Dinner Time

I made Toad in the Hole for dinner tonight. The Guardian had an article on how to make a good one earlier in the week, and I got hit with a wave of nostalgia. We used to eat it fairly regularly at home when we were kids, but I haven't had it in years. Funny what you miss, moving away. So far, the things I miss most are good thick rashers of smoky bacon and Colgate Total toothpaste. Ah, the taste of home.

Toad in the Hole isn't eaten in Sweden, although there's equivalents like tjock pan kaka (fat pancake). People give you funny looks if you ask for Paddan i Hålet. Something about the idiom of referring to your sausages as amphibians, I suppose. We're not so particular back home, where I hear everyone eats horse now. Deliberately or otherwise.

My wife gave me one of her askance looks when I offered to have a go at cooking it. Fair point - I have never cooked it before, and worse, she has never eaten it before. She's... I guess 'extremely cautious' is a good way of describing her attitude to new foods. I can't entirely blame her, some of my more experimental cooking (mulled spice brownies, economy banger stew) can be pretty unpalatable. But it was okay - rather than refusing to countenance this offering, she only waited a couple of days before giving the project a green light.

People keep asking if we're eating properly. The baby certainly is, and actually, we're doing pretty well too. I've adapted my wife's long habit of eating two meals a day, a good Swedish breakfast of crackers and cheese, then whatever we end up cooking at night. It can be frustrating, cooking something, plating it up and then eating in hurried shifts as we tend to the baby. It's not stopping us, though, even if the meals are a little more irregular and improvised than usual.

The same goes for baby. It's cold over here at the moment (I almost said 'very cold', but cold that would probably spark terrified headlines predicting the eating of the sun by a wolf in the UK is pretty ho hum over here). My wife has to make sure she offloads milk regularly, either into the baby or bottles, otherwise it backs up and can be painful. She's had a couple of alarming shivering fits if she's skipped a session, for frivolous things like doctor's appointments or being utterly exhausted at 0415. I was making glib remarks about ice cream. They were ill-received. Mastitis is no laughing matter.

As I know - I had mastitis as a teenager. No, don't laugh, I just explained it isn't funny. I discovered a painful swelling in my right breast when I was about 19. The wonderful thing about a small amount of medical knowledge is that it allows you to assume you have cancer on a moment's notice. I dutifully alerted my parents to the fact that they might be about to lose a family member and mournfully made my way to the GP, who booked me an appointment with a specialist.

The specialist in question turned out to be the surgeon I'd done my work experience with the summer before. He was exactly the sort of surgeon I love best - the first time I ever saw him, he was sitting in his convertible, smoking a cigar and talking on his (giant early '90s) mobile about golf. After making a couple of remarks about how fit his nurses were looking that morning, he told me I was having a hormonal over-reaction. Not over the presumed cancer, my breast cells were overreacting to the small amounts of teenage oestrogen in my system, and were apparently contemplating growing into an actual boob. This did nothing to reassure me at all.

Once he'd talked me off the roof, he explained it was almost certainly temporary mastitis and nothing to worry about. If it didn't go away, he would happily cut it out. That got me to leave, at any rate, and I went home to bring the diagnosis to my worried parents.

"I've got mastitis," I said, with a look of extreme martyrdom.

"Oh, that's what John Barton's goat had," Dad said cheerfully. Much ribald mockery ensued, as having an elder brother who was doing an impression of a hermaphrodite barnyard was a goldmine to my younger siblings.

It's good to be able to understand your wife's pain.