I was grumping and growling all day yesterday and much of this morning, largely thanks to my father who is getting difficult as he ages, and never more so than when he is unwell. I am worried he has some sort of lung infection, as this is the fourth or fifth time in the past months he has come down with a terrible cough (and he smokes like a steam engine). Plus, he is of a generation, class and gender that expects to be waited on hand and foot; that is just how the world works and he finds it inconceivable that it could be otherwise. For example: yesterday he arrived home with ten kilos of shelled peas. These were to be blanched and packed away in the freezer to do him for the rest of the year (this is his favourite vegetable), but he would not do any of that himself. So he roped in a delivery man to blanche them, and in the evening I wandered into the kitchen to find pots of peas everywhere and nowhere to store them since he had not thought to arrange freezer bags or containers in sufficient quantity, nor was he sure where these could be found (there is a specific shop which is the only one that would do for some reason and he doesn’t know where it is).
By lunchtime I cooled down quite a bit and then made some of his favourite style of peas with garlic and black pepper, which he enjoyed.
Then I went to visit an elderly relative, Peedum, who made me grumpy again by talking about religion in a particularly annoying way, with a sacharine smile of sweet virtue on her face. The only story worth repeating is of her sister, the only one in her family, who didn’t fast in Ramazan. She asked that sister, ‘Peeda, why don’t you fast? Do you know it’s incumbent upon us by our religion and even missed fasts have to be made up?’ The sister explained, ‘Well Peedum, when I fast one day, for the next fast I have the most terrible constipation.’ So the relative said to her, ‘Peeda, you know I have been constipated since I was a little child and yet I always keep all my fasts! Would you like to know my secret? Every evening before bed I take on tablet of Voltron [a laxative] and that cleans out my system for the next day!’. ‘What a good idea! I will try that, Peedum,’ said the sister. And what do you know, since that day Peeda has kept every fast of every Ramazan.