Monday 16 October 2023: A bit green around the gills…

Image by Andy from Pixabay

We didn’t move any furniture at the weekend, or swap any rooms around. We did the shopping and the band had a gig. But we didn’t do much else.

At about teatime on Friday I suddenly took ill, and I got steadily worse as the weekend progressed. We don’t know whether I’d eaten something, picked up a stomach chill, or was just suffering the opposite of withdrawal when you omit something from your diet and then suddenly reintroduce it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

Saturday morning I stayed in bed while the poet went to get the dog’s prescription, fill up the car with petrol, and buy some Euros for his business trip this week. While he was out, he also picked up the dog’s wet food, which we use to give him his tablets in at teatime.

Saturday afternoon I did a quick meal plan for the week, wrote up a shopping list, and off we went. We bought meat, veg and bread from a farm shop and everything else from the supermarket. And our weekly shopping came in at £20 under budget.

Honestly, there are people out there who say they can’t afford to eat healthily or cook everything from scratch, yet we’re saving between £20 and £40 a week – a WEEK – just by cutting out as many processed and ultra processed foods that we can. And we have a lot of fun experimenting with recipes and making all of our own food, from bread (normally) to pies to cakes to ice cream to cordials to jams and preserves, and so on.

Where possible, we’re buying local and organic, and this time we also bought some eco-friendly washing detergent too.

We had a light tea, then I ran the poet to the van, deciding right at the last minute whether or not I’d be joining them later. I did join them, but we had to stop off at a motorway service station on the way home in the wee small hours of the following morning.

I still wasn’t great on Sunday and we had a long lie in. I hardly ate anything all day, but the poet made ice cream and a Sunday dinner, complete with Yorkshire pudding, and I made a pumpkin tray bake cake. I managed tea, and cake, and some organic chocolate, but I overdid it and was up half the night.

This morning, the poet went off on his business trip and I stayed in bed again all morning. When I got up I did feel a lot better, but pottered around doing household chores, like washing the dog’s bedding, washing crocks by hand that can’t go in the dishwasher, emptying the dishwasher, filling it, hanging washing up to dry, emptying the bins, and tidying the kitchen after Sunday’s baking and cooking session.

It was gone 4pm when I finally arrived at my desk, so I don’t think I’ll get through a lot today now. Instead, I’ll concentrate on streamlining my work over the next four days.

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