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.

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.

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.

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…

Shu’s ‘10 random facts about me‘ meme… another opportunity for me to haver.

(1) I paused to think what random 10 facts I could come up with, and Mum popped up behind me and said I only have 10 minutes; we’re going out to feed some cats in town. (Are we STILL feeding those cats? Feels like they’ve been on the agenda all summer).

(2) If I have to wash dishes by hand, I clean between fork prongs and wipe round the rims of glasses, cups and mugs. Would that claim me back any points towards being a brilliant 1930s housewife?

(3) Not only does Mum not do my laundry now that I’ve moved back in, I hog it all to myself. She comes and says “I’m putting on a wash, do you have anything to go in?” and I always say ‘no’. I say to her “please don’t do any of mine; I will do it,” and she sneaks into my room and washes my stuff anyway – for example, a load of my pale pinks along with a rusty red-brown skirt.

(4) It was as round as a ping pong ball but not as big… the baby wren who perched on the wall beside Mum. It was so tiny, fluffy and pretty that we stopped to stare. It hopped up to Mum’s window and stared interestedly into the car, so we shut our doors and drove away.

(5) The rain is spitting down out there. I went to clean a cat litter tray, and the drops were thudding coldly onto my back. That was a bit too much, so I hurried back into the kitchen, abandoning the tray. Samson was out there with me, and when I turned to watch, he looked around oddly, shuddered, and ran for the kitchen. He was running so fast he skidded on the kitchen floor and fell over.

(6) I’m just like Shu in her 10th point… terrible procrastinator, often a bit late, hating to be told what to do. When I’m about to do something, and someone says “do…” (whatever it was I was already going to do), I feel like turning round and not doing it, just to prove I wasn’t doing it only because they told me to. I think Shu’s word ‘bloody-minded’ is spot on.

(7) To balance that out a bit, I adore praise. If I do something and somebody else says “atta girl” or something of the kind, I purr like a kitten. I mean, some people would see it as being patronized, but I’m happy to have done something that somebody approved of. For a change.

(8.) I am trying to declutter by taking at least one item into a charity shop every time we go to town. Today I took two Jellycat toys… a sleeping pony and a curled-up grey cat.

(9) I read this article over my mocha in a coffee shop. I always said Neil Diamond is still very cool, so I was delighted. I liked some of Paul Weller’s stuff (I’ve got his Wild Wood. If you’ve not heard it and don’t mind YouTube, give it a listen). The Specials were another favourite… I have to admit I didn’t like all of their songs, but the ones I did like got me big time. There’s a good chance that I saw this Top of the Pops airing and decided I had to get their single. (Check out those cosy jumpers… and that band member’s ironic grin halfway through the clip! Friendly and yet not… Click the video clip’s ‘more info’ link for the lyrics). I played it over and over and over and over till the parents cracked. I’m about to play it over and over and over while I do my editing…

… because….

(10) … the report we’re editing has just come boomeranging back at me for my bit. Rats.

Delilah makes me chuckle… she was going after a fly, and I caught her eye and said, beseechingly, “please don’t do it!” She looked guiltily back at the fly with a “waaahh!” as though to say “but I can’t help it, you know I can’t.”

Today, she was leaning close to my ear and I thought I heard a squeaky noise, so I turned and looked at her and said “did you say something?” and she immediately said “yah!” in that identical squeaky tone, so I knew it hadn’t been something going on in the house which should be investigated… set my mind at rest.

I don’t let cats go up on kitchen worktops (or try not to) so when I caught Delilah on ours, I said “get down!” and Delilah promptly jumped off. Mum laughed and said “did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“She said ‘oops’… or made a noise very like it.”

Head still hurting – sore eyes I think.

One thing the cats do… they use the tray, and a stench arises, so I rush to scoop it out, thinking the smell will go away. A short while later, it’s still hanging around – I assume it’s still settling down and ignore it, then finally get suspicious. I look again, and there’s a second lot waiting there to be scooped out. I would have cleaned it up sooner as I don’t want to sit in a cat-fug.

I reckon this is one of the little drawbacks to being deaf you would never suspect… with reasonable hearing you would hear the cats scratching in the tray, and know right away. Just like you hear them start to be sick somewhere and have time to sling them outside or pose them over the basin, or you hear them howling and scrabbling in whatever cupboard they’ve got themselves shut into. When we’ve lost a cat, Mum will sometimes say “hist! I hear her… somewhere…..” and even if we don’t know yet where ’she’ is, I feel a bit better. At least she’s not run away and got shut in someone’s horrible freezing garage. Then we might find her in the loft, which is often enough the first place we looked. We can’t always trust cats to come when they’re called; they hide away and grump, and if I can’t see them…. well, I don’t know they’re there, and I’m well on my way to a serious panic.

The poop-immediately-after-poop thing is something they often do; in this nice weather you would think they would use Mother Nature’s litter tray outside. It’s a lot bigger and softer than mine. Maybe I should pop my blog on the laptop and go out there myself to get away from the fug.

This morning (in the last hour or two in fact) they did it to me three times, not just once. I have thrown all the windows open. Should have asked Mum to look for a squirt gun.

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.

Delilah just loves insects and plays cat-and-mouse with them. Having bopped a fly so that it lay at her feet, I thought she would crush and eat it… but she picked it up in her mouth and dropped it near Samson, alive and kicking, so that they could both bully it.

I don’t like to see anything tortured, so I scooped it up in my hands (it didn’t protest) and pushed it outside the door. The feeling of its wings fluttering against my palms made me frown for a moment… I was reminded of a dream I had a couple of nights earlier.

In this dream, I was living alone in London. I had lots of friends there but had withdrawn from their company for a little. I needed time on my own but felt guilty. One lovely sunny morning, the sky was blue and the breezes playing, and I was having a quiet little picnic on the grass well away from the crowds. There were trees heavy with pink blossom, and I stood beside them and tried to compose a little haiku.

“The may tree blooms… no, wait. The may tree blossoms…”

Pacian came up and stretched out on the grass beside my picnic basket, heaving a sigh. “What a day. So full of crowds in the Big Smoke. We haven’t seen you around for a while. You hibernating or sumpting?”
“Oh, you know me,” I said. “Just taking time out for a while. How is Geosomin?”
“Oh, fine, fine! She was asking after you too. Are you coming round to see the new baby?”
“Oh yes, the baby. I’ve not met him yet, have I? I will come round soon; just not today.”
“Don’t leave it too long.”
“I won’t. Well… I better be getting home now. Things to do.”

I stood up and packed the food away in my trolley. Sharky was in the park too, strolling around, so I popped him in the trolley and zipped up the lid. It was the best way to get him home through the streets. I was just about to set off when Pacian stopped me. “Sharky is kicking up a rumpus.”

I opened the trolley and peeked in… sure enough, Sharky wasn’t sitting purring as I had imagined – he was half standing, wailing anxiously at me, things falling on top of him.

“Oh,” I said, “I thought he was sitting comfortably on the rug, but he’s just jumbled up in there with the rest of my stuff.” I felt upset because he had been shouting inside the trolley and I didn’t hear… it took someone else to point it out.
I pulled everything straight so that the cat was sitting peaceably on the rug again, zipped up the trolley, and set off.

My way home lay through a market… it was half empty today, but I ran into an ex-colleague, Dick. He was packing up a stall.
“Nobody’s around,” he said. “I’m taking all this stuff back to the office.”
“It’s a nice day for it,” I said. “How’s Donna?”
“Donna’s her usual self.”
Once he told me Donna didn’t like the song ‘Oh Donna, you make me stand up; you make me sit down, Donna, sit down, Donna…’ I had grown up with the song, and didn’t sympathize – till I looked up the lyrics.
“How are things at work, Dick?”
“Oh, so-so. Every thing’s at sixes and sevens just now. We could do with more workers.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But it’s a beautiful day and I’m enjoying my freedom. Have fun!”

I took off, leaving Dick labouring disconsolately.

Near the candyfloss stall, a large moth whirled round and round me, trying to escape the attentions of a large red-coloured rat. The rat ran round and round me, scrambling across my clothing. They were both moving very fast, and I caught the moth and held it between my hands, trying to protect it from the rat. My heart was in my mouth as I was worried the rat would get the moth anyway, and then I would feel terrible for trying to protect it and not succeeding. It was fine, though; I took the moth somewhere safe and let it fly away… and the rat never knew. It kept looking round for it, and eventually gave up and went to get some candyfloss instead.

Meanwhile, Samson and Delilah are still torturing all the flies they can catch. Those insects have no idea what it takes to stay out of the wee devils’ reach. I have rescued three so far, all lightly battering the palms of my hands. Yesterday when they were chasing one which was waving the white flag of surrender, I picked it up and popped it out of the window. The cats watched it zoom off into the blue, then turned and glared at me.

I don’t think I’m Person of Note around here at the moment…

Samson was tagged by Pearl over in Shu’s Small World, and is mighty chuffed! Says it’s a weird feeling to have a lovely blue cat (is she blue?) come flickering out of nowhere, give him a playful swat, then vanish again. But maybe he can do the same to a few others – should be interesting to try. If a big cream cat appears all of a sudden, don’t scream… it’s just Samson.

1. What I was doing 10 years ago.
This one’s easy – I wasn’t born then. The cat before me had just about been born himself. He was a Grand Premier (though not 10 years ago!) I’m not sure I will bother, myself – maybe one day, but I’m not in a hurry.

2. 5 things on my to-do list for today.
Eat, sleep, roam around my territory, chase wasps, and toss the fake mouse a few times (if I can’t get a live one).

3. Snacks I enjoy.
Just our usual meals, preferably meat rather than fish. Anything else isn’t food. Delilah eats Stilton, salmon, and cheesy crisps, but I don’t fancy any of that myself.

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire.
Retire to my own private island with Delilah, Diddums and her mother. The island will have any number of fresh springs we can drink from.

5. Three of my bad habits.
Using the litter box just as Diddums sits down to rest with coffee or lunch; constantly demanding to have the tap turned on for me; getting my eye scratched during play (I’m recovering from my fourth scratch, or is it my fifth?)

6. Five places I’ve lived.
Small village where I was born. And then this room here – corner of the sofa, squeezed down as far as I could go. Then I moved behind the computer desk, sometimes switching to the book shelf, where I hunkered down behind the piles of books. Then there was the top of the tallest unit in the room. Now I live downstairs in the cat hammock beside the front door. It’s a great address… catches lots of heat at night from the radiator, and a warm golden pool of sunlight in the morning.

7. Five jobs I’ve had.
Friend to Diddums; companion to my playmate Delilah; a little excitement in the life of Cheeky (who still likes to ambush us); park keeper; somebody for Diddums to blog about. That’s five.

I tag…. your pet or animal companion! *Pow!* A big cream cat appears and thumps into your leg like a particularly heavy sack of sand.

I’ve gone a little quiet, I know – I’m following more Photoshop tutorials. It’s great when I find ones I can use in Photoshop Elements 2.0. So many other Photoshoppers seem able to afford the top applications.

On Wednesday night I had a dream…. it cast a slight shade, a transparent gradient, over my day. The closer we got to bedtime, the bluer the cast of my mood.

In the dream, I went to tea with one of my cat clients, doing my best to make pleasant conversation, but she cocked a sardonic eyebrow at me. I was relieved when one of her cats shot off to the end of the garden, and a terrible caterwauling arose. It seemed her cat was picking on one of my cats, Lucky. Lucky died years back, before I started this blog.

I rescued him by picking him up and carrying him back to my seat. He seemed surprised at first, then clung closely to me, purring deeply. I could feel it vibrating through my heart. He seemed to be saying “it’s such a long time since you last held me.” I was bemused to realize it myself, and couldn’t think why such a distance had grown between us.

Later in the dream I discovered I had a huge aquarium at the back of my upstairs sitting room. It contained three large fish, about 40 cm long: two sharks and a human diver. I had to carry one of the fish to another part of the house in a red plastic bucket. I could have picked any of the three – the diver, the slim pretty shark, or the strong, sturdy, moody shark… I picked the moody one. He was the most likely to bite, but I felt he would be better able to deal with being removed from the tank. After scooping him out, I was annoyed to find there was no water in the bucket – I had to dash off to get some before I could put him in.

We were possibly showing him to a visitor, after which I returned him to the tank… he was slightly limp, but recovered quickly. Nobody had been bitten.

Sharky… I wonder if there’s a connection. Cats who have passed on… one of them missing me, and the other swimming moodily in a tank.

And then thinking how people are here one day and gone the next. Dad working abroad, making a life for himself and his family – and now it’s just us. And the baby mouse… I rescued him from the cats. At first I thought he was dead, and Samson was pinning him down with one claw, but when I got closer, the little thing was shaking. His legs were so thin and crumpled under him that one looked broken, but he was just weak. I took him straight outside with some crumbs. I don’t like wearing my nice pink slippers outside, but for the mouse’s sake, I trekked them across wet grass and placed him in a snug corner near the shed. He hobbled and wobbled slowly under the shed… Not convinced he will have survived, but maybe he found a nest of leaves and slept himself to recovery.

Mum accused Samson of nibbling the top off a muffin, but I said I gave it to the mouse.

I was in Photoshop Elements painting a light bulb in a lamp, when a song came into my head… one of Melanie’s most ’sobbing’ melodies. It might have been Candles in the Rain but I’m not sure; it’s years since I’ve played her music. It wasn’t Ruby Tuesday; I would recognize it as soon as it came up.

The Photoshop tutorial was absorbing, but while working on it, I remembered a stray comment from one of the 30 or 40 others who have already followed it. She said she decided to do it because there was nothing else to do, and she was feeling sad, longing for some human contact. I became aware in my mind of all the others tracing the same lines – some quickly, some slowly, some happily, others less so.

I’d like a nice pink gradient tomorrow, please, and a different song.

Last night I dreamed I was a nervous wreck. My cat had just died and my life was on rocky ground. I went to the local school during the night, when it was empty of all staff and pupils, and pinned my cat’s best show rosettes on the padded back of a school chair. (Since when were school chairs padded?) I also typed a couple of sheets about my unhappy experiences, and pinned them alongside the rosettes.

They stayed there for a few months and became quite a feature of the school. The teachers and schoolchildren were talking about them and hadn’t taken them down. I wondered if they kept so many chairs in the school that they didn’t have to use that one, or if there was a girl who would perch gently, half turned, so she wouldn’t squash the rosettes.

One day I realized I was feeling better; the experiences I wrote about were in my past and I didn’t want them hanging in full view any more. If I cared at all about the cat I had lost, I should get the rosettes back before the school itself took them down. All of a sudden I was filled with a sense of urgency – I had to get out there that night, before it was too late.

After waking up, it occurred to me the essays in the dream represented my blog.

I am still (very slowly) going through old blog posts and deleting many which have passed their date of usefulness. It’s true I posted them when I needed to, or when they were part of an ongoing story, but they don’t have to be up there forever. When I’ve finished editing those, I’ll start on the newer ones here. Editing is something we should always keep in mind as bloggers or site owners… though sometimes we get tired and just let things slide.

I also have desktop wallpapers ‘out there’ that I don’t like any more! They will be coming down eventually as well.

As for the cats’ rosettes… I don’t know what to do with them. I said I would go through them and keep all the best, and I did.. but there are still too many. I’m waiting to lose interest but I haven’t yet, because of the cats who won them. There’s a rosette pinned on the cork board behind this computer – Best of Breed. Could be Sharky’s, could be Thor’s. I noticed the other day some toothmarks at the bottom of its trailing ribbons – probably courtesy of Delilah. At first I was sad and annoyed, then shrugged it off. The cats never cared. One day I won’t either.

I’m reading Dean Koontz books again – the last one (One Door Away from Heaven) was as unputdownable as Brother Odd. I won’t give away the plot. Odd things annoyed me slightly, but not enough to spoil it for me (except somewhat at the end, but we can always change the ending in our minds).

Near the beginning, a mention of Ghost Riders in the Sky was inspired. The tune that came into my head was the Shadows’ version, Riders in the Sky. It was one of my favourites when I was a teenager, and it greatly added to the novel’s atmosphere: power, speed, technology, hope, vigour, love of life… and an underlying menace. Perfect.

The main annoyance I had with the book was that the print disappeared into the crease. It was too big a book to be constantly pushing the pages back… quite a strain on the hands. Though I call it ‘unputdownable’, sometimes I had no choice. Sensible people would probably just break the spine but I can’t bear the thought! I’m sure the pages would have started to fall out.

It’s impossible to blog with an insane kitten jabbing her claws into your armpit. Samson has run off into the night, so Delilah has latched onto me. I placed her in her comfortable cot downstairs and came up to bed, but even as I went, my back was stiff… as I expected, there was a ferocious drumming of paws and she shot past me up the stairs, her tail held high. She didn’t want to sleep alone.

I’m worried she’ll sink her teeth through the downie into my feet, she pounces so enthusiastically. Furthermore, I have hopes that she won’t bite my nose off while I sleep, or shave my hair, or something of the kind. No wonder Samson skedaddled.