Christmas Day
I knew that Christmas 2023 was cursed when I woke up late on 25th December and realised I'd forgotten to take out the chicken and pigs-in-blankets from the freezer on Christmas Eve.
If it was down to P's mum, whom I will call Muriel for the purpose of this blog, Christmas lunch would be a straightforward Sunday roast with no 'fancying up' - ie, no stuffing or pigs-in-blankets, cranberry or bread sauce. In fact, she isn't even that keen on roast potatoes. Her reasoning is that these things give her indigestion - but really she just doesn't like anything with 'a flavour'.
Fortunately, there was a beef joint in the fridge, waiting for Boxing Day, so we cooked that instead and made Yorkshire puddings. Muriel complained that the beef was too 'tough' and not cut thin enough. Apparently, 1mm is too thick, and medium rare too difficult to chew, for a woman who wears only her top set of dentures. She finds chewing anything tougher than trifle a chore. Her Christmas lunch this year consisted of one thin slice of beef, half a roast potato, two small sprouts, a quarter of a carrot, a sliver of parsnip (which she left on the plate like a silent protest], a teaspoon of mashed potato and a teaspoon of gravy. She declined a Yorkshire pudding. I'd offer to puree it all for her in the Bullet to make a sort of Christmas Dinner smoothie - but she doesn't like soup.
She seemed to enjoy her specially made non-alcoholic trifle, however - though later she claimed the mandarin oranges I put in it upset her stomach. Getting old isn't fun, is it?
The moment she arrived, Muriel claimed to be freezing and she kept her woolly pompom hat on throughout her visit. In fact, she wore her coat too for most of the afternoon, with two blankets wrapped round her, in addition, in our centrally-heated house. P and I felt faint from heat-exhaustion.
Fittingly, we'd bought her one of those little heaters you plug directly into an electric socket - they are supposed to be very cheap and efficient so we thought she would approve. She opened the carefully wrapped present as if it was a box of gelignite that might explode any moment, with an expression of pained anxiety on her face. Her reluctance was due to the fact that she doesn't 'do' presents. In the week running up to Christmas, she had sent P to the shops for bottles of wine and boxes of biscuits, which he then had to deliver to various neighbours on her behalf, but she moans if they buy her anything in return. If I didn't know her better, I'd think it was passive-aggression.
She gave P - her only son - nothing at all, not even a bottle of wine, not even a Christmas card. He doesn't mind. He drives an hour to and from her house three or four times a week, runs errands for her, rings her every evening, won't go on holiday because he is worried about leaving her. He is a wonderful son, and he doesn't mind when she fails to get him a Christmas present. She has helped us out with money in the past - she just can't see the point in presents on birthdays and Christmas.
She isn't actually a horrible woman, though she sounds like this here - she's just a dreary person to spend Christmas Day with and I've been spending Christmas Day with her since 2001. In reality, she is generous and has a sense of humour, but she is certainly eccentric and peculiar.
She talked all the way through the 1947 film White Christmas, which she had requested and which I had to pay to watch. Half-way through, she began to ask: 'Is this the same film? It's a long film, isn't it?'. She then repeated this question every few minutes until we finally turned it off.
Boxing Day
On Boxing Day, I became ill. I'd been feeling tired and achy for a couple of weeks, but the stress of Christmas Day seemed to bring out all the other symptoms of a bad cold and I felt awful for at least a week. I had a terrible sore throat but the worst things were intense tiredness and pain in all my joints. Most of my friends were ill too, with different things. Everyone I knew seemed to be vomiting, coughing up their lungs or passing out this Christmas. My symptoms were very similar to my friend's Covid symptoms but we had no tests in the house so I never discovered whether I actually had Covid myself but I suspect I did.
Unfortunately, two days after my symptoms began in earnest, Muriel became ill too. Presumably she caught it from P and me [P had been ill before Christmas]. Being 89, she required more looking-after than me so P went over to her house every morning and every afternoon/evening for about a fortnight. During this period, he had to ring 911 twice, and they sent an ambulance both times - the first time, Muriel twisted in her seat and got a stabbing pain in her side. Her melodramatic reaction led P to believe she had fractured a rib, but the paramedics checked her out thoroughly and thought she had just pulled a muscle - an hour later she was no longer in pain and claimed she couldn't remember the incident. The second occasion, she ended up in A & E as her blood pressure rose to 190, only to be sent home by the triage nurse who said this was nothing to worry about [the paramedics thought it was].
That fortnight was a terrible strain on P. The driving back and forth from his mum's, with me too poorly myself to help much - the constant worry about his mum, who wouldn't come and stay at our house while she was ill. She couldn't sleep and was forgetting to eat. At one point he thought she was dying. We had to cancel seeing our great-nephew, so his Christmas presents from us just sat beneath the tree unopened - in fact, by the time we saw him, it was well after New Year and I'd taken the tree down and put the decorations away. We also had to cancel a visit to my sister's where we'd been invited for a meal. My friend from Stockport had planned to come over but she had to postpone her visit. The week between Christmas and New Year was boring, stressful and tedious beyond belief.
Then, a few days into his mum's illness, as if the universe was trying to convince us that things can always get worse, our elderly cat came home limping badly on her right front leg and holding her paw bent back. She clearly couldn't put any weight on it.
Tilly
We thought she'd fallen and possibly fractured her leg. Regular readers will know that she was always climbing onto a neighbour's roof and we were always worried she'd fall off. However, the vet said there were no fractures or dislocations, and that she'd recover with a lot of rest.
At first, she could still clamber up and down stairs to the spare room where she had decided she wanted to sleep. She came down to eat and even went out into the garden a couple of times in those first few days.
But then she started going downhill. She spent more and more time curled up in the spare room. We started carrying her up and down stairs as all her legs began to look peculiar. She was splaying her back legs in a weird manner when she crouched, and her limp was becoming much more pronounced and affecting more than one leg.
The vet said it might be 'nerve damage' which would take a long time to get better.
We bought her a litter tray and I made a ramp for her to clamber up to get in it but she couldn't manage it. We squirted Metacam down her throat in case she was in pain. Soon, she couldn't walk at all. There was one evening when she sat on P's knee for an hour then on my chest for an hour, but otherwise she spent all her time in the spare room, occasionally mewing. We knew something more than nerve damage was the problem.
Tilly's original owner, Duncan, took her up to the vet's for the third and final visit. He rang us soon afterwards and told us the vet wanted to euthanise her and we could come up to say goodbye. So, in a state of shock, we witnessed the deed.
This was the second time I've seen a beloved pet being euthanised. With Asbo, we'd prepared ourselves as he'd been ill for a while with bowel cancer, and we both wept like babies in the surgery and all the way home. But with Tilly, it was a complete shock. It had been no longer than ten days since she'd come home with a limp. How could the vet now be saying she had a neurological disorder which would only get worse and become more painful and confusing for her?
I think I was in a state of denial as I didn't cry until a couple of nights later when I seemed to come out of the shock and suddenly realised our little funny cat was gone forever. It was about two in the morning. I started seeing flashbacks of her tiny trusting face, and feeling guilty that somehow we hadn't done enough to help her, and I got really upset.
P says he never wants to go through this again and therefore doesn't want another pet. By contrast, I feel like the house is empty without an animal in it. My niece, an RSPCA officer, keeps sending me pics of animals in need of adoption, but P is adamant that he doesn't want one, and he's right. It's too soon.
However, here are two pics of potential animals in need of homes to show what we're up against:
Slimming World
When I was ill during the Christmas period, I completely failed to lose my appetite.
I mean, surely, the very least you should be able to expect, in a well-ordered universe, is to lose your interest in food when you have a virus?
I spent a week sitting on the settee, with Tilly lying on my chest [only a fortnight later she was euthanised - I wish I'd appreciated her kindness in using me as a warm, unmoving bed during my own illness], watching TV and comfort eating. As it was Christmas, the house was full of treats so I was stuffing my face with chocolates, Pringles, cheese, pork pie, toast with honey, trifle - even mince pies and Christmas cake, neither of which I particularly like! Basically, the illness seemed to provide me with a license to eat every kind of food that was bad for both my diet and my pre-diabetes, and do absolutely no exercise at all.
I missed three consecutive sessions at Slimming World - firstly because I had to do some cover at work, then because we had theatre tickets to see 'White Christmas' for our wedding anniversary, and then because I was ill. The lovely group leader, Vicki, managed to make it so that I didn't have to pay for these sessions. I thought I had probably put on at least half a stone when I did finally return, but in fact it was only 2.5 lb. I got back onto the diet but the following week I had put on a further 1.5 lb! So I actually weighed 4lb more than before Christmas, despite having been strict for one week. Last week, I had lost that 1.5 lb, and I am hoping that by next Thursday a miracle will have happened and I'll be back to where I was before Christmas.
Presents
I did get two particularly fab presents, though neither of them were Christmas presents.
One was a beautiful cotton throw to celebrate our wedding anniversary on 21 December. Apparently, the traditional second year gift is 'cotton'. I didn't get P a present, though I did pay for the tickets to see 'White Christmas' so I suppose that was a kind of present. I was actually completely taken by surprise when he gave me this gift:
The other present I got was also from P and this time is was an early 60th birthday present. My birthday is in February but I had mentioned that I was interested in a six-week still life drawing and painting course being held at The Art House in Sheffield on Thursday evenings starting in January, but couldn't afford to do it, so P paid for it. I've completed two sessions now, and I'm really enjoying it. Each session is two and a half hours, which is extremely tiring, but the tutor and the fellow students are lovely and there is something restful about completely concentrating on one activity for an extended period.
Below is a photo of my partially-completed practice work - the shading needs a lot of work and it is far from finished, but this took a huge amount of effort:
