What I've learned this week: The problem of feeding the Oldies [cont]

 My partner’s mum, whom I will call Ermintrude (because it makes me laugh), is in her eighties and, though she has no underlying lung problems, she is quite frail and has had at least one TIA (essentially a mini-stroke, TIA stands for Transient Ischaemic Attacks), so we are very concerned about her in the current crisis. 

One thing that makes her easier to deal with than my own mum is that she rarely goes out except into the garden anyway these days.  Under normal circumstances, getting her to come over to ours for a meal or let us take her out somewhere for the afternoon is a major feat of persuasion.  She requires several weeks of preparation time in the build-up to such a jaunt – but then she has never been a spontaneous person.  When her husband was still alive, whenever we took them out anywhere, we’d arrive at their house to pick them up and find them sitting on the settee in their coats and outdoor shoes, where they would have been waiting for at least an hour.

 

            Ermintrude doesn’t eat much. In fact, she eats less than an anorexic squirrel.  Her diet is not only small in quantity but also very restricted in variety due to her being what we call round here ‘faddy’ (or ‘normal’, as most people I come across since we moved back north in the early 2000s seem to be surprisingly unadventurous about food – it’s the same instinct that made so many of them vote Brexit).  She used to have Wiltshire Farm Foods delivered to her house, but apparently they were introducing far too much ‘weird, foreign food’ (like pasta, which in Ermintrude’s opinion should be restricted to milk puddings – though she isn’t keen on them either). 

These days, she has a ham sandwich for lunch and a Marks and Spencers mini-meal every evening. Ordinary sized ready-meals are far too large for her.  She won’t eat lamb because she likes lambs. She won’t eat pork because her father used to have a smallholding and he kept pigs. She’s not keen on beef because it’s too chewy for her dentures.  She doesn’t like sauces of any description, including ketchups, pickles, chutneys, etc,  except gravy, because she’s from Yorkshire. She won’t eat fruit because ‘I used to work in a greengrocers’ – this non-sequitur always makes me think that she’s implying that she’s seen how they really treat fruit, behind the scenes, like those whistle-blowers in abattoirs: flaying oranges alive, dipping lemons in boiling wax, juggling with innocent apples.

Her comments about food are often mysterious, random and hysterical.  For example, on Christmas Day, while watching a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, she suddenly said:

‘Did you know, Louise, that pigs can’t swim?’

‘Well, I knew they couldn’t fly,’ I muttered.

‘My father used to have a smallholding and he kept pigs.  We were always running down to the river to fish them out when they fell in.  It’s their little legs…’  She then tried to demonstrate how a pig would, according to her, flail its short legs wildly. She looked like she was having another TIA. ‘They cut their own throats, see?’

‘What?’ I asked, mouth dropping open in astonishment. ‘How?’

‘It’s their trotters,’ she explained, deadly serious. ‘They thrash about so much in the water that they end up cutting their own throats with their trotters.’

I spent some time trying to visualise this.  I didn’t think pig’s knees were the right way round to allow for this incredible feat of self-immolation and I foolishly expressed my doubts, ignoring my partner’s frantic hand gestures behind his mum telling me to shut up.

‘Oh, yes,’ she went on. ‘It’s a terrible thing.  My dad always used to tell us we had to get them out of the water double-quick before they slit their own throats. They just sink, you see.’

‘But loads of four-legged animals can swim…’ I tried.

‘Their bodies are too fat.’

‘So is mine, but I can swim. What about hippos?’

But she wouldn’t be persuaded. ‘Pigs just thrash about, sink, and cut their own throats.’

Later, my partner told me he had been through this conversation with her many times and had even shown her videos of pigs swimming, from the internet, but all she did was solemnly shake her head and say ‘Well, I don’t know about that, but all I do know is that pigs can’t swim because they cut their own throats with their trotters’. Presumably, she thought the Youtube films were somehow CGI-ed or photoshopped in some way. Or that the pigs they showed were specially trained performing pigs with hidden water-wings.

               Ermintrude’s dislike of most food groups comes into it’s own at Christmas – she doesn’t like mince pies, Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, stuffing, pigs in blankets (possibly she feels the blankets are a cruel additional burden for an animal so liable to cut itself with its own trotters), any more than one and a half sprouts, roast potatoes if they have any ‘hard bits’ on them, trifle (because it might contain sherry and she doesn’t drink alcohol as she hates the taste, and it might contain fruit), turkey (we have a chicken on Christmas Day to keep her happy), chocolates, crisps, sweets, biscuits, gateaux, shop-bought meringues, dates, nuts or any sort of spice.  Which makes cooking Christmas lunch for her very easy.

               Anyway, I digress. My point is that we now have to get food to her. As we are on complete lockdown due to my partner’s health, my niece, who is being fantastically helpful, is prepared to go to the shops for her, but though Marks and Spencers does have food on its shelves, including mini-meals, Ermintrude will only eat a limited range of these meals. There are about four she will tolerate. So there is unlikely to be many of the particular meals she likes on the shelves, and my poor niece will have to make more journeys than she needs to in order to get the specific things Ermintrude wants.  She can’t store much anyway. She has a small fridge freezer that holds about twelve mini-meals and two loaves.  A week before lockdown, we offered to buy her another freezer as there is room for an under-counter one in her little utility room (which she calls ‘the porch’), but she refused on the grounds that it would have to go in front of the electric plug for the washing machine, and she would therefore be unable to unplug the washing machine between washes. 

               We love Ermintrude, despite finding her inadvertently amusing.  She is in many ways a fabulous woman, as is my own mum, and the mums of my friends, all of whom are weird in their own individual fashion.  They are entitled to be weird. They’ve lived a long time. They’ve brought us up. Their bodies are failing and their mental acuity is not what it was.  They deserve to be looked after.

But they do make it very difficult at times!