Aw Diddums

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.

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…

Ooh, four-year-old article… Are Open-toed Shoes Appropriate Business Attire? But I have to say I don’t understand the anti-open-toed stuff either. I only read comments on it fairly recently, in magazines and blog posts. I never even look at people’s feet, so if people are going about with long toe nails and rough heels or glittery nail polish, I don’t see them. Seems simple to me… other people’s feet are none of my business.

I mentioned it to Mum, and she was confused too… she said “what are you talking about? I haven’t heard anyone complaining about open-toed shoes.” She held up a beautiful, well-cared for foot with straight toes, and said: “look at this foot. It’s a 75-year-old foot. Other women my age have toes crossing each other because they were determined to wear fashion shoes.”

Yes. I go for health and comfort above fashion and individual / corporate prejudices. Anyone else?

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.

Searching for my style

I saw something yesterday that annoyed me. Many folk have a little piece saying something along the lines of “don’t steal my art”, which strikes me as understandable but futile, but one guy broke new ground with a general warning on his own pieces: “don’t copy my style.”

First of all, I didn’t see anything individual about his style; it looked like many others of that genre. Secondly, we are all inspired by everything else we’ve come across in our lifetimes, including this person so worried that he might be copied. Like any of us, he might well have come to it in his own time, but the likelihood is that he didn’t just make it up out of nowhere… there was nothing new about it. The piece I was looking at looked like a pale version of something from The Golden Compass.

The funny thing about ideas is that people tend to get the same ideas over and over… partly because they are drawing from the same wells of inspiration. Like when I took a photo of a cobweb with dewdrops on it, and was going to blog about it, and a little while later found a couple of blogs by other Scots around the same time, talking about these cobwebs with dew on that they’d taken photos of. There is no way that they copied me, as I never blogged about it… and I didn’t see theirs till after I thought of it. Actually, I doubt if they ever came near my blog.

He has a bit of a nerve to suggest that I (along with others) should stop experimenting and discard perfectly good examples of (cough) art I might have considered making just because it might look like stuff that’s already out there. There are many who post tutorials teaching us how to do this or that, and in the end we can combine the skills to make something of our own. They don’t complain when we post a few pictures like theirs; it’s more like “welcome to the party!” I could almost describe it as a type of internet apprenticeship, which is what it’s all about. Not “here’s my special brand… now you can’t ever do anything like this.” Like what, exactly? Perhaps I should just avoid looking at his work, and then I won’t be subliminally (or overtly) influenced. I can’t promise I wouldn’t have similar ideas on my own, without ever having seen more than two of his own pieces.

Wrongly labelled

An extra rant… things that appear in the wrong categories. It’s bugged me ever since my eBay days in the year 2000 or whenever. All people had to do was write “This is NOT a Steiff bear!” and it would appear in the Steiff listings, as if they weren’t long enough already.

There were the misspelled things that never got into the right listings, but if you were on the lookout, you might get a cheap ‘Stieff’ bear that none of the rival collectors noticed. Usually if they were serious collectors, though, they were on the lookout for misspellings themselves, hoping you weren’t noticing.

Or there were the ones with titles that just said “A lovely cuddly soft toy!” and you wanted to know (without having to look) what sort of soft toy. It might have been a Steiff. It might have been the old pink Woolworth mouse you’ve been looking for for years. But you only have so much time to spend on the search, and your old computer is too slow to look at every page that leaves you wondering. I didn’t spend much time or money on Steiff bears, but I looked occasionally to see what was out there.

And the miscategorizations spread to other fields… such as stock images. Recently I decided to look for spaceships, space shuttles and UFOs. The UFO category was stuffed full of women posing in Sci-Fi costumes, along with pages and pages of perfectly ordinary sky photos. I picked out three sky photos (not from the same pages) and would you know… they were all by the same person! I looked to see if maybe she had called them UFO Skies, or written casually in the description “this would be good with a UFO travelling across it”, because then it might not have been deliberate. But ‘UFO’ wasn’t in a single one of them, not even as part of a word… it must have been added to the search terms. Verdict: not accidental.

If I wanted a nice dramatic sky for a UFO to travel across, I would take or make my own, or search the ’sky’ section of the Stock Photos. I wouldn’t look under UFO if I already had one. A background, I mean… as it happens, I did have one of my own.

Pah.

(I ended up making my own wobbly UFOs).

Funny how quickly things change… a couple of days ago the PC was rendering Apophysis fractals, but tonight it’s rendering a 3D scene in Bryce. Life would be very dull if there was only one thing to do. I wouldn’t have thought of it but there’s a minor contest for science fiction images. My bent is much more towards fantasy, but I came across a folder of unused 3D scenes which were quite promising. Maybe, with a little work, they would fit.

Looking at the other entries, it hasn’t a snowball’s chance… but it’s literally the taking part that counts; lots of fun and new ideas.

I didn’t come here to bore everyone senseless (oh, well maybe I did, but not deliberately). I was thinking about how people make certain decisions that X is OK but Y is not… for instance, traditional photography versus digital photography. All kinds of photography versus manipulation or ‘tweaking’. Those are very broad examples; the individual permutations of biases and prejudices are endless. “I despise the brushed metal effect,” is one phrase I came across a while ago. Nobody bothered to reply. What he really meant that he thought it was overused by uncool people. On a Come Dine with Me show, someone said “you used one of those two-handled things to open the wine. The RIGHT way to open wine is…” and my mother and I looked at each other.

X is cool, the right kind, the right way, used by the right people. Y is not.

These biases start young. I was rambling round one of the arty sites and came across a conversation where someone was required to describe the process of photomanipulation. Despite the friendly reply from the photomanipulator, the enquirer dismissed it as ’simply cutting and pasting the images of other users’. That’s not necessarily true; photomanipulators aren’t barred from using their own images. And if they just cut and pasted things, they would probably not look good… there is much more to it than that.

If you think about painting a picture (traditional media), you might have a still life specially set up in the studio (various items taken out of their own environments and placed together in an attractive way). If you think about photography, there are portraits of people perched against backgrounds, graduates wearing cheesy grins and clutching false rolled-up certificates (slightly battered round the edges), models wearing evening gear and make-up. When you took a photo of wild nature on holiday, you waited for a break in the crowds of other tourists and angled the shot to avoid the telephone pole and picnic signs. Then, people enjoy movies and fiction, but they’ve never been real.

I’m referring to the expectation that photos etc are worth nothing if they are not a real, true representation of the subject. If the sunset is peachy pink and there’s a boat on the water, it should remain peachy pink with a boat on the water. I don’t understand that, as there’s nothing 100 percent natural or ‘true’ about any of it. That same stretch of sky could be glorious blue and gold tomorrow. What we see out of our own eyes or perceive with our own minds is never the full, eternal truth; still less committing it to a piece of paper and saying “this is last night’s sunset.” It’s not a sunset… it’s a piece of paper.

There’s nothing ‘true’ about painting, photography, sculpture, drawing…. none of it.

As for the ‘using other people’s stuff’ thing, well… provided you make a good image and credit the original photographers / artists (who gave permission in the first place), or avoid all of that and use your own stock anyway, then I don’t see a problem. It’s still work: searching out the images you want; using tools, skills, the mind’s eye… trying to achieve a particular result. Sometimes the ‘cheat’ is much harder to pull off than the real thing.

In the conversation I mentioned, the photomanipulator asked if the other person would like to try that genre. No, said the other person – she would never do it… she preferred to stick with the usual kind of art.

I went to see who this philistine was, and what sort of art she went for, and I didn’t find much there to support. It was all one kind of thing (not terribly adventurous) and not particularly well done. But before I got too sneery in the privacy of my own room, I checked her profile… and she was only 14.

Ah. She’s got time yet. I’m sure I was dismissive of things (and stuck in an artistic rut) when I was 14, but in time I learned life is never black and white. Rather to my dismay. Then again, what would art be if we didn’t have other shades to play with?

PS It’s one of those days (in a minor way) when one thing going wrong leads you straight into another thing going wrong…

ScribeFire had a fresh update which at first seemed OK, then it started telling me it couldn’t or wouldn’t delete my notes. I wasn’t sure what was up with that, but it didn’t seem too terrible, so I left it. Doubtless it would be sorted in the next update.

I typed out a fresh post which it allowed me to save only once, but that wasn’t a disaster either, as it wasn’t forgetting anything I typed into it.

“B-b-b-but I’m addicted to hitting ’save’!” I grumbled, feeling lost. That seems a weird objection, but it’s true. Saving every little change is as routine as making coffee. Hunting for the save button and not finding it makes me hesitate. In fact I nearly hit the ‘Clear Content’ button instead, as it was over in that corner.

Later on (after I turned off the computer so a guy could bring Sky to my delighted old analogue TV), I tried to post something, but discovered Scribefire had forgotten where my blog was. I clicked around, looking to see if there was a list of blogs from which Aw Diddums had accidentally been deselected, but couldn’t see anything, so started to remind it via the ‘launch wizard’. I got as far as being asked for my password and was spooked enough to cancel without answering. It didn’t make sense that it had forgotten the first time; I would rather wait it out. My imagination was running riot again, with the squeaky little voice whispering “it could be a haaaaaaaacker!!” Aw shush.

Gradually it occurred to me there was nothing stopping me from using my own blog’s dashboard, so I toddled over there, pasted my blog post, and looked at the list of categories. I read it over three or four times before realizing (panicking) that Agoraphobia wasn’t there. Had some haaaaacker been tinkering with my blog?

THEN I noticed the small print beside the list of categories. It said, ‘Most Used’. Underneath that was a link to ‘All Categories’. OH!

When you’re not expecting to be presented with an abridged list, it wastes your time while you scroll up and down looking for the thing that isn’t there. Agoraphobia should have been right at the top, alphabetically… it would have suited me to have the whole list there. I notice this time it’s still on the ‘All Categories’ tab – probably ‘Most Used’ is the default when you’ve not been on the site for a while, or when you’ve been doing most of your posting via ScribeFire. I hope ScribeFire feels better soon. It’s gone a little bit haywire and I miss it.

Saw this in the paper yesterday: blind woman refused access to her pension.

It makes me want to stop the world and get off.

Today I was catching up on my blog-reading (slipped a bit) and found a post I enjoyed by Liz in Fate is Chance, Destiny is Choice: Inclusion.

I know exactly where she’s coming from when she speaks of the feeling of panic you get when everybody in the classroom starts a mad scramble, and you don’t know what is going on because you didn’t hear the statements that led up to that moment. Gosh, that brings it all back! I didn’t have any notetakers and wouldn’t even have thought of it. To catch up, I read books, and they were as often my family’s choice of books as the school’s, so maybe I knew things the others didn’t, and vice versa. I was always a little ‘not fond’ of school, and I’m sure uncertainty was the main reason why.

Malfunctioning subtitling equipment, gosh, yes. I haven’t tried the ones in cinemas, but the ones in TV are malfunctioning all the time; or the TVs and receivers garble the subtitles/captions for whatever reason. Someone like me isn’t able to pinpoint why, and even if the experts knew why, they won’t be in a hurry to explain it to their customers – they don’t want us interfering or making ‘unreasonable’ demands. That sounds paranoid, I know, but that comes from general life experience and observation! There is so little out there that’s subtitled… for reasons of cost and hassle, apparently. I like to think folk are doing their best to change this situation, and I’m sure some are, but I can’t help suspecting that other people don’t care, and yet others are more interested in an easy life and profits.

I’ve always felt that film editors should consider this a little more (if allowed by the management)… you know how some pictures are very fast moving… take a look at Disney’s Hercules as an example. It’s almost impossible to watch the film AND read the subtitles. In extreme examples I have resorted to rewinding DVDs and videos in an effort to catch something that whipped past. I’m a fast reader; I have learned to absorb chunks of subtitling in the blink of an eye, as in the next instant it could be gone… but sometimes I’m just not fast enough. I’m pretty sure speedy filming makes life harder for the subtitler as well as for the subtitle-reader. The subtitler’s mission is to place as much meaning as possible in a small space and increasingly small amounts of time. My point is that film editing could be more inclusive but isn’t much considered, if at all. Does film need to zip past quite as fast? Why? Quite often the commercials are slower and better subtitled than the movie we have just barged through.

That’s all I want to say for the time being; I think I’ll get a soothing mug of coffee now!

Life is Like Wading Through Treacle

My cr£dit card company have begun the annoying practice of putting the following sticker on my replacement card: “please call this number to confirm that you have received this.”

I’m deaf – I can’t call that number.

I asked my sister if she was getting that sticker on her cards as well, and she said she was in such a mood about hers that she marched into her bank branch and asked a member of staff there to do the ringing up. I thought that was a good idea, which was why I was waiting in a bank queue yesterday. I asked if I really had to ring that number, or if I could safely ignore it, but she said “do you want me to ring for you?” and I said “yes please.”

It took a bit longer than we expected… she managed to get through when she rang the number, but the people at the other end wouldn’t believe her, and refused the request to confirm my card. Fortunately she had an ace up her sleeve in the form of a private number, so she rang that, and this time it was accepted. Presumably they knew who she was on that phone.

The bank clerk agreed it was all terribly difficult, and when we were talking about it later, Mum said, “it’s so unnecessary.” I said if they didn’t believe she was who she said she was, how would they have believed me? Presumably they’re not allowed to ask me my pin. How would they know who I was?

All these questions. What I really wanted, I suppose, was some indication that calling was optional. (Ha). Or a little slip to fill in and send off. I thought they used to do that. What happened to that plan?

The thought of having to go through this every time a replacement card arrives makes me tired. I wonder if switching to another cr£dit card would be a smart move… or do they all pull that trick?

I’ve just realized something… the reason muesli is ‘healthy’ is that you push it away after one spoonful. Especially when it’s got lots of dried fruit in it. And it’s not as if I intend to get something else to eat – my stomach was so shocked it stopped rumbling.

In an earlier blog post, I was mumbling about the ratings received by the more ‘different’ names on Baby Names Country. There are also ratings on Baby Names World, but I couldn’t see a way to do that, so I imagine you have to register.

On Baby Names Country I was reading advice claiming that in the U.S., 85% of first names are chosen from a list of only 200 names – and other countries are more or less the same, presumably including the U.K.

That is shocking – I thought humans were supposed to be imaginative and adventurous? So many people would like to consider themselves as being apart from the crowd, but this naming convention is proof that most people prefer not to be all that different.

Of course there tend to be naming conventions within families as well – the same first name being used for the oldest son (so that you have to distinguish between ‘Carl senior’ and ‘Carl junior’ as in Snow Falling on Cedars), or the wife’s maiden name is used as the middle name of one of her children, or the mother-in-law hints she would be delighted if the first-born bore her name, and so on. Family connections are important, but when they restrict naming opportunities this way, they complicate life.

Perhaps it’s comforting to believe that there will always be a John Brown, son of John Brown, son of John Brown living in the village, and it all runs into one in your mind… you feel that life goes on forever. But sometimes you don’t want the different people to merge in that way.

There will always be bad and unfortunate names as well as good, but I wish we could have the courage to strike out a bit more; to search for a little more individuality.

I hate banks.

I’m not an Egg customer myself, but I didn’t know whether or not I was surprised when I saw this piece of news on the television last night. I stared at it with horror, thinking to myself “that can’t have done anybody’s self-esteem much good. It’s the last thing we need in this world, which is hard enough.”

“Stupid bank!” I said out loud.
“Stupid guinea pigs,” said Mum.

Feeling annoyed about several things…

• How can some folk treat you like you don’t count? I wonder if they would feel the same if they saw others treat someone they cared about that way?
• How people have nothing good to say about someone, and when she dies, suddenly she’s an angel with the strength and grit of 10,000, and the world will never see her like again?
• How everyone’s ridiculously overworked, and not even doing anything particularly rewarding, and then we end life wondering what it was all about?
• How just running a home is considered of no value compared to gumming up the public transport system every morning and every evening.
• How some people are determined to be accorded more respect than others, even when it’s a waste of other people’s time and energy.
• How charity shops are overcharging for things (muddy shopping trolley that somebody spilled something inside…. £8.50? A tiny handbag that still contains a sanitary towel and a shopping list for toilet rolls… £5.50? Dinky little jewellery cases with so much padding that there’s no room for most people’s jewellery collections – anything from £6 to £13?)
• How people stroll into a shop and don’t give you room to leave it first – do they think there’ll be plenty of room inside with you still trapped in there by them?
• How set top boxes, DVD players and VCRs operate together in such an incredible muddle that they don’t always do what you expect (much too complicated) and sometimes your set top box refuses to work at all when it was working perfectly well this morning. As a result, you miss Tenko, which you haven’t seen properly (with subtitles) for over 15 years.
• How things like kettles and juicers are sometimes made in such a shoddy fashion that they fly apart and injure people, and you worry in case it happens to you – but when you’re shopping, all the kettles and juicers look as shoddy as each other and you get the feeling it won’t make much difference which you choose.
• How people cheat, use small print, try to mislead you about what you’re buying, and don’t tell you the full price of their products.
• How DVDs force you to watch bits you don’t want to watch (by not letting you speed over them), and when you try to speed over something you’re allowed to speed over, it takes you straight into the middle of the film.
• How there are too many remote controls with too many buttons using too many different symbols in too many different places, and your brain starts to give up so that most of the time, even months after buying these things, you’re just dabbing all the buttons hopefully, trying to get things to do what you want.
• How some DVDs are so badly designed you start the film before you’ve even been given a chance to set the subtitles, and it’s not very clear that an X in the box next to subtitles means “I don’t want this” when you think it’s a check in the box for “I DO want this” and you have to go back and do it all over again when the subtitles fail to materialize. And finally when you succeed in putting the subtitles on, the DVD takes you right back to the spot you first discovered they weren’t running, when what you WANT is to go back to the beginning to catch anything else you might have missed (and I’m not talking about the bit that says ‘20th Century Fox’ or ‘Dreamworks’ or the trailers of other films).

Think I’ll get to bed now, and let the Invisible Sulk roam unchecked… he might even get on this blog to you, you never know. I hope not.

My cat Sharky was missing for up to 18 hours.

He strolls around the neighbourhood, gets himself shut in the cubby hole and sleeps in various different spots in the house, so It wasn’t till teatime that we really started to fret. Mum even went to ask one neighbour if he was shut in her garage, but he wasn’t.

Eventually she came upstairs and said “he’s just come in.”

“Oh,” I said lightly, “did he just stroll in as though nothing had happened and nobody was worried about him?”
“Actually, I think he WAS shut in somewhere,” said Mum. “He went straight to the water bowl and is drinking a lot.”

I went down to where he was still gulping water and patted him. He felt cool and slightly damp to the touch, just as though he had been lightly rained on. He kept drinking.

“Fancy that,” said Mum, in a mock-scolding voice. “He goes straight to the water bowl instead of coming upstairs to tell you he’s home and you needn’t worry any more.”

Finally he came upstairs, drank more water from his own bowl, and demanded food, which he got.

When I picked him up, I thought he smelled strange and sniffed at his fur. Maybe it was tobacco smoke, or a rather musky old perfume. Mum said no, it smelled more like oil to her.

Though I’m not convinced about the tobacco or the perfume, I’m not convinced about the oil either. It’s definitely an alien odour of some sort – he’s been shut in somewhere, possibly sleeping on a heap of sacks – or maybe there aren’t any sack heaps any more and I’ve been reading too many books from an earlier era.

Now that Sharky’s eaten and drunk his fill, and sat on me for a long time, he’s gone over to the sofa (my old sofa from our old home) and has been sleeping there for hours. Mum came up and gave him a hug. I said “he’s definitely quite upset about it, isn’t he?” and Mum said “yes – I don’t think he’ll go off like that again for a while.”

Well, that worked out alright, and I don’t think anybody meant to imprison him.

What worries me the most about cats who go missing is that a large number of the rest of the population don’t seem to know how to return cats to their owners. If a stray cat comes to your door, you don’t just take him in and feel good about it – that’s not the right thing to do.

I recently received the winter edition of a cat club newsletter. There was a story about someone who took a pedigree cat to the vet, saying he wasn’t being accepted by her other cats and she wanted him put down. The vet decided that would be a waste of a nice, not-too-old cat, and pulled strings to get him rehomed by various people she knew were interested in that breed. So far, so good. The person who left him at the vet’s rang up and said she hoped he hadn’t been put down yet, as she had changed her mind, and could she have him back? The answer was no – once the cat had gone to a new home, that was it. He couldn’t be returned. They knew she had taken the cat in as a stray – she hadn’t reported him, hadn’t advertised, hadn’t made any attempt whatsoever to find out who he belonged to.

The pedigree people had details of various missing cats of similar description, and set about tracking down the true owner… and they found her! She had nearly given up all hope of seeing her cat again.

I’m delighted that story had a happy ending, but all the time I read that passage I was fuming. How dare someone just take him in and not try looking for the owner? The ‘rescuer’ even tried to have him put down without raising one little finger in that regard. Some people make the excuse that if a cat is wandering around, the owner can’t have been looking after it properly. If they don’t even know what happened, they’ll never be in a position to judge correctly – and even then their opinion will be subjective.

Very recently a stray kitten turned up here. Sharky brought him in, allowed him to eat his supper, and protected him from the indignation of Cheeky (Mum’s cat). First thing the next morning, Mum whisked the kitten away to the vet’s so that they could scan his microchip. That same day they found the owner and returned the kitten to her. She phoned up to say she was so relieved and glad Mum had taken the cat to be scanned. She has two little girls who were very upset about the kitten’s disappearance, and the kitten’s sibling was missing him! (Gosh, I know, potential for a real mushy sobfest – but I know from bitter experience that it’s really not funny when your pet goes missing). The story was that they had been outside playing with the kittens and called them to go back indoors with them, but Sharky’s fuzzy friend waltzed off to explore the big bad world.

Well, that was another happy ending. It would have been less happy if we’d been the type to keep him when he turned up at our door – those two wee girls could still have been thinking their kitten was dead.