Strange days

Cats are weird. In this weird weather, it's grown so warm so early that we have already skinned the duvet and are sleeping under its skin; so now is the time that Barry decides our bed is the only place to be, all day and all night too. Now it's no longer warm and snugglesome beneath him. O-kay.

People? Also weird. If you had tried to tell my younger nocturnal self - the one I still cradle somewhere within, the one who could sleep till noon then work till 3am and go out looking for company to watch the sun come up, the one I just really really miss - that my older self would rise at seven in order to drink coffee in a cafe with friends before work, he would just have stared. It wouldn't even have been laughable; it wouldn't have been possible. But I have done that; and I have emptied and filled the dishwasher, and taken out and fetched back the bins, and made bread-dough, and fed the cats and scooped the litter, and taken in a parcel for m'wife, and it isn't even nine o'clock yet, oy.

I learn these things so you don't have to

In Mac's eyes, it seems, cuddles are no substitute for porks. No substitute at all.

Who would ever have thought it?

Since you need catching up, I should tell you that yesterday, bearing in mind the new-crowned tooth and all, I skipped lunch altogether and made a supper of things that needed little chewing: a stir-fried dish of chicken and green garlic, with rice-and-mushrooms and long beans in ginger (and even the beans cut short, so as not to call for undesirable biting). And a searing chilli oil that I am really pleased with, fresh ripe red Thai birds-eye chillies sizzled with chunks of garlic and ginger, with a sploosh of soy to finish off. I am unsure that even the copious oil will preserve it long, but I can always drain the oil off and keep that for ever, while I slurrup down the crunchy bits instanter.

But that was yesterday; today I was bolder. Lunch was leftover rice topped off with duck eggs and more of that ecstatic oil, but tonight we had pork tenderloin roasted on a bed of beets glazed with balsamic and honey, with roast cauliflower and brussels sprouts beside. And Mac was very, very interested in that pork, oh yes. And just when he would have been possessing himself thereof, I risked my arms to cuddle him in lieu. Because I'm just that noble and self-sacrificial.