The other day Belle and I were having lunch in McDonalds. I make no excuses for the fact that we go to McDonalds because we like it, so there. Also, we recently smuggled a full McDonalds breakfast for two into the cinema under Belle’s coat and it was ACE.

So we were in McDonalds, having just collecting our meal. As a side note – Belle does like ordering through those screens but I’m not entirely sure of the point of them. They just seem to have shifted the queue from the ordering stage to the food collection stage. Who knows, perhaps they did research and found that people are happier queuing when they know their Big Mac is on its way.

Mcdonalds Big Mac and fries

Anyway, we’d collected our food and I put the tray down onto the table. Some of my fries spilled out of their little carton. You know how they always do that, and you have to sort of round them back up? I collected all together again and I put the last straggler straight into my mouth, (for the sake of efficiency).

‘Belle,’ I said, pulling a sad face, ‘that chip was completely cold.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘I mean I just ate someone else’s old, cold chip off a table in McDonalds.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ she said.

Yes. Yes it was.

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Today I have a guest post from my fiancé, because he knows about football and I wasn’t sure who Sir Geoff Hurst was. I did pose for the picture though:

Sir Goeff Hurst

Think of Mcdonald’s, and you’d be forgiven for not associating them with sport at grass roots level in the community. All right, you might think of their logo blazoned on sponsorship boards at every football World Cup in recent memory, but you probably wouldn’t think that they’re that heavily involved in getting children active and involved in their local football clubs.

We were pleasantly surprised too.

“Do you want to come with me to interview Sir Geoff Hurst? “ Jo asked, adding, “is that a thing?” to confirm her understandable ignorance to English footballing history. I don’t blame her for this – mine is sketchy too, but it’s always nice to have superior knowledge to Jo when the majority of the time, on most subjects, I’m metaphorically in her rear-view mirror. View Post

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I mean actual fudge. Sweet enough, but sticky, soft and soporific.

Like this:

FudgeI have always been notoriously forgetful, not even able to recall whole conversations from only days previously, but I had thought it was an adorable sort of absent-mindedness – the sort you could laugh fondly about. Lately though it feels more like the worrying sort of slowness and makes you glad you don’t have a baby, for fear of leaving it behind in a supermarket trolley.

The irony of course is that I can’t remember whether this feeling is really new, or I’ve just forgotten that I felt the same this time last year.

It feels sometimes like there are vital connections not quite right in my brain. I can see things happening, but they are distant, like I am watching myself do them, laughing silently at my own ineptitude. I feel a little disconnected – both from things happening around me and internally – and it is quite disconcerting.

Aside from the usual things like not being able to remember the words for simple things like ‘bread’ and ‘cat’, two things happened this week that added further weight to my brain into fudge concerns. Firstly, I tried to buy a drink from a vending machine. A simple enough task you might think for a woman educated to degree level.

It looked like this one:

Vending machine

After figuring out how to put the coins in, I spent some time touching the picture of the bottle of Diet Coke, trying to work out why the drink wasn’t appearing anywhere, before realising I was literally just pawing at a picture like a not terribly well trained chimp and actually had to press one of the buttons at the side.

Thankfully no one was watching. For the second incident I wasn’t so fortunate.

I was driving through McDonald’s. (I don’t spend my entire life buying fast food and fizzy drinks, I promise.) I had placed my order and driven to the next window to pay.

I paid. So far so good. ‘Excellent,’ I thought to myself, ‘that’s that done,’ and I drove off. I was turning the corner back out into the main car park before I realised I hadn’t actually collected my food. I reversed awkwardly all the way back round to the final window, where a teenage boy with questionable skin was holding out a brown paper bag, looking confused.

“Oh silly me!” I said, trying to sound casual about the fact that I was clearly on the verge of dementia, grabbed the bag and drove off for a second time.

Seriously, what is the matter with me? Does this sort of thing ever happen to you or should I be making some sort of appointment??

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