The Quest For Chocolate Custard

If you'd been in Woolies early this morning you might have caught Mum and I bent in intense concentration over a shopping list.

"What do you supposed crumbled fillets are, then?"

Slightly more difficult to decipher than 'tiramisuey', but we found the frozen fish eventually. My gran suffered a mini-stroke a couple of weeks ago and, although otherwise her lively, acid-witted self, is finding it very difficult to move around at the moment. Mum, therefore, has appointed herself Commander-In-Chief of Groceries, and is doing a splendid job. But we'll be buggered if we can work out what Gran means by 'chocolate custard'.

Yes, we KNOW you can buy cartons of chocolate custard. We did. We bought a one litre carton. That's not it. It's too big. We bought a 600ml carton. That's not it either. It comes in little tubs, like yoghurt. We bought a 12-pack of little tubs of Dairy Farmers chocolate custard. No, that's not it. It's self-saucing. Self-saucing custard, I hear you ask? Isn't custard ALL sauce? Apparently not. We took home some Yogo. That doesn't taste like custard.
(I agree. It doesn't taste like anything.) I've got a nasty feeling that what she actually means is creme caramel, but I received such a bollocking when I last suggested that that I'm going to have to wait until she's out and sneak it surreptitiously into her fridge to test my hypothesis.

Stiff upper lip aside, I felt anxious when we waved her off to the hairdresser's. Gran is as tough as they come, but how old is too old to live alone? Does anyone have the right to insist on care when the border between independence and safety has been breached? Gran lives in a retirement village but she didn't tell anybody for almost a week that she'd 'fallen over' - she didn't know she'd had a stroke either - and even the neighbours can't look out for her all the time. Stubborn as she is, she would, I know, flatly refuse to live with family. I can understand the frustration at the deprivation of privacy and self-determination that must go with accepting care, but I love my gran and I want to make sure she lives as long, as comfortable and as dignified a life as possible. I want to know she's safe when I'm not there.