Aw Diddums

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).

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.

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.

I haven’t been using the computer much over the past couple of days but I have a headache anyway. It might be the sparse lampshade in the landing behind me (the bulb shines out of it too brightly). Even when I sit with my back to it, I can see my shadow cast sharply onto the wall while the light bounces off the screen. Makes me a bit sick.

I think these glasses (for myopia) make me a little light-phobic. A while ago I took them off for a few days. I’m so short-sighted I can’t see text on the computer screen when I sit at the normal distance away, even when I increase the font size. Mum said I would get a headache not wearing the glasses, but I didn’t get a single headache all the time I wasn’t wearing them… just a neckache from craning!

After five days I put the glasses back on, and all of a sudden I’m getting headaches. I expect they focus the light beams too much.

I don’t usually care about my image (I pull a shopping trolley around, wear open-toed sandals and gush on about my cats), but Mum was asking (and she asked me the same thing when I was 15) “would you wear these clip-on shades on your glasses?”
My answer was the same as it was then…. “Never! It’s so uncool.”
“Who cares about being cool??”
“Well I don’t, normally, but those things might scratch my glasses.”
“No they won’t scratch your glasses.”
Pull the other one. Ugh.

What would be cool would be prescription sunglasses.

I had no intention of writing this when I sat down to blog. I was going to complain about Mum’s cat Cheeky. She sits on top of the PC monitor (it’s one of those old ones built like a breeze block) and she dabs things moving about the screen… which is cute, till she leaves fifty pawprints and I have to wipe them off. Then she swings her tail across and I can’t see what I’m doing, so I push it aside… and she glares at me and gives me a swipe for being so cheeky.

Even worse, she has claimed the computer chair as her own, and when I come to sit in it, she doesn’t budge. So I say “I want my chair back, please,” and touch her, and she’s ready with her slashing claws. I get more insistent that she has to leave, and she has a real hissy fit before finally leaping off in a fury. It’s no wonder my cats don’t get on with her… she’s not even getting on with me that well. Maybe she’s blaming me for bringing them here.

Tutorial finished… it gave me two pictures to put in my online art gallery. The first was so-so (I didn’t like the red and pink colour combination but the thing had a life of its own!) so I made another with colours more to my taste.

Today I didn’t have to walk Thundercloud, so I walked Mum instead, taking my camera along. Ran out of film (or rather card space) in the first five minutes, having taken the 512MB card instead of the 1GB card. It was a bit bright for photos anyway – it was 3pm but felt (and looked) more like noon.

I was annoyed when I framed a nice shot of the footpath with overhanging trees, “ah, lovely, just trees and Mum wandering gently along,” finger tightening on the shutter… and two sweaty joggers shot past me into the frame. I didn’t even hear them coming.

I didn’t ask for that, cosmos.

The photo you see here isn’t that one, but it has Mum in it. Get out the magnifying glass.

Today I said to Mum I’m so bored with the town here I want to go somewhere else for a while.
“Where?” she asked.
“Anywhere but London.”
“Of course, NOT London!” (glares at me as though to say “that wasn’t even on the menu.”)

“We could take the train to Xxx…” she suggested.
“I don’t like trains.”

I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere, then…

Got up early this morning – there seemed to be no reason to lie around, as I was just

• too hot
• dreaming about desktop wallpaper every time I dropped off
• struggling with tinnitus and other thoughts

While still lying there, I was being driven mad by a plodding, depressing tune that was in my head along with a monotonous roaring house noise. “I don’t have to put up with it,” I thought, “I can take control of my own head. I will listen to whatever I choose to.” I rejected the plodding tune and threw open the doors of my mind to the world of music… what else will come wandering in?

It was The Entertainer. Wouldn’t you just know it? But there’s something special about The Entertainer – hush just a minute.

Last night Mum got a phone call and said “that was Maria… Charles has died.”
Charles and his wife Rosemary lived in a house down the road from us in Edinburgh… Maria was their daughter, and there was a son called Allan. They were related to us, enough that I could call Charles and Rosemary ‘uncle and aunt’.

They loved dogs, cats, gardening, long walks by the beach, baking, and sewing. They took my sister and me on a short holiday to their but and ben – there was a caravan close by and my cousin Allan liked to sit in it and read – maybe he slept there too, while the rest of us were in the cottage.

It was on this trip we were first introduced to flying saucer sweets – Uncle Charles stopped the car and went out to a small local shoppie, and when he came back, he had a paper bag with these strange sweets. “What do we do with these?”
“Why, eat them, of course!”

We went to the farm near by for fresh milk and baths. The baths were lovely and hot, but came out of the taps a strange yellowy brown. I was told this was normal – must have been peat or something! We had cream and sugar with our porridge in the morning, and at night I was in the bottom of the bunk while my lovely older cousin Maria (with her long hair unpinned and loose) dozed on the top. I bothered her with things like Old Macdonald Had a Farm, Ee I Ee I O!, but she never snapped at me, just sounded sleepier and sleepier…

My sister (older than me by three years) got so homesick that Uncle Charles had to drive her home, but I was enjoying myself and stayed.

I don’t know if perhaps there were two or three trips to this cottage, all confused in my mind into one. I’m not even sure if the flying saucers were courtesy of Uncle Charles or my grandparents. I seem to remember my grandmother with us when I found the rabbit’s tail. She said she saw it but didn’t want to pick it up, but Aunt Rosemary said “it’s lucky”.

Aunt Rosemary loved baking, and I still have some of her recipes. She made me copy them down when I was about to go to university. I wasn’t much of a baker and didn’t know what all the fuss was about, but I’m glad of them now.

In the aftermath of my father’s funeral, my mother and I went down the road to have coffee with Aunt Rosemary. She liked to sew and had a couple of rag dolls sitting on the sofa – I picked one up and smiled. Something about that must have touched Aunt Rosemary, because when we went back up the road, she said “please keep the doll”.

Some time later, Aunt Rosemary was killed by a lorry. She was waiting at the bus stop and was hit by the lorry’s wing mirror. Imagine… the very last thing you would expect. Bright and bobbish in the morning, full of plans. And then her family being phoned at work… it must have been terrible for Charles and the others.

When I went out to join my own family abroad, I was the last one to fly out. I went on the plane alone when I was six, but it was Uncle Charles who drove me to the airport. I was so excited I couldn’t believe we had to wait for him to come home from work and then have his supper.
I remember looking at him as he drank his tea, and he caught my eye, made a resigned but amused gesture, and got up out of his chair.

I went on the plane with a shiny red handbag – inside was a small pink bottle of rosemary oil perfume (and it still smells good!!), a bag of barley sweets (to stop my ears popping) and a book – Bottersnikes and Gumbles. But that’s the start of another story.

All this kindness over the years… but when Mum said “Charles is dead,” the thing that came first to my mind was when I arrived too early at school. It was a frosty cold winter morning, and my breath steamed in the air. The school was still closed, no other children were about, and the janitor wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I wandered round the school building rather forlornly, then spotted Uncle Charles moving books around in one of the classrooms – he was a teacher there. I tapped on the window, and when he saw me, he smiled and let me in. It was warm and peaceful, and I was grateful.

It seemed more than just a coincidence that The Entertainer was the song that came in when I opened the door for it this morning. Aunt Rosemary played it on the piano – I had never heard it before, and I thought it was wonderful and cheerful and fun. Just like Charles and Rosemary themselves.

This still isn’t the blog post I was planning, but when I found the TV Creature Survey by Pete from Thequacksoflife, I wondered which animal characters from film in general I would place as my top ten. This is my list (in order of importance):

1. The Angry Beavers
2. Scrat (from The Ice Age)
3. Puss in Boots (from Shrek)
4. Hammy the squirrel (from Over the Hedge)
5. Sid the sloth (from The Ice Age)
6. The Wombles (if I had to pick one, it would be Orinoco… or possibly Wellington)
7. Salem (black cat from Sabrina the Witch)
8. Kaa the python (from Disney’s The Jungle Book)
9. The Pink Panther
10. Black Beauty (from the old TV series)

I love Winnie the Pooh when safe between the covers of his book, but I can’t stand the TV versions… very dull. That’s why he’s not on this list.

I have a Disney print (a find from a charity shop, carefully attached to my cork board) of Shere Khan throttling Kaa with one lazy fist. You’d have to see it to appreciate the humour of their expressions, but I bought it because it reminded me of my relationship with my sister. Our Chinese Zodiac animals are Tiger (sister) and Snake (me).

Looking at it just now, I see a photo of Sharky on the board too – it has swung loose and slipped round to rest on top of Kaa in the picture… maybe he’s still trying to protect me!

I like Morrison’s instant mocha – I figured I would be one of the very few who did, but when Mum was shopping with a friend, she told her I liked that drink, and the friend bought some to try. My toes curled in embarrassment as I was convinced she would hate it, but one day there was no mocha left in the house… just a box of Morrison’s instant latte, which I’m less keen on, though it’s OK.

Mum said she looked and they were out of it in the supermarket, but she got a box of latte instead. Then she said her friend was with her again and wanted more mocha, so she let her have the last box.

Ah… well I’m glad she likes it. Move over, Rolo.

I do like the so-called healthy drinks as well… there are a couple of juice bars in town and I sometimes opt for those instead of coffee (she blogged smugly, only having had two juices so far… one from each bar).

The first was a mixed fruit juice which included ginger. It was called High Flyer… very tasty indeed, but there wasn’t much I dared order from that shop. They almost all seemed to have names like ‘Hangover Remedy’ or ‘Stress Reliever’, which are hard to ask for at the counter. ‘High Flyer’ was possibly a veiled warning…

The other bar had much better names, and I chose a smoothie called Bali Hai. That was lovely too, and very cool as there was crushed ice in it. Although I asked for small drinks in both shops, they were too big for me and are very hard on the stomach. Coffee seems to slip down more easily.

I start to understand why fruit juices are sometimes described as ‘hits’. I have a juice-making book which is very fond of the word, but that doesn’t seem to me particularly desirable… don’t they say “all good things in moderation”?

I have the suspicion that other people drink more than me. Folk are always stopping for coffee, more coffee, and then tea; then there’s the crowd who have round after round of drinks at the pub. I don’t know how people get through even two drinks at one sitting… I’ve generally had enough before the end of the first. This fascination for beverages of all kinds has me completely mystified.

Mum said she used to worry I wasn’t drinking enough, and that was as recently as me coming to stay with her… then she noticed how rapidly I was knocking back the juices and the Coca-colas! That’s usually after a dog-walk, especially in hot weather – I get very thirsty then. I also make coffee almost every time I pass the kettle… it’s the routine I love; I leave so much of it to go cold.

The sheer size of mugs offered by some cafés is ridiculous – there have been ‘medium’ ones which were so big and heavy I needed both hands to lift them. It’s not just McD’s who go in for this ’supersize’ business.

I spotted a short piece in a newspaper recently… it said they don’t know where the idea came from that people need eight glasses of water a day to remain healthy; there is nothing to indicate that’s true. Some people seem perfectly healthy and happy drinking nothing but tea.

Pacian tagged me for a six-word description of my life. That’s even shorter than a haiku!

I thought of mine last night; better put it down before I forget:

Came far, writes much, speaks little.

Even the much-loved and much-hated font I wrote it in speaks volumes (though it depends if you even have it on your computer). I’m allowed six tags but I ‘write much’ and am feeling greedy, so have allowed myself ten. The choice is up to you (and since I have four spare, four can cry off if they prefer) but my ten tags are (in alphabetical order):

BEG
Drifting
Iain (aw goawn)
Kaz
Goldfish
Pete
Shu
Snark
Timorous Beastie
Thomas

Last night I dreamed I had been reminded (to my surprise) that I used to have two cats, but for some reason or another had given them to someone else. Couldn’t afford to keep them at the time… that was pure dreaming, as these cats did not exist in my life!

In the dream I was shown pictures and reminded how I had called one of them after Arthur Wendell, and everybody called him Art for short.

I struggled awake, saying “I can’t tell the blog about that; I can’t give the real names of my pets,” then woke up fully and realized I haven’t called a cat that anyway. I don’t know who Arthur Wendell is. It was in my mind that he was a historian, but I’ve not been reading or researching anything by anyone with that name.

It’s odd what falls out of the mind when you let it run around by itself. I know there used to be a white cat in a catfood commercial called Arthur.

I forgot all about the dream till my sister sent an email saying she had been trundling around today much as usual, then someone got in touch with her and said “hello, do you remember these two kittens you homed with me? I know it’s been a while since we’ve talked, but I thought you might like an update.” And sent some photos.

My sister was fascinated, and said she hadn’t thought about them in a while. I looked at the photos and said one of them had a particularly distinctive face.
“I don’t recognize that one at all,” she said.
“Are they right about him being one of yours? Are they sure a goblin didn’t snatch the real kitten and leave a changling?”
“I wondered. Perhaps I shouldn’t have called him Gobbolino,” she said. (His name was changed by the owners – when I made that remark, I didn’t even know what his name used to be!)

Late at night Mum went to bed, then came upstairs grumbling that some cat had peed on her bed and completely messed up her duvet. She got a blanket out of the cupboard and was about to take that downstairs when I reminded her there was a spare duvet draped on the sofa… it was clean and washed, and all she really needed to do was change the cover.

This is one of those rather distracting moments… you know that it’s a good thing to ‘travel light’ so to speak, and rather than hoard stuff, you should get used to discarding (or rehoming!) the things you do not personally need. Storing things up ‘just in case’ is supposed to be a no-no.

Much of the time that makes sense. When you keep all the things you might use, and then go looking for something when it finally might be useful, you can never find it because of all the other things you’ve kept just in case they’ll be useful.

After a long, hard struggle, you’re just getting used to this idea of a more ascetic life and are steeling yourself to discard more things… then life throws a spanner into the works, in the form of doubt. The duvet on the sofa was a spare one from my house that we didn’t have room for. There was no room left in any of the cupboards, or in the loft, or in my bedroom. I couldn’t bring myself to chuck it out, though, and it wasn’t quite new enough for a charity shop, so I put an old duvet cover on it (one I had been meaning to throw out of course, but was quite fond of because it went to university with me), and draped the whole lot over my sofa. To keep it clean and comfortable, and so I can crawl under it and watch the TV if it’s one of those days. Why not?

Don’t you think now that it’s a good thing I didn’t throw it out?

Well, having a spare duvet was probably one of our better ideas. The real bad idea is keeping all the stuff that shoved the spare duvet out of the wardrobe in the first place… but I don’t want to think about that too much. It just proves my priorities are possibly in the wrong place, and that’s even more depressing than being labelled a hoarder.

Last night Mum put a ‘ready meal’ in the microwave oven. When I came downstairs I found she had left the kitchen, and the microwave was flashing the following message at me: “O.P.E.N. D.O.O.R. O.P.E.N. D.O.O.R. O.P.E.N. D.O.O.R.”

I opened the door, took the cooked dish out, and put it on the chopping board.

Mum came through and looked around, surprised. “Did YOU put that there?” pointing at the dish.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is it cooked?” she asked, frowning as though she couldn’t quite remember.
“Yes – the oven said to open the door, so I obeyed.”
“Oh.”

She put a second dish in the microwave, started it, then said, “Hmm. I could leave little notes round the house telling you to do things.”
“Notes only work if they flash,” I said.

When I trip over the rugs in the kitchen and squawk “these are dangerous! Why do we have rugs in the kitchen??” I get a lowering look from Mum along with “you shouldn’t have been wearing those slippers.”

When Mum trips over them, though, it’s suddenly different. “This thing has got to go.”

I was struggling to come up with something for this week’s BlogFriday word, ‘tears’. I could research and write something factual, tell a sad or a funny story – I could talk about my tears, or someone else’s. We all have them, even if we have to squeeze them out of a bottle.

I wish I could have written Katyboo’s The self fulfilling Caucus Race – it reduced me to tears of laughter. I’m glad she went ahead and wrote it down anyway; I couldn’t have, mostly because I haven’t gone through her particular experiences. On reflection, I’m quite glad of that. I found her when following some tags the other day, and had to wrestle with an unworthy desire to keep her all to myself.

When you’re not gifted with so much ebullient humour, ‘tears’ is a hard word to write about. I don’t want my blog to be angry or miserable, though at the same time I want it to represent the life I’m really living. I was wrestling with these feelings when I got up this morning, and about the first thing I saw on my computer screen (apart from the 3D wallpaper from Caedes and an unsorted rank of desktop icons) was my horoscope for today.

“However you feel is how you feel, so don’t try to hide it. If other people are uncomfortable with your anger, your happiness, or whatever emotion you’re exhibiting, that is just too bad for them. You’re not a robot, so why should you act like one? Beware of people who think that hiding how you really feel is some sort of superior, more powerful way to be. Not acknowledging your feelings can become a very unhealthy habit – one that can keep you from having honest connections with others.”

Alright then… wasn’t the word ‘tears’? I have a bottle of them beside my bed.

The optician’s receptionist (I nearly called her the optionist) gave me them for nothing when I was complaining about gritty eyes. They don’t feel any less tired, but I smiled this morning at how shiny they were… it just struck me as funny, all of a sudden. I’m sitting-up mud with dark eyes glimmering out at everything. Just look at all of you, reading my blog. Take away the spectacles, the veils, the hats, the hoods, the hair and the sleepy, rubbing fists… behind them are eyes so shiny they’re like mirrors.

These drippy bad boys are full of natural painkillers. When your middle gets icy cold, that’s almost physical pain, not just emotional. The heat seems to squeeze out through your eyes.

The two of us living here in Mum’s house were supposed to be having an adventure. Thence we had fled, abandoning our own home. While Mum got on with things downstairs, we were playing Anne Frank in the attic, hiding out upstairs and sneaking down for food. Sharky was the last of four cats, and when he died, it was as though I was losing everything all over again: not just his love and companionship, but the entire feline crowd, our house, and the life we lived together.

Ah! Those halycon days! Those days when Thor was beating up everybody except the giant Maine Coon in the next street, when Lucky smiled at me from the back door, and Fusspot teased the seagulls and made them stress out all over my washing. Those days when I had an office to dislike with cordial passion, cat shows to get incomprehensibly excited over, and Star Trek Voyager showing every week on BBC2 at 6 PM. Just like Lister in the Red Dwarf, I’d settle down with my curries and shandy and didn’t have to worry about someone else wanting the Antique Roadshow instead. The cats weren’t into clocks and Welsh dressers.

I thought he’d be with me for years yet, with his kind wisdom, energy and humour. The two of us had moved away but could return if we wanted, to the scolding seagulls and the takeaway belching greasy smoke at the bottom of the garden. Together we were complicit in the lie that we could go back while choosing not to. My penpal described it perfectly when she said “Sharky was your bit of continuity” – that’s what made it so particularly hard to bear.

I’m no robot – it’s true.