Aw Diddums

Summer Agony

Another bad day… Not John McClane style exactly, but my head was so sore I sat wrapped in a rug. It got worse till the back of my neck hurt and my glands felt as though they were popping. Something came on TV about Bruce Willis in Armageddon and Die Hard; he managed to get the top two slots in the Top Disaster Movies. He’s one of my pin-ups! Or would be, if I had posters. A friend of mine is surprised at my taste, suggesting he’s more brawn than brain. Well, I can’t help it… I like his smile.

I was a little surprised that Die Hard was classed as a disaster movie… they really had me guessing. I guessed at Armageddon (which was second) but it surprised me that The Day After Tomorrow wasn’t up there (it was down at 4, I think). I couldn’t imagine what the top movie was going to be.

I think of disaster movies as being about natural disasters, but possibly the category is a bit broader than I thought. (??) Actually I’m not sure about that, as it would put an awful lot of modern movies in that bracket. I would have called Die Hard an adventure, action, thriller. Any of those three. I suppose a crashing airplane full of nice old ladies and wosname from Star Trek classes as a man-made disaster.

Mum is not fond of ‘horrible’ films and kept leaving the room on little errands, but I made her watch the flying bus in Speed. At first she didn’t want to, but I said she had to; it was good. Otherwise she would never see it. Now she can say she’s seen that bit. When she saw it landed safely, she seemed impressed despite herself… though the look on her face made me think of Moominmamma wishing she could melt into the mural of her garden and spend some time hiding behind the trees for a while.

To get back on track, I was mildly amused and distracted by Bruce Willis having such a grip on the world’s imagination, and Samson came up on one of his rare visits and gave my fingers a good washing… must have liked the salt on my skin. Cat washes are pleasantly raspy and send me to sleep. All of a sudden I realized my headache was gone, apart from a few tendrils winding round my eyeballs.

It wasn’t raining. It was midnight so it’s likely that the pollen count slowed a little and we’d shut most windows by that time. I looked on the internet and read that pollen is at its worst between 3pm and 7pm. Or between mid-morning and early evening. Cat washing was not cited as a cure, though hoovering the bedroom floor is supposed to remove any pollen that might have floated in through your wide-open window (I ran to slam mine shut).

Now I expect I’ll get a ‘lack of oxygen’ headache. Just can’t win!

Credit: The grass brushes in the picture are by Obsidian Dawn.

Mum has been looking through china, glass and pottery, saying “I had no idea I had so much stuff.” I blame that for last night’s dream.

In the dream we were travelling, leaving our home abroad. En route, we spent the night on a Pacific island. There was the sound of a helicopter during the night… I was asleep and dreaming about this helicopter. The people in it leaned over to have a close look at the island as they passed above. Dawn came, and I woke with a groan, thinking I better get ready and come out for breakfast and fruit juice, as the people in the helicopter would probably have arrived. I knew they were looking for me, expecting me to mind their small dog for them… I didn’t want to, but there was no help for it.

I was surprised to find we had no visitors… the helicopter had gone. During their search for their errant pet-minder, they’d been looking for signs near the main building of anybody having arrived there with all their baggage, such as vehicles parked all over the place, but had seen nothing. The island looked quiet and uninhabited. Not being found was a nice feeling.

Kristin, a friend, was sitting on the sofa in the sitting room, and I showed her three treasures Mum had packed in her personal suitcase. They were so important to her that she didn’t want them to travel separately. They were three furry bricks, including a talking one.

The chatterer had a glass screen set in the top so that I could read the words it spoke… which was nice. All it said, though, was a captcha-type code (individual to the brick), followed by “If you would like to guess my name, please move me after the code is given. When you move me just the right way, I will tell you my name.”

It was a kind of puzzle, worse in some ways than Rubik’s Cube. Ever since the 1960s, when this brick was made, lots of people had wasted hours shoogling the brick around, hoping it would unlock the secret of its name. Very few succeeded.

There’s no such thing, of course… it was just Mum’s dream brick.

I thought I better put all three back in the suitcase, otherwise I would be blamed if they were left behind. I scooted off to fetch the bricks from Kristin, thinking she was still on the sofa, and in her place was a woman I didn’t recognize. I flashed her a polite smile, anyway, trying not to look surprised, then realized it was my sister. She had been outside and suddenly seized up like a rusty robot, unable to move. People had to trundle her back indoors to sit down. She was still able to tell me about it, though, and turned her head slightly to look at me.

Time for bed again, I think…

Black Cat from the U.S.

I was mulling over ideas for an image contest I might enter… not having settled for anything yet, I looked through a gallery of stock images for white cats. The search term didn’t work that well and I ended up with all sorts: black cats, torties, tabbies, Siamese, Tonkinese, grey cats, tigers, cougars, women in costume…

At first I was just flipping through, stopping at this picture or that, thinking “this one would look good but I would have to paint the tail in” and so on. After a while, I got sad. My tinnitus changes to suit my mood (and reinforce it, I suspect), so I heard the pop equivalent of plaintive violins. I can’t identify it. A male voice singing kindly, as if over a guitar in the deepening summer dusk. A little bit distant, as though I looked over to the next hill slope and he’s sitting there in the honey-warm heather, warbling away on his own.

It’s a wonder I haven’t just drifted away in my sleep… stopped breathing, as the world I live in is not this one! Some of those modelling photos made me uncomfortable: they brought it home to me that I’m surrounded by a host of people living on a different planet. If we’re all on that other planet, who’s on this one?

Back to the cats. I wondered what the unwitting feline models would think if they realized people were putting them in pictures of their own, painting them, or just looking at their cute little button noses from the other side of the world. Each cat was individual… I could imagine how I would have loved each one.

I’d just finished that sentence (not wearing hearing aids as they were tiring my ears) and there was a loud bang, one of those that you feel all through you. You thought somebody was attacking and threw your arms protectively round your head, then realize something fairly major has fallen down or exploded… by ‘fairly major’ I mean not just a pile of books toppling to the floor. I whipped round, my heart hammering. Samson was chasing a moth and had knocked over a heavy tower of tape cassettes.

He wasn’t in the least bit repentant, just chased the fluttering will ‘o the wisp all the way down the stairs and back again, even with me standing on the landing shaking a fist. I looked over my shoulder just now, and he was skulking round by the foot of the tower again… doesn’t care if he knocks it down. Chased him out of the room a second time, but he’s immediately come back.

Sigh.

Where was I?

“Each cat was individual… I could imagine how I would have loved each one.” Sitting looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths… and I believe them.

Why should that make me sad? I have Samson and Delilah (otherwise known as Springy and Squishy). I’m thinking of other cats I’ve known… Sharky heads the list, followed by Thor, Fusspot, Lucky, Tarquin, Scampi, and others. Tarquin was a black moggy with a white bib; I named him after a character in a Georgette Heyer novel. (Well, I was 12 or 14 or something like that). Mum said Tarquin was the stupidest cat she’s ever known. A comfortable, friendly boy though; I miss him.

Does this mean that we can never look at something we like with without feeling pain? The only item I can look at and think “I’ll never lose this,” is my bed!

The accompanying picture is one of the cats I hovered over for ages in the stock photo gallery… he has kind eyes and a modest expression like Thor. if I could have given him a hug, I would have. The original picture can be found at One White Whisker. The cloudy sky is one of mine.

Later, when Mum came upstairs, I told her about the tower of cassettes being knocked over. She said (unsurprisingly), “yes, I heard.” Then added, “my friends tell me it must be nice to hear somebody moving about the house.”

KABOOM.
“Who did that??? Don’t DO that!!!”
(Sound of cats thundering uncaringly up and down the stairs).

Thanks to BEG with her link to A Challenge for DBC and AGB. Yes, I know the feeling… and I’m not even a ’super’ phony as I never tried that hard.

I’ve had sore eyes for weeks, along with an associated headache. I buy moisturizing drops (the kind I can use every day if I want… some aren’t good for that), and have also bought omega capsules (which I keep forgetting to take). I’ve tried going to bed early, turning off the computer for days on end, and have had midday siestas with a wet cloth over my eyes.

Nothing seems to work.

Mum was at the doc today, and while she was there, she said “my younger daughter is complaining she’s got bloodshot eyes and nothing seems to help.” The doc said, “it’s probably allergy… lots of people have been coming in with sore eyes just now, because of all the pollen flying about. I’ve been giving them moisturizing drops.”

Talk about being treated at a distance… it makes me think of women lying behind a curtain, only allowing the doctor to see one limp hand.

I don’t hear Mum too well, especially when I’ve had a shower (wet ears and no hearing aids), so there are conversational notes scattered all over the house. The other day I found this one:

Mum: I bought the Triffids the day I went to start midwifery training. 54 years ago exactly.
Me: I woke up with a hurrble stomach ache. Hordes of screaming bacteria rushed over the hill, waving their tomahawks and shooting fire arrows, so my body waded in with sandbags and squelched them.
Mum: Have a swig of Domestos!

Mm… thanks but no thanks… my body needs supporting troops, not corrosive poison.

Footpath disappearing into dark trees

Pete is probably wondering what happened to the photos I said I would put here one day when he was photoless… it was the day I went out myself and took some pictures, just by chance. I sat down to look through them and they weren’t too awful, but then things started happening (just ordinary everyday things not worth blogging about) and I didn’t have time to put them up that day.

And so it went on over the next few days… a mixture of being busy doing other things or feeling too sleepy.

But today I spruced up two of the pictures… they’re not exciting or significant in any way, but they’re part of my everyday backdrop. There are no birds or butterflies, but I noticed a blurry spot which was either a bee or a hoverfly. I couldn’t see it clearly enough to make it out… maybe it was hoping I would blog about it.

Anyway, the first photo is of a little path up the side of a small hill. I used to go this way to work. I had a light summer coat which was a lovely fresh red, and it had a hood. I didn’t meet any wolves though…. not then.

The second picture is where I DID meet wolves, or should I say, on two separate occasions here, Thundercloud and I were set upon by those unleashed hounds from hell. It’s from the wrong viewpoint (this is actually the route the hounds from hell were taking when they spotted us… we were coming down at right angles to this). Maybe if I do another Diddums Tour with my camera, I can go to the very spot where… (distant sound of ferocious baying)…. oh, wait a minute.

Dog pack trail

It used to be possible to obtain commercial videos (such as Jurassic Park or You’ve Got Mail) which included closed captioning. A couple of times when looking at old videos on eBay, I wasn’t sure whether or not they were captioned, and wrote to the sellers to ask if they were. They were confused – they had no idea that any of their videotapes had this ability.

To start with there was a little box thingy (a decoder) which cost £100 (around the time I discovered it) and could be run with an ordinary VCR to decode the closed captioning on Jurassic Park, You’ve Got Mail and others of that ilk. Eventually they stopped making and supporting the little decoder (that’s what I was told when mine broke down). By this time it was possible to obtain VCRs with the decoders built in. Not all VCRs; just some. You had to be careful which you bought.

The Panasonic VCR I have here in this room can read closed captioning. My sister took my old (very expensive) Grundig VCR along with the little decoding box (which appears to work for her).

My mother’s ancient VCR could never read closed captioning as it was too old, so she threw it out about a year ago and bought a DVD/VCR combi. We can watch subtitled DVDs on this, of course, but for some reason (we’re normally so careful when choosing new technology!) it came as a shock when I tried to watch a captioned video on it, and discovered it couldn’t decode the captions. In other words, it’s a normal bog-standard VCR.

I couldn’t understand this… one half of the machine is a DVD player with the capability of reading captions, and the other half of the machine is a VCR without. That makes it 100% useful for the hearing, and only 50% useful for the deaf. If you’re not going to build a decoder into the VCR, what’s the point of having any part of this machine decoding subtitles? That facility is probably only used by a small percentage of the hearing. You might say it’s too clever for some and not clever enough for others.

I said to Mum maybe we should get rid of that one and look for a combi I would find 100% useful… so tonight I looked in the Argos catalogue, and on Amazon, and on other sites. I drew a complete blank. It might just be that they fail to mention it in the marketing information, but as far as I can make out, none of the new VCRs (in the UK) have decoders.

I’ve seen hints that old videos don’t play well on new VCRs anyway… I saw a complaint by an Amazon customer who said old videos played badly on his new machine but beautifully on his old machine. The manufacturers told him he had no business playing old videotapes on their shiny new VCRs anyway.

We are all expected to change eventually… videos are out on their ear. But it incenses me that though hearing people still have the option of purchasing new machines to play their old videos (even if rather badly, it seems), the deaf no longer have that option at all.

Today just disappeared – do you know that feeling? I got up so full of energy and things I meant to do, and only did one or two of them. After supper I was very sleepy and didn’t even want to go out in the gusty cold twilight to bring my washing in. So it will have to stay out for another night.

I thought I hadn’t seen Spiderman 2, but it turned out I had, so I surfed the channels (whimpering disappointedly) looking for something else. There was MASH, which Mum likes, but no subtitles. I ended up on Frasier, which we both like, and that did have subtitles… I would have whimpered even more if it hadn’t.

After a couple of shows went by, we had the following conversation (or how it seemed to me):

Mum (in a matter of fact voice): “Good, you’ve stopped groaning.”
Me (surprised she was talking about that when Frasier and Niles had been keeping me quiet for the past while): “Oh. Why?”

My brain has just got stuck in a sleepy tangle… will wake again in a minute.
…
…
…
…
…

OK, the rest of it went something like…

Mum: “No, I said…”
Me (struck by sudden doubt): “oh wait… what did you say? Did you say I had, or I am?”
Mum: “I said you were.”
Me: “But I wasn’t….? I haven’t said a thing.”
Almost immediately, as we kept an eye on the TV, yet another commercial began, and I let out a gusty sigh.
Mum pounced. “What do you call that?”
“That’s not a groan. That’s a sigh. It’s because of all those commercials.”
“Hmm. We shouldn’t be paying for Sky when they put so many on.”

Then we saw part of QI… sometimes it’s not very good, but tonight it was funny. Alan Davies said he saw something run across the snowy winter backdrop behind them, and Bill Bailey said it was a Velociraptor. (How do you pronounce that? Do other people let that trip off their tongues as a matter of course? I’m impressed). I thought Alan was just joking, then something streaked across the snow again, quite far away. The people on the show missed it and were determined to see it next time, so they all sat staring behind them, waiting for something to happen. One of them (probably Alan but I’m too sleepy to remember) said “the little things matter.”

I was laughing so hard that my throat hurt – it was a strange feeling. I would start choking if I kept it up, so I stopped. That’s what happened last time I laughed that hard, which was…. erm…. months ago! I can’t remember what was so funny then. Might even have been QI.

How often do you laugh really hard, and why? The other day the TV happened to be on and I was watching something that looked like You Have Been Framed (but wasn’t). You Have Been Framed annoys me enough, but this thing was awful. Nothing was funny. Some things were upsetting and others were very normal… there was a clip of somebody falling over on the skating rink. He didn’t cause a pile-up – he just slipped and fell.

I got up and went to find Mum (who had left this dross playing on the TV) and said to her, “they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel… they must be desperate.”
“Oh, if it’s that thing,” said Mum, “it’s dreadful. They send in films of things happening to people which are meant to be funny, and they’re not.”

I’m surprised I’ve managed all this … I’m too sleepy to finish it properly. Night, all. No falling out of bed or videotaping it. I fell out of a bunk bed once…. had to avoid squashing one of the cats, who caught me by surprise, so I fell out instead.

Sleep tight.

Over the past two or three days I’ve been surrounded by a smell. I kept the cat trays clean, but it was getting worse. Even Mum noticed it. She said the smell starts on the stairs and gets worse the higher you climb.

Tcha. I didn’t want to be known as That Stinky Diddums Upstairs.

Yesterday I found an old rug being used as a pee corner (Delilah is the prime suspect – I caught her on the old sofa, and it was probably she who went twice on Mum’s bed), so I told the cats they were no longer allowed into my upstairs sitting room during the night. It’s common sense anyway because of the computers and trailing wires in here. Once I caught Delilah trying to bite through the PC’s connection to the rest of the world (a pretty red cable to the router, now covered with some frightening chew marks. I nearly went through the roof). Cats, technology and trailing wires don’t always mix. But the place still smelled distinctly gamey. Throwing out the rug helped, but not enough.

Eventually, Delilah was seen juggling a sparrow. It was cold, scrawny, tattered and had been dead some time. It definitely smelled, so when she wasn’t looking, I chucked it in the bin outside. I washed my hands, opened all the windows, and brought some coffee upstairs, ready to put my feet up…. and the smell nearly knocked me out. Throwing out the bird helped, but not enough.

In bed that night, with my door closed, I could still smell something bad.

Today when I was coming up the stairs, I finally saw them…. three rodents lying under the desk on the landing. Each was at a different stage of decay, and one of them had soaked into the carpet. We didn’t spot them before because of various items sitting in front of the desk, but today they’d moved just enough for Delilah’s gruesome larder to be revealed to the world.

I have thrown them out and opened all the windows, along with the front door (so that the house got very cold, and then it started spitting with rain, of course). It does smell a lot better now… but I don’t think I will be happy till we’ve done some serious spring-cleaning.

Well, I finished Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, and had mixed feelings about it. Some of it I agreed with, some of it made me uneasy. Parts of it were uncomfortable reading… descriptions of the hurtful rows couples can have makes you curl up in a ball. It’s not just couples, of course; you can have these painful clashes with anybody whose good opinion you value.

I haven’t had any huge arguments lately, or ruined friendships (that I’m aware of), though the other night I didn’t understand something Mum was trying to say till she blew up and stamped about and threw things. I thought we were having a chummy evening in, so it was a shock. What did I do? Turned out she was asking me to stop playing with the cats, as it was distracting her from the TV. I thought she was saying other things, and kept right on…

It sounds both funny and stupid, but it made me feel quite ill. It reminded me of something on TV about a deaf Dalmatian dog; it couldn’t hear warning growls from other dogs and would keep right on… and got attacked. It haunted me at the time, and I couldn’t help remembering it.

I did some stamping and door-slamming myself (retreating upstairs to watch my own TV), and didn’t forgive Mum for two or three hours.

The book said you can get blazingly angry about something all in an instant, but if you stop and think about it, you realize there’s an underlying emotion such as hurt or fear. People get angry because they feel threatened in some way. I didn’t have to think about it very much, I knew about it already. It came before the anger.

The treatment meted out by other people to their friends and partners is not pleasant reading. It makes me want to reach through the pages and shake some of them till their teeth rattle.

It’s purely opinion, but I was dubious about some things in the book. I giggled when reading about a study of one particular group of patients. Some received therapy along with their treatment; others did not. The ones receiving therapy left the hospital an average of two days earlier than the rest. I said to Mum “do you suppose they were trying to escape?”
“I’m quite sure of it,” she said.

I imagine I would have been one of the schoolchildren hinted at (further along) who consider mediation and therapy at school to be an invasion of privacy. Ironic… here I write to the whole world what I’m thinking, but clam up when therapists/consultants/whoever are talking nicely to me in a quiet room. I even clammed up when the university tutors were trying to discuss my thoughts about things I’d read, which was completely missing the point of having tutors… but that’s by the way.

There was a bit about timid cats catching smaller mice than their more courageous brethren; I took issue with that use of the word ‘courageous’. It’s supposed to mean you’re scared but go for it anyway; not that you weren’t particularly scared and waded joyfully in. Mum said it showed a basic misunderstanding of cat behaviour.

Finally I finished the book and handed it over to her in case she wanted to read it, and she dropped it in the bin. “You’re supposed to make up your own mind about it,” I protested, and she said “I have… I’ve had bits of it read to me!”

Finally she relented and pulled it out again, but I don’t care what she does with it. I’ve begun reading Cat on the Edge by Shirley Rousseau Murphy and it’s wonderful. I already see the hero cat (Joe Grey) as being my own Sharky, though Sharky wasn’t ugly and grey with half a tail. It reminds me how I would go off my chump when he (or any of the cats) disappeared. I could just imagine him doing some of those things… but I won’t give away any more, except to say that the pretty girl cat (Dulcie) reminds me strongly of Delilah. Nobody could be cross with her for any reason.

Am taking it to bed, along with cuddly moose, cuddly mouse etc.

Funny how we think we know something, and it’s not what we think. One of the changes I had to make to the report was to add ‘n/a’ to the Abbreviations list, “… for ‘not available’,” said our contact.

If she said it was ‘not available’, then that’s what I would put… but I was a little surprised. I always took it to mean ‘no account’. I looked it up, and sure enough, the nearest free dictionaries said it meant ‘not available’ or ‘not applicable’.

As it happens, I can remember why I was convinced it meant ‘no account’ – my father told me. I would have been filling in an application form or something, and he was advising. He said “put n/a…. no account.”

He wasn’t an ignorant man, and I couldn’t believe that it wouldn’t mean that to some people anyway, so I added it to my search term. It started popping up alongside the word ‘banking’. Ah. Yes, that figures… I’m my father’s daughter.

Time flies, and I regret nothing.

A black-haired lad from my past. We met at a wedding.

It happened the way it did because it had to, and we still share certain memories. I wonder if he remembers the same things.

I regret if I ever said or did anything to hurt… though for a long time I didn’t know what else I could have done.

Last night I solved a mystery. I’ve blogged about tinnitus, and how it often takes the form of music, or seems to. I’ve seen it referred to as musical ear syndrome, which I quite like. It often dogs people with hearing loss.

Mine are not completely random… right now it’s a tune I’ve experienced repeatedly over the years. Not all the time, or every night; I mean ‘now and then,’ maybe once every couple of months.

I never understood where this tune came from, or why it should be one that returns frequently. I speculated that it matches noises in the house… bearing in mind that I’ve experienced this particular tune in my old house as well. It’s not specific to one building.

Last night (breakthrough!) I matched it to a song. I’ve not been playing any tapes, CDs or video clips. It wasn’t on TV. I haven’t seen the singer mentioned anywhere, or the song… but now I can almost hear him singing it in the background, and it definitely matches the MES tune I’m getting. Having seen the title of this post, you’ll already have twigged… it’s In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins.

The black-haired lad had a Phil Collins tape in his car. Once we were on a motorway at night, headlights all around. We sat in companionable silence, not talking, and In the Air Tonight came on. Of all the fleeting moments that come and go… we remember a few for the rest of our lives for their magical quality and significance.

When In the Air Tonight is playing, I think of him. He’s a ‘what if’; a fork in the path I turned away from.

Well I remember, I remember don’t worry
How could I ever forget, it’s the first time, the last time we ever met
But I know the reason why you keep your silence up, no you don’t fool me
The hurt doesn’t show; but the pain still grows
It’s no stranger to you or me

And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord…

You know those “what’s in your bag” things that go around? Last night I crawled into bed with a stash of stuff to enjoy before lights-out, and it occurred to me to wonder if anybody’s ever filled out a “what did I take to bed last night?”

If we launched that as a meme, we’d have to stipulate that sleeping partners and other living beings (except possibly pets) don’t count. Also it has to be what’s in/on the bed, not next to the bed or on the floor.

The following joined me last night:

1. writing pad (unused reorder forms) and gold-coloured Staples pen
2. cuddly moose
3. cuddly mouse
4. cuddly lion
5. cuddly bear
6. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
7. box of Toffifee sweets (unopened)
8. Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class by Bikram Choudhury with Bonnie Jones Reynolds
9. Art by Robert Cumming
10. birthday card from someone… not sure why it was there, but it was

Can anyone beat that?

What questions do you ask your pets?

This is the one I asked Delilah today… “is emotion a weakness?” She blinked lovingly and did not reply. I only asked because I’m reading Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. I keep feeling confused by his talk of highly emotional intelligent people doing better than their opposites, regardless of IQ. When I thought about it, I identified a deeply rooted part of me objecting, “if they’re emotional, they’re not going to do too well, are they? How can they be doing well?”
I have to bat it away with, “he’s not saying that they have tantrums all over the place; he’s saying that they don’t, even when they want to.”

Perhaps it’s the word ‘emotional’ I’m having trouble with, rather than the concept.

To link back to where I started…

Delilah is the more warm-natured of my two cats. If you remember, I chose Samson first, an older playmate of hers at their old house. Delilah came a few days later in an effort to coax him out from behind the desk… it worked very well.

It took Samson a long time to get used to us even then. He would come up for some attention, (purr purr), and loved being petted, but when you reached out your hand to him, his eyes widened in horror and he ducked back. It was as though he was fluctuating between two views of his situation: he liked comfort and attention, but on the other hand, just look at who was giving it… these huge bipedal monsters who could rend him limb from limb!

He is very affectionate and loving, and comes more and more often for attention, and flinches less and less… but I said to Mum how even his tail feels like a coiled spring. Delilah sags softly in your arms, and Samson is all muscle, tension and barely damped-down suspicion. We stepped in through the front door after I said that, and Delilah was just inside, draped lazily in a cat hammock. I said to Delilah “hello Squidgy.” Samson came galloping up, his tail vibrating vertically, and Mum said “Squishy and Springy.”

The cats have got a handle on me and how I might react to any given situation. When they are happily torturing flies, for instance, I will allow those poor bewildered insects to escape out the window. They can guess how I might react when they come in with a flapping bird.

That is what Samson did yesterday… he scooped up one of those overly-trusting baby blackbirds and brought it in to show Delilah. The cats saw me looking, and realized their fun was about to end. Samson darted away, growling, but I cornered him and got my hands round his jaws, which were clamped like a steel trap on the bird.

I’m aware that emotion, pain etc would cause the most loving pet to turn on you, and Samson is the more highly strung of the two cats. There’s a greater chance he would get angry or scared and go a little out of his mind with it. I usually get a bird away by manipulating the cat’s jaw and he’ll drop it, but Samson held on grimly. So I put my hand in his mouth.

I never put my fingers in a cat’s mouth, no matter how much I love or trust that cat. But there was a part of me that said I would be a coward if I left the bird to be crushed. What’s a hand compared to a whole body? I knew I would probably get bitten but decided I would just have to accept it.

I could feel his teeth pressing hard on my fingers, and he was angry, lashing his tail… then he let go and fell away, leaving me with the bird.

It died – though not right away. It looked up at me with slowly dulling eyes, and chirped more and more weakly. There was blood on my fingers and I thought I would find cuts… there was a small nick on my ring finger, but apart from that I was unscathed.

I’m still surprised at myself – I generally have a healthy respect for the weaponry of even the kindest of cats.

The next time Samson approached me, glancing sideways at my face with caution and slight resentment, I felt a wash of love for him. I was impressed that he didn’t bite me when he could have and was angry enough to. It seems to have bonded us a bit more, and today he came and slept on my lap, which has not been a habit of his. Maybe he has more emotional intelligence than I credited him with, though I’m not too sure about mine…

Having a quick breather while somebody else takes over the master file. It’s a mishmash of bits and pieces sent by various different writers to make one (in)coherent whole, so of course the margins and fonts and things are all over the place. I’m the one supposed to format it consistently. Last night I finally got the hang of what I was doing, and reduced the entire thing from 210pp to 180pp. That included 4 figures, 52 tables and an uncounted host of text boxes.

It’s not particularly straightforward, even when working from a stylesheet, as different writers tend to have different quirks and tricks when using MS Word, and sometimes it’s difficult to figure out what somebody has done. A lot of time can be spent undoing the knots. I swore if I came across more of these glitches, I would skip over them and ask someone else to sort them out in the background, but when you’re trying to make sure everything fits correctly on a page and that the tables don’t spill over, it’s hard to make yourself move on. It nags at the edge of my mind and I end up going back and tinkering.

A couple of days ago I had this email conversation with my sister:

Diddums: I wish the writers would not be ‘clever’ with the formatting… I was struggling to reduce the white space under a text box which had been edited to be smaller, and I couldn’t see any settings under ‘box’, ‘paragraph’ or ‘border’ that needed to be changed. Eventually I managed to select the white space, looked in the menu, and it turned out to be an invisible autoshape sitting under the text box. After that I was able to reduce it to the same size… but I don’t see any need for it. It’s not smart when others are going to handle the document after them.

Sister: Plenty of moaning goes on about that on the editor lists.

It seems I’m a true editor.

Actually I tend to feel a bit ‘off’ about editors in general; not through working with them, as the ones working with me have a good sense of humour, though they can get a bit stressed when deadlines loom large. It’s more that editors are hard to deal with en masse. When I went to those same moaning editor forums frequented by my sister, some of them struck me as an awful lot more pedantic and acerbic than I am… and I’m quite bad! Some had the attitude that you couldn’t be an editor if you didn’t have the training and experience; in one way I know what they mean and there is truth in it; but in another way it’s a little bit too “keep off my patch.”

People can always learn, like we did.

I didn’t stay on those lists. Life seemed a lot quieter and pleasanter when I wasn’t getting irate about other editors whose views weren’t mine. Perhaps I got tired of the unending complaints about greengrocers’ apostrophes and ‘less vs fewer’. It’s all right for me to complain about things, of course, such as invisible autoshapes where you don’t expect them…