Home again

I am back home, and hope I am not tempting providence by saying so. The APs are managing with some help from the neighbours and FD, true to form, is out and about again, welcomed back by the surprising number of people on the dogwalking circuit who had missed him. And That Dog is fully recovered and as rambunctious as ever. My real crisis is averted for the time being and I am chained to my desk attending to correspondence.

I suppose it's not surprising that I am now having a mini-crise, a crisisette. I'm fretting about eveything: neglected work, neglected garden, the fact that there is nowhere in this house to out anything down any more, and I can't think what to do about it...even my neglected Other Half, since at the start of the summer I had promised that we would have an occasional day out (we can't go far as he has CFS) in our new (to us) car. We have managed a total of two outings all year; most years we make an off-season trip to Seahouses, where we share delicious fish and chips with the dogs and walk on the sands, before a quick stop in Bamburgh on the way home - high excitement in this household, I can tell you, but we haven't got that far. Not that I mind outings when the weather is colder, and the dogs don't care at all, but I just don't have time.

Instead, I've wasted time today dithering over when to go back to Devon - I'll have to go close to Christmas but I can't leave it until then. It's all getting very expensive, but this is absolutely my last whingeing session. Back to writing about nature, I promise!

To which end, I think we'll have a random armadillo to cheer us up (the last was on Geranium Cat's Bookshelf), since I find them very appealing:

Oh glory

There are small consolations from time to time. This morning glory is a joy to behold in the mornings - I pass it on my way to the washing line. FD is out of hospital (we won't talk about the state in which they discharged him) and now feeling a little more cheerful - amazing the difference eating can make. The dog is feeling better too, which means disruptive and demanding and generally infuriating, blast him.

The late evening sunshine on the church tower is pleasing too, but I'm not going to take its picture. And coming back from shopping I saw an egret sitting in the topmost branches of a dead tree, surrounded by 4 rooks, 3 magpies and a buzzard. It looked entirely untroubled by such company, and finally the rooks went off to mob the buzzard, which was obviously much more fun.

The halt and the lame

Walking the dog this afternoon, I was thinking about families, and responsibilities, and so on: I have now spent more time this summer in Devon than at home, since my stepfather added a crushed vertebra to my mother's badly sprained ankle, rendering them both incapacitated at once. The dog, though comparatively elderly now himself, is unfortunately an out-and-out lunatic, who has both Aged Parents so firmly under his paw that he dictates every household routine. He views me with the jaundiced eye of sibling rivalry, and I suppose, if I'm honest, I view him much as I would do a spoilt toddler, though I try to be patient.

At one stage in the walk I was composing this post in my head (by way of explanation for my lack of blogging activity) and, as I said, brooding on families in general. I could, I thought, introduce my parents, FD (Father Dear) and MM (Madam Moth); we all, I would have to explain, tend to refer to each other by silly names, though I have been circumspect about using them, ever since OH took exception to my referring to him as The Playboy of the Western World. Honest, it was meant to be a mildly ironic allusion to a man not greatly given to garrulity and extravagance, but I think he took it to mean that he wasn't very exciting. Anyway, back to the other half of the family. FD was coined by my late stepbrother, himself always referred to as The Seventh Earl, named as he was after Titus Groan (yes, we knew the Earl of Groan was the Seventy-seventh of that ilk, but we couldn't quite compete, dynastically).

I was just congratulating myself on being the only one who didn't own a silly name, when I remembered that my mother's infrequent letters to me during my childhood began, first: Dear Baby Bird, and later, Dearest Bird Bath, after I had protested that the first was soppy. Madam Moth, of course, which appeared during my early obsession with Hamlet, was short for Madam Mother, but the overtones of Puccini pleased me, and I still begin letters that way. MM, on the other hand, still doesn't write many letters, which is just as well as no-one but me can ever read her writing.

Anyway, the sprained ankle is recovering slowly but satisfactorily, though the back injury is newly done and there are some weeks of recuperation to go. I have said I will stay for a couple more weeks, since in theory I can work from pretty much anywhere. In practice, of course, by the time I have delivered breakfast on a tray to one, it's pretty much time to offer morning coffee to the other, then there is lunch to prepare (they like a proper lunch, something to look forward to), then there is That Dog to walk, followed by afternoon tea….if I get up early I can have a couple of hours uninterrupted then that's about it for the day. Fortunately, I've been able to commandeer a son to do some of my work for me…

I can hear a mouse behind the skirting board. They are all moving in for the winter. I expect they will want breakfast on trays, too.

Precious things

I've been away from my blog again recently because my grandmother died, aged 98. She'd been in a nursing home for some years, and I hadn't seen her since last year, but a couple of weeks ago her health deteriorated and we were warned that she wouldn't last long.

She was a woman of considerable character and it's strange to think she is no longer here. For some years I lived with my grandparents and she was very important to me while I was growing up. Her ashes are now interred in a woodland burial site, not too many miles from the Isle of Wight which she remembered and loved from girlhood.

When she had to part with her household possessions to move to the nursing home she was pleased that I wanted the willow pattern china which was part of my early memories.

Spectrum days

Some time after, according to my OH, the rest of the world became interconnected via the Interwebs, he is groping to join the world of geeks.* Now, for him to be in this position is grossly unfair, because back in the dark ages, he was the one who dragged the entire family into computing. It happened thus:

First, my great-auntie Marie left me a diamond ring. My grandma told me about it when I was 12 or so, but that she would look after it until I grew up. Well, I remembered the story, but I never entirely believed in the ring (I hadn’t seen it) so I was quite surprised when, after Grandma died in the early 80s, my father said, “Oh, by the way, there’s a ring for you. I’d sell it if I were you” and handed me something enormous with 3 diamonds set in white gold. I couldn’t really imagine wearing it, and it sat in a shop window in Carlisle for several months, so that I was completely staggered when we received an offer for it: I’d never really believed that it represented money, in the same way that I hadn’t really believed its existence. But we left the shop in Carlisle on a Saturday morning with a large roll of £50 notes, and a couple of hours later we were the proud owners of a ZX Spectrum with 48KB RAM, a tape cassette player, a television set and a large yellow teddybear for younger son, who was too small to get to grips with BASIC.

I think it became clear early on that I had no talent for coding, but OH and elder son took to it happily, and my proofreading years began as I waded my way through pages of machine code looking for a missing colon. Meanwhile, OH was writing his dissertation with the aid of Tasword, an early and primitive word processing programme, younger son was helping Paddington to transport small animals across rivers, and the entire family quickly became au fait with computerspeak. In fact, we even attended an early computer fair and drooled over such unlikely objects as microdrives and, oh wonder of wonders, an early mock-up of the Sam coupé, a computer mostly famous for barely existing. Later we upgraded to an Amstrad word processor and the fact that I had learnt to use it was largely responsible for getting me my first post-childcare job.

So it is ironic that a household which took enthusiastically to personal computing from its earliest days has for so long had one member who was barely literate. I had put my old iMac at OH’s disposal, but it was hardly practical to bring it out for occasional use, and pre-broadband, it was quicker for him to ask me to type a letter, so nothing really came of it. But for the past year or so he has been nagging me to hand over my retired laptop, and I kept putting off, partly because it meant clearing everything off it, partly because it meant making time to be helpful. With a deep intake of breath at Christmas (which brought on a coughing fit), I duly reinstalled the network card, plonked it on the dining table and announced it was ready to go. It’s at moments like these you realise how complex some of the repetitive tasks performed daily actually are. When it’s a struggle to remember how to save a Word file to My Documents, setting up Headers and Footers becomes considerably more time-consuming. “Where did Google go?” he said this morning. A perfectly good question, if you haven’t got into the habit of always opening links in new tabs. Just to add to confusion, sons and I all use the same browser, but in different ways, so three sets of advice are available. I foresee conversations which go thus –

OH: I don’t think that’s the way I did it last time.
Either son: well, that way won’t work very well, why were you doing it like that?
OH: because your mother told me to.
ES: well, she’s wrong.

Bloodshed may easily ensue.

*geek: if you want to find whether you qualify, you can try this quiz, which made me laugh. My results?

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.

You say tom-ah-to...

My stepfather is one of the few people I know who still says "pi-ah-no". I expect there are more of you out there, but drug up as I was in the wilds of Scotland, if I had added "pi-ah-no" to my pronunciatory infelicities, my dead body would probably have been discovered in some dour and dreary dyke, a frightful warning to the Sassenach to encroach no further.

"Pi-ah-no" aside, I have just bought my stepfather for Christmas a recording of Bach's English Suites played by Angela Hewitt. Now I will wait to see whether he will be pleased with the recording, or if he will consider Hewitt – a limpid and lucid interpreter of our greatest composer, I aver – too Canadian for the English Suites, in which case I sincerely hope he will return them to me (where they will remain) with a demand for the composer and recording he would prefer. Since he trained as a pianist, I find it hard to choose for him.

In a perfect world, I would first buy him something better on which to listen than the Walkman and mini-speakers which live by his chair. Perhaps for his birthday I could embark on such a fearful quest, one which would meet with much resistance and protest about unnecessary extravagance. I should seek a system which is small and unassuming in appearance, yet with excellent sound reproduction – not Bose, which even he is bound to have seen advertised, and to have realised that, where no price is published, it must be exorbitant. Were I to find such a system, my mother could then inherit the Walkman, in order to listen to Maggie May in the kitchen, something I know she would welcome.

It can be difficult for our generation of conspicuous consumers to offer small creature comforts to the older one. If my mother knew my annual book budget (and no, I don't either) she would probably be shocked to her core. On the other hand, it's considerably less than my annual mother-budget which, on the whole, she doesn't notice. "Had you thought what you might buy me for Christmas?" she enquired on Sunday. "Well, sort of," I replied, suppressing the thought of the fairly hefty sum I'd put in her bank account to pay for her – much needed – new camera, and thinking instead of the rather beautiful pale green wallet in softest nappa leather which I had just finished wrapping. "But you've got a birthday coming up immediately afterwards. What would you like?"

Can anyone recommend a really good coffee-table book on cave painting?

Hallowe'en

Roslin Castle: a suitably spooky place for Hallowe'en

Growing up in the Scottish Highlands Hallowe'en was a special day; in primary school we occasionally did something different, perhaps games in the afternoon, of the teacher was feeling indulgent, but more importantly, it was the day we went guising. This is the origin of trick-or-treating, with its roots firmly fixed in a pagan past, and all the kids did it, until they reached the stage when they regarded themselves as too old, at which point they were generally dragooned into taking out their younger brothers and sisters. No adults, you'll note - these were the days when children roamed quite extensively, and even my over-anxious parents allowed me out for the evening in the company of the other children (although they always fixed an impossibly early time by which I had to be home).

As it got dark we would don our motley - pirates, Spanish dancing girls, ghosts; I was a black cat one year - and set off round the small town. We walked miles, calling at selected houses where we could be sure of a welcome. And we always were welcome, because the ritual was well-established. There were no tricks - we had no idea that there was a "corrupt" tradition across the Atlantic. We would all be ushered in, costumes admired, and then the householder would say, "Give us your piece then", and short poems, songs (by the brave) or even nursery rhymes (by the terminally shy infants) would be trotted out, sometimes with a helping prompt by a big sister. The home-made toffee apples and tablet (for non-Scots, this is a wickedly sweet, slightly crunchy sort of fudge, which absolutely every Scottish housewife learnt to make at her mother's knee) would be doled out and, in the best households, there might even be a sixpenny bit. By the end of the evening, everyone would be cold, sticky and feeling slightly queasy, so it would be home to a soothing hot drink and bed. In our most glorious year ever, my best friend and I borrowed long cloaks from the amateur dramatic society's wardrobe and, disguised as ghostly monks, walked 2 miles through silver-frosted fields to visit an elderly friend. I doubt if anyone was scared of us, but we were petrified, especially passing the Episcopal graveyard.

Some years later my then boyfriend rashly said we could get married, but only if we did it on April Fool's Day, Midsummer's Day or Hallowe'en. We were in England at the time, midsummer was a week away, and 31 October looked just fine to me. We held our wedding reception in a house on Dartmoor, suitably grey and louring for such an inauspicious date. Unfortunately we subsequently moved back (for me) to a Scottish village where we spent years trying to celebrate our anniversary interrupted by toddlers lisping nursery rhymes, and internecine struggles over who stole whose sweetie bag. One year the dog ate all the tablet and was sick everywhere.

Moving back to England, I thought, "At least we'll have our anniversary in peace." And we did, for 10 years. But this gorgeous marmalade cat is for my stepbrother, who died suddenly on 31 October 2003. He loved his cats, and I miss him.

Phaea

This post is about Phaea, though it won't be one of those "taken from us on this day" dirges, which I can't bear. Though she has long been buried under the bird table (it's where she'd want to be), I still miss her, so I celebrate her relatively short life by giving her star position at the head of this page.

We brought two cats to Northumberland, a blond bombshell called Humphrey (if he'd been born more recently he would have been christened Boris), and the much younger Phaea, officially my younger son's cat. On arrival at the farm where we'd bought a cottage we discovered a large colony of feral cats in residence. Humphrey hated them and, though he tried to stay out of their way, there were scuffles and spats; Phaea, on the other hand, was more successful at staying away from them (no masculine ego? though both were neutered Humph did rather retain his tomcat pride).

When Humphrey first looked frail we weren't too concerned - he had a pin in his hip after a road accident and we'd been told it would probably lead to arthritis. And although he lost weight, he continued to eat well, hunt with enthusiasm and duff Fifi up when she crossed the line (what line? who knew? Humph had an emphatic personality, as I was reminded whenever I tried to tackle the knots in his fur). But within a year our neighbour's elderly cat had died and an unconfirmed (post mortems are expensive) diagnosis of FIV was suggested. And then one morning we found Humphrey in a state of collapse and rushed off to the vet's. Since he was suffering from acute kidney failure the kindest thing was to put him to sleep; I held his paw until he died and it was very peaceful. We buried him in the garden: I always think a house isn't really a home until you've buried a much-loved pet in the garden. Anyway, it was pretty apparent that his decline was very much the same as the neighbour's cat and that it was probably the result of FIV. After that we dropped some pretty broad hints about the farm cats - who disappeared at an alarming rate, to be replaced by skinny and unhealthy kittens - but to no avail.

It was probably too by then anyway. When a couple of years later Phaea started to ail we had the test done and she was confirmed FIV+. We kept her going pretty well despite and, for several years, I was much more concerned that she would get stuck down a rabbit hole than about her being sick. I used to watch her from the kitchen window, battling down the path carrying a rabbit as big as herself, and retiring under the car to devour it. An hour or so later, Madam Fifi would re-emerge, just ever-so-slightly rounder and immensely sleepy, and a quick under-the-car investigation would show that no more than the scut remained. Phaea, meantime, would retire to her snug place upstairs until bedtime, when she would go out again to wreak havoc among the rats in the grainstore.

She was the sweetest-natured cat I have ever encountered unless, of course, you were a small furry animal, in which case I guess she looked a bit like the avenging angel. Her outdoor pursuits were the essence of her existence - I don't think she spent more than a handful of nights indoors in her entire life. We've never had a catflap, but she quickly learnt to let us know that she wanted to come in, by tapping imperiously on the window with a single claw. She drove our dog to distraction chasing his paws, but they adored each other and slept in a heap. Once ill she developed breath odour that emanated from the deepest pits of hell and her sore mouth meant that she drooled constantly, but her hunting continued unabated - perhaps she drowned the mice? She died during the last foot-and-mouth epidemic, when I couldn't get back to the farm and both sons had left home, which upset my poor husband dreadfully. It saddens me that I wasn't there to hold her paw.

I suppose what really prompts me to write about this is that it is only now, 13 years after we came to live here, that the farm has been sold and the new owners have rounded up the feral cats (or as many as could be caught so far) and had them neutered. In the meantime any number of them have died, since FIV+ cats are susceptible to infection. And there wouldn't be as many as there are now if the tom from the farm up the road hadn't come and impregnated successive generations. The cats were constantly complained of, blamed for ailments amongst the sheep and cursed for being ineffectual in dealing with vermin, but nothing was ever done, ensuring that FIV has remained endemic in this population, as it is in the wider area. Yet if all domestic cats were neutered (which would also decrease their wandering) and feral cats routinely dealt with, it would largely die out in an area as rural as this. I find it immensely difficult to be judgmental about others (except in the privacy of my family where we compete for the hat-and-cloak of bad taste and cynicism) but I like to think that, had the farm been my responsibility, I would have assumed that that included the cats and their welfare and Done Something.

I don't keep cats any more.