DEMENTIA CARE: RUSSIAN STRAWBERRY MILK ROULETTE.

This first part is the story of instant milk disposal. Milk is ordered weekly. The use-by date is almost always a week in advance. Refunds are almost always on the day of delivery when I spot something wrong with an item.
   So far…so normal.
   Refunds are offered for online products within a five-day period. What’s my problem? I notice an issue with the product on day six. No refund. Unless I fill out a form.
   But it is more convenient to do the other thing. So I do the other thing. Sell-by dates and use-by dates indicate nothing. You can run over those dates and still consume perfectly edible refrigerated products. And you could still be well-within those dates and find a problem with the merchandise, just the same.
   It is day six. Time to open another bottle of milk. Here’s the process. Pour milk. Stop. Shake powdered pills into the cup. Pour milk. Stop. Shake more powder into the cup. Finish pouring the milk.
   I reacted too slowly. If it happened the very first time, I’d have saved the powdered pills. Ah, well. In goes the first layer of milk, no problem. Powdered pills float in there. And then, when I pour the second layer of milk to cover the powdered particles, a huge milky string materialises.
   Grim. I stop pouring. The milky string whips up in the air, arcs over the bottle’s mouth, and swings around to deposit a tiny invisible Spider-Man on the side of the bottle. Or that’s how I like to imagine it, anyway.
   Over to the sink. I swirl the bottle around. It’s transforming into butter, there. No wonder the first pour was liquid. It dribbled out effortlessly. After that, I was dealing with curds. How do you deal with curds?
   You instantly dispose of the curdy brew down the sink.
   Glug glug glug. The drink formed a big pink pancake of a plug. It looked far worse out of the bottle. Is there a use for curdled milk? As far as elderly care is concerned, no. You can’t take the risk. It isn’t even all that great for putting out small fires.
   Never risk thick strawberry milk on the elderly. It may still be edible, but the taste will skew out of the normal pattern. And for people with no concentration, the regular taste of strawberry goodness is incredibly important to routine. Change that and you risk losing the strawberry treat entirely.
   The main indicator you’ll have is viewing a sour face on the cared-for when drinking sweetened milk. Luckily, this goo roamed freely through the air when I was trying to pour it into the cup. Problem spotted. Luckily, I keep a reserve of milk in place. Problem solved.
   Supermarket milk is cheap. Brand-name milk in smaller bottles, with a longer shelf-life, costs more. It’s the brand-name stuff that acts as the special reserve. I’ve killed off The Blob. Now it is time to blast the half-filled cup. Then I’ll reach for the reserve milk.
   It’s all done easily. A quick fix. Right. I need a refund on that product. There’s no telling when it went like that. I wildly assume that the product was like that when it came into the house. But with the bottle full, placed into the fridge, it was harder to spot on the day.
   And so I discover this excessive way of gaining a refund for something that lasted until day six. Fill out a form. That’s no good. Provide photographs of the thing I wish to replace. I’ve poured it down the sink. Instant disposal of suspect milk took me away from the photo opportunity.
   Never take chances with suspect items. Dispose of those instantly. That’s the rule.
   I wait until the latest delivery rattles along. When it is all in the fridge, that’s half the story. Only once it is in the supermarket system as delivered, only then, I go to the order.
   There I find this week’s delivery, and I request a refund for one bottle of milk. This is arranged with a minimum of fuss, bother, and explanation.
   Click. Refund. E-mail. We are processing your refund. Instant second e-mail. We have processed your refund. Who did this harm? No one. I was down one bottle of milk that had to be refunded. And a refund went out from the shop.
   When you become a carer, you are far outside the system. Then you navigate your way into the system. There are shortcuts. And then there are ways around, up, over, through, there and back again, and off-the-wall – into and beyond The Twilight Zone.
   You follow the path of resistance. Sometimes this is MOST but mostly it is LEAST. Being a carer, you take that carer system you are working your way through and you copy it over to everything else. Every aspect of caring infiltrates every aspect of everything.
   I took the path of no resistance when dealing with a refund I wasn’t allowed. Yes, I could have gained the refund by filling out excessive amounts of detail on a form. (With the attendant photography thrown in, if I’d not thrown the milk out.)
   But I took one look at the form and thought FUCK THAT. I’LL TAKE THE REFUND FROM THE NEXT BATCH. JOB DONE.
   It was so much easier to click for an instant refund than to fill out a form for a delayed one. I’d played Russian Roulette with the milk bottles lined up in the fridge. It was just coincidence that I put that one bottle further along the rack.
   If the dodgy bottle had been the DAY ONE bottle, there’d have been a DAY ONE refund, and I’d have kept my eye firmly on the reserve bottles earlier in the game.
   Instant refund. As soon as the next delivery came along, that is. Mark that in the WIN column. Russian Strawberry Milk Roulette gave me this blog post.

The second part of the story involves nostalgia. Sugary treats should be an easy thing to administer. Dementia has destroyed all the savoury options. Only the sweet stuff remains. The diet is a diet of strawberry milk, after all.
   Occasionally we go utterly mental and switch to banana milk. There’s no one to stop the rising tide of chaos.
   I bought sweets so we could have a talk about sweets and anything else that came up. The sweets have particular shapes, colours, and scents that evoke my mother’s past. She would hit the pick ’n’ mix stand the way heist crews hit deposit boxes in caper movies.
   As a child, headed to the train, I knew we’d stop at the little stand around the corner from the ticket window. There, she’d buy something for herself and mints for me. That’s a ritual on the way out…
   On the way back, there’d be a little stand around the corner from the ticket window in an entirely different station. If I had mints left, I didn’t really need more mints. And if the train stood right there, then there wasn’t time on the way back.
   If I think of any food associated with railway stations, I think of mints. As I still eat mints today, I tend to associate mints with everything – not just railway stations. Anyway, I decided to bring back memories of sugary treats.
   These are more associated with HOME.
   Sometimes the cared-for announces I want to go home. You are home. But you aren’t, are you? This is common in dementia care, so I am told. I think about that home. My mother’s home, when she mentions home, is a long-demolished cottage in another town.
   And that’s a place in a time long-gone. How much of the fabric was swept away? Are any stout timbers left? Time for the cared-for is the distant past, and that stays in the mind. So it exists, if in a jumble. I go there, now, by the sorcery of Google Maps, and I wander the streets until I find the place where sweets were sold.
   There are gaps in the map. Literally, a gap where a building once stood. And that building was on local authority land. I’m surprised and not surprised that the local authority hasn’t made something of the place since the building stood up and walked away.
   Around the streets I go, and there, until the end of the world, is the place that still sells sweets. The sweets of my mother’s past aren’t necessarily my sweets. I’ve bought them in, to show her the past. Her past.
   This means I’ll eat sweets that aren’t quite to my taste. My dentist would certainly complain bitterly at the sight of the glassy grenades on display. Glassy hard-boiled sweets aren’t really my thing. I like a few of them.
   Her past is a past of my grandfather’s. So he would keep a supply of sweets for her, on visits. And he extended that tradition. This is not a world of chocolate treats. My mother stuffed her face with chocolate as a child, spewed up, and never ate chocolate again.
   (With one exception. There’s always one brand that stands out from the much-hated ranks.)
   The stash of sweets is, mostly, hard and glassy. Barley sugar is okay. It’s difficult to overdose on. Your tongue, teeth, cheeks, jaws, and sense of taste will all stop you from nearing the overdose.
   I associate barley sugar with my grandfather. My mother loved soor plooms. They are okay. Soor Plooms was her nickname for her twin sister, my unsmiling aunt. This isn’t true. My aunt would smile, and laugh, and occasionally cackle along with my mother as they found something highly amusing.
   The difficulties with glassy sweets are clear. Solid lumps are choking hazards. The hard crunch into a glassy sweet always provides the sensation of breaking your teeth. Those shards will go after your tongue and your gums with a vengeance.
   As an aside, over in the world of mints…I tend not to eat the glassy ones. I say humbug to the humbug mint. However, the greatest threat in the mint world is, just my luck, a Scottish one. The pan drop is an attempt to turn the mint into a confection of stealthy annihilation.
   You haven’t diced with death until you’ve accidentally swallowed a pan drop whole. There’s that moment in which someone else’s life flashes before your eyes as you hope the damned thing goes to your stomach like a pebble…
   No hope for you if it lodges in your throat. A minty flying saucer of doom. But this doesn’t answer the vital minty question. Peppermint or spearmint? If you are going to choke to death on a mint, for fuck’s sake don’t make it spearmint. At least attempt to retain a shred of dignity on you way out.
   There are no mints in this nostalgic collection. Cinnamon features quite a lot. Oddfellows. Aromatics. Aniseed and cinnamon. These flavours are more to my taste.
   As for the glassy items…
   Doodles should be a doddle to eat. But the toffee flavour isn’t the consistency of toffee. You’ll drown in your own saliva sucking a toffee doodle down to a fragment that won’t choke you to death if you make a wrong move.
   I can’t allow her to eat these time-bombs. And I suspect that the more aromatic aniseed cinnamon notes are now too far from the sweetness of strawberry to count as edible. She’d screw her face up, in tasting many of those offerings.
   So I sit here, coffee after coffee, dissolving these cannonballs on my tongue, wondering at the appeal of barley sugar, pear drops, and toffee doodles. But we had our conversations. Our trips down a fragmented lane of memories.
   There was a spark of interest. Worth it? Yes. Worth it. Even the pear drops. I drew the line at red cola cubes and luminous pineapple cubes. Barley sugar cracks as the hot coffee collides with it. Memories, splintering, releasing flavours of times and places. That was the point of strolling down a sugary memory lane.