being labelled (obviously) and put in the freezer.

I took a tub of this type of soups - butternut squash with chickpeas - to have lunch with a friend the other day, and we were agreeing how brilliant this sort of food is when you just don't have the energy to stand in the kitchen. Sometimes, whether through illness, the general peri menopausal hellscape or just a case of I cannot be arsed, a container of soup in the fridge is like a hug from your past self to your current knackered self. "There, there. Don't worry, I've got you covered."

Broccoli soup is a special one - it needs almost nothing doing to it at all. Gordon Ramsay demonstrated it on telly once and it was a revelation! Literally a 5 minute soup. Just steamed broccoli put in a blender with stock and seasoning. It's a vibrant green, and is absolutely delicious with a slice of goats cheese sitting on top, gently melting. If you've ever got a slightly sad looking broccoli in the veg drawer, I can highly recommend using it up this way. 

I've written in the past about the absolute queen of soup, Pasta E Fagioli  which is especially pleasing made with home grown borlotti beans. In fact, some of last year's borlottis are in this week's sausage casserole, reminding me that the veg patch is a gift that keeps giving even when the garden is asleep.

My favourite ready made soup is the Smoked Haddock and Salmon Chowder made by Cully and Sully. It usually costs between £2.20-£3 and is a hearty meal all of its own. It's not quite up there with the marvellous Fiskesuppe we had in Norway, but it's the best soup I've had from a supermarket. 

To be honest, for me there are very few vegetable soups worth buying in the supermarket since manufacturers started adding coconut solids to soups (rather than butter) to make them vegan. It's not nearly as nice. I stick to fish soups now  if I'm buying ready made. My freezer is packed with reused Cully and Sully tubs; I buy it most weeks through winter.

The best restaurant for marvellous soup, in my opinion, is The Jolly Fisherman in Craster. They have a magnificent Crab Soup that they serve with a generous helping of homemade bread, and the House Chowder is also superb. 

I am alone in my Soup Devotion in this house. Mark enjoys the odd bowl, but he'd usually opt for a sandwich instead. (Mark and I have VERY different ideas about what qualifies as acceptable bread. I am very much Not A Fan of the damned Chorleywood process that ruined bread quality in the UK, whereas he doesn't mind) Zach never quite forgave soup for being the only thing he could eat for weeks when he first got braces, and Miss B thinks soup is boring. 

One thing we can all agree on is that Andy Warhol preserved for posterity the most truly repellent flavour of Campbell's Soups in his second Soup Cans collection of  paintings. It's currently on display at the rather wonderful Cartwright Hall in Shipley, on the edge of Bradford. What on earth were Campbell thinking?

Hot Dog Bean Soup? No ta.

 

 

Seasonal Food - Asparagus Quiche

 It's the last weekend in May and we're deep into asparagus season. We've passed the first few harvests of a handful of spears and are into the gut. The first cutting I ate while standing next to the saucepan in the kitchen; the next three or four actually made it to the plate. By mid May I had enough tall stalks to make asparagus soup, which is far and away Zach's favourite soup in the world. (I like ALL the soups)

Last weekend, following the mini heat wave, the spears had put on another burst of growth, leaving me with nearly 300g of fresh trimmed asparagus to be used that day. I decided to make a quiche. 

Sublime to ridiculous - the big one was over a metre

It must be said, I never make quiche. Ever. Mostly because it involves pastry and I hate dealing with pastry. It's awful stuff - too cold and it doesn't roll out, too warm and it stretches and sticks to everything. Dreadful. With the exception of making mince pies, I only ever use the ready made pastry, and even then unwillingly.

However, asparagus quiche does look awfully pretty, and heaven knows I've got plenty of eggs from the hens at this time of year. I decided to give it a go.

• 1 pack of ready rolled shortcrust pastry
• 4 eggs
•  140ml milk
• 80g finely grated hard cheese (cheddar, pecorino, parmesan, whatever you like)
• as many chopped asparagus spears as you can fit in your dish (about 275g in my case)
• salt and pepper 
• grating of nutmeg (optional)

I put the pastry into a lined pie tin and popped it in the freezer while the oven heated to 160 fan. Then I blind baked the pastry for 15 minutes, removed the baking beans and put it back for another 10 minutes.

I whisked the eggs, milk, seasoning and most of the cheese together in a jug. The raw spears were cut into 3cm lengths and the tips set aside. I crammed as much asparagus into the pie tin as possible and poured the egg mix over it until full. I arranged the tips in a circle in the centre of the quiche and sprinkled the remaining cheese on top before sliding it c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y into the oven.

It baked in the oven until set which took about 35 minutes, give or take. The time in the oven was just enough to lightly cook the asparagus, still leaving some bite to it, which is my preference. If you prefer asparagus soft, by all means blanch them for a minute or two before baking the quiche.

I'm not going to lie, it was superb. Really, utterly delicious in the way perfectly fresh ingredients just outclass anything you can buy in a shop. The eggs and the asparagus were food metres, not miles, and the asparagus was cut from the veg bed while the pastry was blind baking.

It was far too much for the three of us - obviously Luke wouldn't eat it and Bonnie's still at uni - so I shared some with my Very Excellent Mate Penny. She was also a fan. Asparagus one of those crops, like peas and sweetcorn, which really benefit from being home grown and eaten as soon as you pick them. The sugars start to turn to starch the moment after they're picked so freshness is crucial to the best flavour.

So I guess the real first instructions for this quiche  are:

1.  Plant your asparagus crowns in February or March. Mulch well
2. Wait three years 

 

 

We have it, I just don't know how to pronounce it.

A little over a week ago Mark bought ingredients for pesto and focaccia, intending to recreate the food we had on holiday. Then he didn't actually get around to it while I was obsessing about promised Italian food, so I ended up making them. (Never, ever proimise me cheese, Italian food or trips to New York and fail to deliver - I will obsess about them at the slightest opportunity).

Focaccia needs baking at a very high temperature. This is how I discovered our 23 year old Samsung oven no longer heated up past 140 degrees, and produced very, very bad focaccia.

The oven had been limping along for years; the door wouldn't shut entirely so it's lost heat for at least 6 years, probably more. Last month I discovered only half of the grill worked, but as we have an air fryer, that seemed manageable. 

After some very scientific research and testing (I read Good Housekeeping's recommendations, then I went to John Lewis to open and shut doors and twiddle dials) we decided on our oven. Wanting one that would last pretty much forever, we bought a Miele.

The difficulty in ordering one in person is that no one seems to know how to pronounce it. There was MEE-leh, my-EL-eh,  my-EL, MEE-lay, MEEL, MEE-luh. Each person I spoke to said it differently. In the end I was basically just pointing. "I want that one with the actual buttons, please."

It arrived promptly enough, but there were complications. We'd gone down from a double oven to a single, so Mark needed to build a shelf for it part way up the larger cavity left by the old one. This does mean we have space for an extra drawer, though, which is great.  Also, it needed wiring it. These felt a bit of a faff, so to be perfectly honest Mark procrastinated a few days before doing it just before Bonnie and her friends arrived for the Easter weekend.

There was a hitch - no power. Mark uninstalled it, connected the oven to a plug and turned it on, which showed the oven itself was fine. So it seemed to be the wiring. 

I'll be honest, mid afternoon before a 4 day weekend when you're feeding 7 people is a sub-optimal time to discover you need an electrician.  

I hit all my local WhatsApp chats is an urgent plea for a good electrician but the recommended tradesmen were either busy or on holiday. Mark finally found a bloke at 3:30 on the condition that Mark went to fetch him as his son had taken the car keys. 

 David the Sparky was very lovely. He explained the wiring was just fine but had been over-tightened, leading to a dodgy connection. He fixed that, tested it and put it back in place and was driven home clutching half a dozen fresh eggs as well as his fee, with about an hour to go before the young people arrived.

This morning I thought I should get to know the oven - technology has moved on a lot in 23 years! So first I made a dozen carrot and pecan cupcakes using the Hummingbird Bakery recipe at 2/3 proportions, then a batch of dark chocolate and orange cookies from BBC Good Food. Seeing as it is Good Friday, I've got dough for hot cross buns proving as type. You know me - go big or go home.

HAPPY EASTER - but Zach ate the A cupcake from Happy so I improvised

The new oven is amazing - it gets to temperature extremely quickly,  has a myriad of setting I don't yet understand and probably will never use, has a self cleaning function and can be operated remotely by my phone. What a marvellous modern world we live in, as Captain Jack Aubry says.

 I did the cupcakes on Conventional and the cookies on Fan Plus, and think I'll try Intensive Bake for hot cross buns, and see if I can find a difference in them at all.

 As for the name - I think I'm going with one online suggestion -  Miele rhymes with Sheila. 

 

NB - Mark more than redeemed himself for procrastinating three days with the oven by mowing the lawn today while I baked. First mow of the year! It all looks lovely.

Sort your (life?) fridge out

I absolutely love Sort Your Life Out on the BBC. Dilly, the organiser, is my hero and I go around labelling things like a fiend - my chest freezer is awe-inspiring, I promise you. However, I'm not exactly living up to the decluttering queen's standards day to day. Quite frankly, I'm very messy and fairly lazy. 

With my knee pain worsening over the past two months, the kitchen has descended into chaos lately (along with the rest of the house, god help me!) I though I'd best  have a bit of a sort out. In doing so, I found an awfully nice lunch.

Zach says that to have an ADHD diagnosis, your quality of life has to be suffering because of your struggle to concentrate or remember things. We decided that means I have Mark's ADHD.  He's vague and drifts off to something else partway through, but I'm the one whose life is affected. The number of unlocked doors, cupboard doors left ajar, half-done tasks is substantial and I have permanently bruised shins from walking into whatever drawer he's left open.

So while it's great that he thinks "I'll put that leftover lemon juice from the cocktails in a little tub in the fridge to be used up later," the system falls down because he doesn't label it and he forgets about it entirely the second he closes the door. (See also tins of baked beans, sliced tomatoes, mashed potato, gravy, ready sliced cheese for burgers). 

Mark had put a third lemon juice in the fridge while the previous two were going manky, so I figured a proper sort out of the fridge was overdue.

I chucked a bunch of mystery items (seriously, LABELS, dude!) and checked the many (so, so many) pickles and condiments (entirely my fault)for Best Before dates and emptied out the meat and vegetable drawers to check  the state of things.

I noticed the spring onions were looking a bit pathetic and the lettuce had seen perkier days so needed using up. There were three tubs of mashed potato, and in the meat and fish drawer was a tupperware with some salmon I poached a couple of days ago and didn't need all of.

Hurray, free lunch! I mixed the salmon flakes with some of the mash, finely chopped spring onions and a tablespoon of capers - I like putting capers in, it's like including tartar sauce.  I separated an egg, adding the yolk to the bowl and whisking the white. 

Giving the contents of the bowl good mix, I formed four patties. These were dipped in the beaten egg white then into a bowl of the sourdough breadcrumbs I keep in the freezer. (Every time I get to the nub end of the loaf it's usually going a bit stale, so I put it in the blender to make breadcrumbs and add it to the bag. It's very handy)

Spring onions at 1 o'clock, capers at 7

 I put the fishcakes in a hot frying pan with a bit of vegetable oil and fried them for about 3 minutes on both sides, flattening them a bit to be sure they'd warm through.

I shredded the lettuce, and using the most recent lemon juice, did a quick vinaigrette. It was really tasty - a 10 minute lunch for two using up odds and ends. It was very satisfying.

OK, not elegant but very tasty

 

I needed a nice and filling lunch because I was going to have some rather unpleasant dentistry that afternoon and who knows how long until I'm on solid food again! It was the nicest part of my Monday, other than Mark very kindly buying me flowers to cheer me up after the wisdom tooth came out.

 It was nice to feel I'd made at least one small area of my chaotic house tolerable - especially as Miss B is coming home for the Easter weekend bringing two friends to stay, and we are going to need to fit a LOT of food in that fridge. 

CBT-ing the shit out of this

Material reality is a right pain the the arse, isn't it? I might feel very much the same inside as when I had the kids 26 (and 24 and 20) years ago, but my actual physical body tells a different story.

I have always had fairly useless joints. I was forever twisting an ankle and falling off boots with only a very modest heel even in my teens.  I could still put my foot behind my head in my mid 30s but I couldn't walk in anything higher than about 2 inches without risking breaking my neck (yay, hypermobility). I'm a klutz, but I'm ok about it.

My hips and knees went all to hell during my pregnancies, each worse than the last.  That resulted in being on crutches and a lot of pain for most of Bonnie's pregnancy, and things never quite went back to place. I also have osteoarthritis and have struggled with (often acute) knee pain since my 30s. 

A lot of that was my own damned fault - I hated exercise, I love food and drink, and the only healthy lifestyle choice I've ever made is never smoking. I treated my body more as an amusement arcade than a temple, and I took pretty lousy care of myself for a variety of uninteresting reasons. I also worked standing up for 10 or more hours a day for the 8 years I had the baking business in my 30s and 40s, and the knees got worse and worse.

Over the past 10 years I've been trying to tackle this in a number of ways. I found pool-based exercise classes for people with similar problems and I approached them with zeal. I was going to three a week at one point and my basic mobility was really improving. I can stand up without leaning on the arms of chairs and my balance is far better. I lost a significant amount of weight which has helped with joint inflammation - my knees aren't burning hot by mid afternoon anymore. 
This is very good.

But. There's always a But.

More and more often I was missing Aqua classes because of pain and injury. Falling awkwardly when a rug slipped on a polished floor put me completely out of action for a couple of months and noticeably affected me for over a year. A too-vigorous class leaves me sofa-bound for two days. My knees give way numerous times a day. I try not make a fuss but the pain is sharp and debilitating. Days here are punctuated by yips and short shrieks like I have a particularly piecing form of Tourettes.

Anyway, here I am at 56 years old. I have done what I can to fix the pain from my knees - and, increasingly, hips - but each year I'm getting worse and worse. I can no longer get to the end of the road without a crutch and am desperate for a sit down at least 4 times if I try walk to the coffee shop 200m away.

My life has become small. I can't stand it.

Being a total hypocrite who pushed her Dad into getting a mobility scooter and an elevator in his house so he can go upstairs, I have flatly refused to get a walking stick. I have a crutch, because a crutch is something people use when they are recovering from an injury. Like a broken ankle or or ACL tear, say. A crutch feels like it might well be temporary. A walking stick? That's permanent. We don't need that.

Having walked across the very compact city centre of Leeds twice in the last few months and been couch bound for several days after, I really can't pretend this is going to go away. I can't pop to the shops, or post a letter, or pick up a prescription, or just live my life like a normal person. 

This is stupid. I love being out and about, I love being around people. I can't self-identify as a physically mobile person, I can't wish myself better and I can't alter the material reality that my joints are shot. And it's only going to get worse as I age. Exercise is great for maintaining the best mobility I can have, but it can't fix the degradation of the joints that's already there, nor make me younger and less broken.

What I can do, and what CBT has always been wonderful at helping me do, is reassess.

This is where I am now. I can't change the past, I can't change the state I am in. I can, however, accept this less than ideal reality and decide to problem-solve my way out of it. This will not be pleasant, but it will be effective. 

Okay. So I can't walk much at all. In old school terms, crippled. (We laugh when Dad calls his Blue Badge his Cripple Sticker... it's funny because it's true.) I can ride my beloved Vespa but I struggle to put it on its stand when I get where I'm going. I am a permanently disabled person who won't be striding up  the big hill at Fairburn Ings to watch the starling murmurations nor walk along the Giant's Causeway. 

NB - Those example do rather break my heart as I love murmurations and it's been my longtime ambition to see the basalt columns of the Causeway. And Petra. A woman can dream.

But I can do something about some of that. I can accept where I'm at. And that really, really hurts.

It's hard to give up the belief I can get better, that there's a life without joint pain and lousy mobility. One day (actually, in about 5 years or so I expect) I may qualify for NHS knee surgery and that might change things, but right here and now, it doesn't. And it's hard to accept limitations are real, and not wish them away.

So what would allow me to do what I want to do? There's an easy answer to that - a scooter or electric wheelchair. It's not the same as being about to self-propel, but it's a damned sight better than self-excluding from everything.  

I don't claim disability benefits or anything like that, so I don't have hoops to jump through to access mobility schemes. This is actually an advantage. I can work out what best suits my ambitions for my life and buy it. No having to prove to strangers just how broken I am, like when I got the Blue Badge. Gods, that's a depressing procedure. I'm glad I won't have to do that.

I also have been in vociferous denial that this is a permanent state of affairs. Every year I start mapping out our trip to the Giant's Causeway and every year I have to push it back because I've had a setback and I can't walk enough yet. 

YET.

For heaven's sake, Jay! It won't get better, so have a cry then book a wheelchair-accessible trip and go see the wonders of geology from relatively close by. It's not clambering on the rocks, but it's still pretty damned cool. As the Rolling Stones told us, we can't always get what we want. Close will do.

I have a choice. I can remain in denial that this is my life and I can miss out of loads of experiences and a better quality of life. Or I can jettison a stubborn mindset that a) being disabled is a 'lesser' thing (it isn't, it's just more difficult) and b) that ignoring it will make it all go away at some point.

I was pretty ruthless when pushing Dad to install that elevator between the dining room and his bedroom. I even used the  - frankly unethical, although true - argument that Mum would have insisted on his getting one, so if he wanted to respect what she would have wanted, he'd better stop messing around being stranded downstairs all damned day and get the lift installed.

I was right, obviously, and it vastly improved his life and his ability live in his own home. Now I need to apply the same standard to myself.  

I have been to try a few mobility scooters and chairs. And today I've referred myself to a mobility organisation for an assessment to discuss which  chair or scooter would be most appropriate for what I want to be able to do. 

It's a small start, but I hope it's a productive one.