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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, the rest of it went something like…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep tight.

The arty sites have a plethora of contests, just for fun, and I’ve been finding them a source of inspiration. I’ve only entered one so far, but got an honourable mention. I’ve been working with others in view, and it’s had the effect of making me even more prolific but not actually posting anything… just in case I post something I could have put in one of these small contests. Most of them say “only new images please.”

I’m usually reasonably pleased with the pictures I turn out, but something unsettling has occurred. The last four pictures I made… I didn’t just like them; I loved them. I was using techniques I avoided before (drawing and painting) and didn’t set out meaning to; it just happened. Even stranger, I only wanted to make one of them, and that was in the nature of a quickie (to try out a Photoshop tutorial).

A short aside: I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to talking about this particular hobby. I don’t like saying ‘my art’ or ‘my artwork’ as it sounds so pompous, and usually alternate between ‘my pictures’ and ‘my images’… but that gets old quite fast. Another mental block I have is when it comes to digital stuff, I can never say “I painted” or “I drew,” as I see those being for traditional media only (real pencils, paints, paper). I know that ‘painting’ and ‘drawing’ are accepted terms in digital media too… isn’t drawing with a mouse or a tablet pen just as much a physical process as drawing with a pencil? And it’s not even as precise, half the time. Still, I avoid it, as I know if I said “I painted a picture today,” most people would assume I’d had the watercolours out.

That leaves me with the problem of how to describe the process… “I made something, created something, did something?” Icky. Overtones of school and Blue Peter.

About the four pictures I made that I liked more than I expected to… I was fairly sure none of them would work, and if they did, it would take some hard slogging to make anything of them; wouldn’t it be easier to make a vector picture with gradients and layer styles? I was in two minds about trying these projects at all. Even worse, I disliked the raw material I started out with… two ugly fractals, an artificial vector flower (made by myself in Paintshop Pro), an untidy Photoshop brush (still be to superceded… deliberately spelling that with a ‘c’…) and a shaky drawing with the small El Cheapo tablet dating from the Year 2000 which I recently dug out from a plastic bag. (It doesn’t go with Mac System X, so I had to put it on the PC… and even then the installation was a bit iffy).

The tablet is supposed to make drawing easier, but my first effort was messy and not worth a second look. I thought “never mind, I’ll send it across to the Mac so the little white Mac-mouse can clean it up.” That’s not what the tablet is for… but the shaky drawing is now in one of my Golden Four pictures.

The thing is, you often hear people say (usually of photos) that if it was bad to start with, you can’t make it good. I disagree. You could take the worst photo in the world and turn it into a thing of beauty, though it probably wouldn’t be a photo any more.

To start with, it’s all I can do to keep on with these tough projects, but as time goes by and I see signs that something good is emerging, a sense of wonder creeps in… and you couldn’t drag me away.

This might not seem to be connected, but we were watching Stargate after missing the beginning. It was about an alien city in a dome; the citizens were linked to a main computer and were being brainwashed. People were being killed to keep the population small and manageable, and the survivors’ memories were altered so that they wouldn’t notice their fellows had vanished. I was convinced the Council (or some higher body) were the villains, but they were as much victims as anybody. At the end, I said to Mum, “who was doing it?”
“The computer,” said Mum, squinting strangely at me.
“I just thought… someone must have programmed it to do those things?”
“It was the computer. It got into their minds, like it’s got into yours, and makes them all unseeing and unheeding…”

So, the computer’s the villain. Such a weaver of fantastic worlds and things that don’t exist… even pictures that aren’t on paper. Though, the other day, someone I was talking to said it wasn’t till she had one of her fractals professionally printed and held it in her hands that she realized it was real.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen when I die… will all these pictures, including the Golden Four, be zapped? My diaries burned, disks shredded, words lost? My whole life on computer, deleted.

Mum says she doesn’t care what happens after she dies. The whole planet could blow up; it wouldn’t make any difference to her. But it matters to me. Apart from caring what happens to cats, trees, and dolphins, I want to feel I’ve left some kind of mark. If the planet implodes, so do my pictures. Maybe I will be the only person (apart from Mum and the Computer) to have seen them.

It’s funny how the subconscious mind operates. The other night I dreamed a young student was procrastinating by churning out fractals and Apophysis scripts instead of studying for his exams. His study topics included fractals but he was wasting time on fractal art instead. He even wrote a little poem which he put on his site… and this is it, word for word, not a woolly half-memory of a fading dream:

The breaks are in the wrong places but it has exactly 17 syllables… like a haiku. Yes, I suppose the computer has got into my mind.

Goodness me:
Show Us What’s Happening (contest). I don’t feel inspired myself, but had been wondering if I could depict agoraphobia or even deafness; this contest isn’t a world away from it.

The other day I was brushing my teeth and pondering (don’t we all?) on the uncertainty I often feel about the day ahead. I was wondering how I would describe that if I had to. At first I thought “it’s like going to battle without your armour,” but we don’t wear armour today…

This is the nearest I can come to it: it’s like going to work in your pyjamas and bunny slippers, and everybody else speaks a different language. It’s going to rain, and you haven’t brought your umbrella or handbag, which are at home with the door unlocked. You’ve got on the bus and and realize to your horror that you either don’t have the fare or have lost your ticket, and you don’t recognize the part of town you’re in.

I hate feeling like that in the morning.

Mum was tempted by an offer of four trial months of free Sky TV (after £75 initial set-up, delivery of Sky box and installation of mini-dish). So now we have a dish on our house too.

It’s been enjoyable so far, though it’s shocking how little is subtitled, including programmes which are subtitled sometimes, and other times not. They must do something about that, as it seems such a waste of energy and resources.

We have seen The Colour of Magic amongst other things, very good.

A few days after the Sky box was installed, we tried to watch a DVD. Nothing happened… I suspected the DVD was playing but not showing up on the TV screen. I crawled behind the TV and changed the Scart cables around – the Sky guy had placed them so that they both ran from the TV. I put the DVD player in the middle, taking both cables so that the TV had one and the Sky box had the other.

The DVD sprang to life on the TV screen (already part of the way through).

After watching the film, we tried to watch Sky again, and this time Sky wasn’t responding. Again I crawled behind the TV and switched the cables round to Plan C… this time I discovered that it mattered which Scart socket you used! I thought it didn’t matter, but it does. The Sky box has one socket for the TV and another for the video or DVD player, so this time I put the Sky box in the middle, with one cable running to the TV and the other to the DVD player. The sockets on the other units matter as well, but I swapped the Scarts round till I figured out which ones worked.

This time we could watch Sky, and we could also watch a DVD if we switched off the Sky box first. But the Sky picture was green!!

“You’ve lost all the red,” said Mum, accusingly. After a little head-scratching, I crawled behind the TV again and discovered that one of the Scart cables wasn’t as well pushed in as I thought; pushing it all the way in was all that was needed to restore ‘normal’ colour to the TV screen…

We now have a TV set-up we can continue to use.

The excitement wasn’t entirely over, as Mum got a letter saying they were going to start debiting her account at the end of the month… she phoned and said she’s barely even started the four-month trial period she was promised, and they said they accidentally sent out letters saying they would, but they weren’t going to, and Mum’s money is safe for now.

Funny how it’s never easy.

Tonight I watched Changing Lanes starring Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman (if I remembered their names correctly! Did I? A miracle, then; I never seem to remember names now). I would say it was a Tom and Jerry film for grown-ups, and it was screwing me up just watching it… but by the end I was able to say, “good stuff – I like it!” Probably more than I liked Tom and Jerry (which was ‘not much’).

I decided the lawyer was Tom, while Doyle was Jerry.

Every time Ben Affleck (the ‘lawyer’) got that panicky, cornered look on his face and said “yes, this is what I need for my life to continue to run smoothly!” your stomach lurched… good acting, really.

My ‘maternal kitten’ Delilah was watching children on the TV again… this time she latched onto the sons of Doyle (Morgan’s character). She heard them screaming and crying, and was all motherly concern. Just in case they would like to know.

For no clear reason, the song in my head has changed to Here Comes the Sun.

Little darling, it seems the ice is slowly melting
Little darling, it feels like years since it’s been here
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun
It’s alright

It’s both sunny and icy, and Delilah (kitten) is unsure of the wisdom of venturing outdoors – I’d say she had perfect sense. However, I feel as though I’m cast in the role of singing “little darling”…

A little while back I said there was something particularly sweet about Delilah – Mum said the girl at the vet was saying how lovely she was. I said they wouldn’t have said that about Samson, and Mum laughed at the thought. Samson is all round-eyed tom… young, gangling, cautious and shy, but definitely a (neutered) tom.

There’s something motherly about Delilah, though still a kitten with sharp claws – an oxymoron, almost. (I’m starting to lose all faith in the existence of oxymorons, but that’s for another blog post). Delilah’s not sure about going outside, but Samson let himself out before I was quite ready… just like Sharky did. He seemed to be getting on fine, and didn’t run off anywhere, so I relaxed. Watching them milling about at suppertime, I said to Mum “it occurred to me I shouldn’t worry about them running away – it’s more likely we will never get rid of them!”

Later that night when it got dark, we were watching TV. I glimpsed Samson moving stealthily in the darkness of the hall. A couple of times his eyes turned towards us, shining like lamps. It put me in mind of Sharky disappearing one night quite soon after we got here. We didn’t know if he knew his way back, and left the doors open till he finally came back. It got chilly and we put our coats on. On that occasion, Sharky had moved about in the hall just the same way, flashing his eyes.

During a commercial break, I left the room and came upon Delilah, sitting in the middle of the hallway. “Delilah says her boyfriend is missing,” I said. I didn’t look round to see if he was there or not, and hadn’t known he had left the house… but I knew what Delilah was saying.

“No, he’s not – he’s right there!” said Mum, pointing at his bed.
“Oh,” I said, mentally kicking myself for reading something into the body language of cats that hadn’t been there, but when we reached Samson’s bed, we found it empty.

We did the leaving-doors-open-wearing-coats thing. He was gone till the early hours of the morning, and Delilah was very worried and upset. Every time we took a walk around outside, she peeked out as well, and stared into the dark with sorrowful eyes.

I took her to watch the film with me – it was Jewel of the Nile. The girl in the film was imprisoned by her mortal enemy, who told her “your man is dead.” She gasped in shock and said “no, he’s not! He wouldn’t die without telling me!” We looked at Delilah, and smiled.

Now, every time Samson comes back from somewhere, Delilah grabs him round the neck and says “come here, I have to check that you’re all in one piece.” Mum complained once that Delilah wouldn’t let her out the front door… she parked herself in front of it and scowled.

We were discussing where Samson went to that night, as we thought maybe something happened to make him think twice about going out the next day. “He can’t tell us,” shrugged Mum.
“If anybody could tell us, it would be Delilah,” I said, and we giggled at the thought. That girl makes her feelings known. Wouldn’t you be glad to have her in your corner?

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 had another blog post in mind for tonight but wasn’t feeling particularly chirpy… it will keep for tomorrow. I thought I had been getting on OK with a particular crowd (nothing to do with blogging), then realized some of them would talk to the ‘usual’ people while leaving me out, no matter how often my name came up in the conversation. There seemed no particular reason for it, and maybe there really wasn’t one; it was just habit. I know people communicate in different ways and probably aren’t thinking about it that hard.

I realized today that the same crowd talk to each other on another site… could well be why they feel they all know each other, whereas I’m not one of the merry band. It’s just sheer coincidence that I turned up there anyway.

Goodness, I do know that people have different conversational habits and needs and sometimes don’t realize how they are coming across; the other night I spent an hour or two designing a silly 3D kitchen for my sister (using daft graphics as textures and patterns) because I thought it would make her laugh. Her email response was: “too modern”. I know she probably laughed anyway, and it’s her habit to make the short, dry understatement; she’s known for it. We make jokes about how “quite nice” is high praise coming from her. It’s just that sometimes I need evidence of that laugh… or a watery smile would do.

There’s nothing worse than being demanding or pushing for attention, but sometimes being patient and accepting gets very hard… why did it come in mind that someone blogged today (or recently) about patience being active rather than passive? I think it was a post for BlogFriday’s word ‘active’, come to think of it. It’s a state of mind that has to be kept in place despite all wobbles.

I wound up in a fit of the doldrums and trailed off to watch my TV at the back of the room, Delilah purring on my lap. We watched Celebrity Come Dine with Me, Cotton Wool Kids, and something about Chinese schoolchildren slaving away for their exams. There were some very young kids in the programme and Delilah turned round and stared. I think she would have batted cat toys around for them if they had been in the room.

Eventually I rose to check for messages on the new site. Earlier I’d seen someone’s name there, someone I liked normally but didn’t talk much to, and left a quick message saying “hi, it’s me from (the other site), just thought I would say hello.” I kept it short and casual as she probably wouldn’t want to be conversational. I checked my messages and there was one from her, saying “oh, great to see you here! (Hugs). What a surprise. Do you know X, Y, and Z are here too?”

And… I felt so much better! Well the sadness won’t go away just like that, especially as I now have a headache (aw diddums), but it was wonderful to be greeted so pleasantly! Tomorrow perspective will return – but has already made a start, sending me the estimated arrival time of its train. And then I will write the other blog post I was planning.

Just passing these along… hugs to anyone out there who needed a few.

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!

I woke too early again, and Delilah licked my face. This always makes me cringe, for a reason. For years I’ve had to push away any cat who wanted to lick my face and it makes me feel terrible, like pushing away a child who tries to kiss your cheek. At least you could explain to old-enough children why you were doing that, but you can never explain to a cat.

You wish they would curl up comfortably in the crook of your neck and not try to do the lick. If you let them snuggle up again after blocking them, they try to lick again. If you’ve put up a hand, sometimes they sneak their nose under and lick you anyway.

When Delilah licked my face, I rubbed the area energetically, but after about 30 seconds, my skin started to itch and prickle. I had to get up and slap some TCP on – that’s the only thing (that I’ve tried) that stops the itching and prevents spots from forming. Rinsing your face with plain water doesn’t help, even with vigorous towelling afterwards.

I’ve a feeling I mentioned this before, saying that I was taking my bottle of TCP so much for granted that one day when I reached for it and tried to splash a little into the palm of my hand, all that came out one one solitary drip. I thought that bottle would go on forever and was almost in mourning.

When I got back into bed I was so wide awake I considered heading straight for the computer to type in a Google search: “skin reaction to cat licks.” Fortunately common sense prevailed and I aimed for more sleep instead. There’s something not quite right if you’re Googling for every little thing at all hours of the day and night.

I dreamed that a crime was being committed, to do with someone’s missing daughter. In my dream I contacted the police anonymously, as they hadn’t been aware of the crime up till then, and later on they came to the school (where we were all sitting in assembly) and put out a message (which somehow I was reading as a gigantic printed email hung over the top of the stage) about how everybody had to be very wary and alert, and if there was anybody there called Diddums, would she please get in touch. Informants had told them Diddums pronounced her name with a stress on the DID… that might be a small clue as to her identity.

I knew they hoped I might have more to tell them, but I DIDn’t. I wasn’t very worried, and while everybody else was looking at each other, saying “who’s Diddums?” I was wondering fretfully who it was who had been telling the police how I spoke, and how did they know that without knowing who I was, and what was wrong with pronouncing Diddums that way anyway?? Was it wrong? Did everybody else say, for example, “Little DidDUMS was acting up this morning?”

I’m constantly being tripped up by words I only know from reading them… for instance, today I was watching The Weakest Link. Anne Robinson asked “what kind of hat has a name that means ‘bell’?”
“Cloche!” I said, smugly – pronouncing it ‘closhay’.
The girl being asked the question said “cap?”
Anne said “no, cloche!” (pronouncing it ‘closh’).
Oh. Sometimes I wonder how I would do in a quiz show if I gave the right answer but pronounced it wrong.
But I’m rambling…

I had got about that far in my dream, wondering why the police considered my pronunciation was so offbeat, then my nose twitched and I smelled bacon frying. “Very nice,” I thought, “but she shouldn’t have started it so early… I’m too tired to get up, even for bacon and eggs.” Then Mum was trying to wake me up. I felt so sleepy I couldn’t move, and could only blink my eyes at her. Gradually it occurred to me that nobody was frying bacon… it was just that some kitten had been visiting the tray.

I probably wouldn’t have moved for some time, but Delilah came and slurped my cheek despite the smell of TCP.

After leaping up precipitately and rushing for my TCP bottle, I discovered a crime scene in the bathroom… plant soil everywhere. Some unknown individual or individuals had thrown the plant bodily off the bathroom shelf. The prime suspect is one Miss Delilah, along with her usual partner in crime, Master Samson. We had a bit of cleaning up to do before we could go out anywhere. Mum wanted to go right after, but I said I was hollow with cleaning up everywhere and hadn’t even had breakfast, so she said “hurry up.” As nobody had been frying any bacon, it had to be cereal.

It was not till the evening I made that Google search for ’skin reaction to cat licks’ and…. ha ha! It seems I’m allergic to cats.

I don’t know why I was so surprised. I was allergic to my grandmother’s Siamese cat when I came home after my first term at university. It was so bad I couldn’t lie down to sleep – too congested. It eased with time…

Obviously it’s a very mild allergy now. Cat scratches go red and white, and itch. I sneeze and wheeze, and my throat catches on nothing. Only today I was lining up in the bank, and all of a sudden my throat stung, my eyes watered, and I was concerned that it would be my turn to talk to the bank clerk and I would be too busy choking. Fortunately I calmed down before I got to the counter… bank queues are never that quick.

When your throat catches in that manner, the worst thing you can do is cough. You want to cough, but if you cough, it stings more. I must have breathed in a particle of musty bank dust or something, and my throat was already oversensitive. Maybe the musty mote of dust flew off another cat owner, waiting ahead of me in the queue.

Shortly after the kittens arrived to live with us, I noticed my nose was getting very red and itchy – almost sore. I said “maybe it’s because Samson insists on standing right under my nose to be stroked, and all the dust flies off him,” but I wasn’t being serious. I thought it was more likely to be pollen beginning its mad Spring whirl, or dust from hoovering the house or changing the cat litter tray. But some of these websites point out that you can be desensitized to your old cat, and when it dies and you bring a new one in, suddenly you’re sneezing and wheezing.

The throat thing was something I didn’t realize might have anything to do with cats. Ah… (light bulb switches on over head).

I would never have kept cats this long if any of these reactions had been extreme, so I don’t see my lifestyle changing in a hurry. One thing that did shock me when I was reading up on cat allergies was that some people are allergic to cat owners and not just cats. Someone described swelling up when sitting next to some oblivious pet owner on the bus. I don’t sit on buses these days, but it makes me feel terrible that I could have that effect on anyone. Oy.

I began Brother Odd by Dean Koontz at lunchtime yesterday, and was completely hooked from page 3 onwards… didn’t put it down till I finished it in the early hours of the next morning. I’d meant to write a letter and didn’t need the distraction – still, we can’t always predict these things! Brother Odd is quite an unusual book to me, though it seems there are other ‘Odd’ books by the same writer; I’ll have to look them out.

I have a headache again, I’m not sure where it comes from.

Delilah strained her paw a couple of nights ago and left poor Samson to bat toy mice around by himself for a while.

Cheeky is the adult cat who is chasing the kittens, but today she came prowling in here, looking menacingly under things… “here kitty, kitty, where ARE you?”… and she didn’t notice one of the ‘kittens’, quite a large tomcatty Samson, was treading on her heels. When she caught a whisper of something, and glanced behind, she got such a shock that she spat violently and galloped off with Samson pelting delightedly behind.

He looked so pleased with himself, whereas Cheeky was anything but. Perhaps Delilah’s opting out made him all bored, full of himself and ready for new adventures. Talking of which, I can see exactly how Delilah would have hurt herself – undeterred by her sore paw, she flung herself across the gap between the back of the sofa and a shelf. She slammed into the shelf and slid to the floor.

While moving my blog, I discovered it’s full of stories about my older cats, especially Sharky. Mostly I avoid talking about the cats too much, as I worry that it’s dull – but it made me happy to reread the posts about isolated moments I might otherwise have forgotten.

Here’s one from a night ago… Mum came up about 21:00 (unexpectedly) with some coffee for me, then toddled off. Samson came yawning and stretching from wherever he had been resting, and looked in his empty dish, then stared from it to Mum’s disappearing back. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t brought him refreshments as well.

I think he’s quite enjoying himself – he’s gone from being a terrified Invisible Sulk to an accepted and respected member of our group – no longer just hanging around in the background of a large crowd of kittens.

I discovered to my delight that it’s back-to-back Red Dwarf with subtitles on TV… goes on till nearly 3 in the morning, so I’m recording some for later. I wondered if I’d ‘grown out’ of it but was yelling with laughter the way I always used to, so it seems not.

Smoke me a kipper – I’ll be back for breakfast.

Mum glanced in the room, and saw the Invisible Sulk sprawled on my printer.
“How did you know you had to sit there?” she said. “Do you know the name of the cat who used to sit there? Did his ghost speak to you?”
The Invisible Sulk gave her a look, then turned round and settled back down with his back to her.
“He says, ‘what ghost? There’s no ghost’” I said.

It’s just a nice place to sit.

Earlier I had gone downstairs to get fresh juice. Mum was sitting playing Hoyle cards on her Mac.

I told her the girl kitten was bored, and was jumping all over me with her claws.
“I don’t know why they won’t come down here and play,” said Mum.

Then I said I was trying to work out why Father Ted was so funny.
“I don’t find it funny,” said Mum, staring at her virtual cards.
In the split instant before she said it, I knew she was going to say it, even though the other day I said I always rather liked Father Ted, and she nodded and said “yes.”
She always says she doesn’t find things funny, and it takes a little of the fun out of it for me – unless it’s something I don’t find funny either. Sometimes I think…. but that’s just paranoia talking!

I stood quietly for a moment, then twirled into the kitchen to get my juice.
“You never find anything funny,” I shot back, not sure why I was annoyed.
Mum spluttered – “I just don’t find it funny, Diddums, don’t know why.”

I got my juice and went to the bottom of the stairs, about to start up, and two little kittens who had been crouched there, eavesdropping on our conversation, turned round and hurried back upstairs again.

I chuckled, and Mum said “they’re wondering what you’re doing down here in Enemy Territory.”

Fair question… I hope they hold back on the thumbscrews.

The new girl is making a difference – the boy (Sulk) has started coming out a bit more, but usually only when the girl is scampering around. I wondered if he was jealous of the attention she was getting – she would be purring around me, and then the boy would appear, and start to walk towards us, then at the last minute his eyes would widen in horror, and he would turn aside and slink away again.

It got so that I studiously ignored him, as every time I looked directly at him, he stopped dead and backed off. Finally I managed to pat him, and he got purry and happy… after a while I was thinking “glad to meet you, but I want to get on with my typing now!” and he was still purring and paddling with his paws. I didn’t want to put him off by stopping, but finally I went away to have my lunch.

Later on he was sitting on top of the printer beside me, where Sharky used to sit, looking quite relaxed and happy. Maybe that was his favourite spot whenever I was away from the room. I keep a piece of fleece on it to protect my silvery printer from feline claws. They say cats shouldn’t sit on printers and monitors, but there isn’t a lot we can do about it! At least this printer sort of folds away at the top so that the dust doesn’t get in too quickly; I also keep a dust cover on it.

The kitten situation, though improving, is still kind of dodgy. They are usually hiding when I come back into the room, and they jump nervously if you move too quickly or when something goes ‘bump’ somewhere. I was coming downstairs with the girl kitten in my arms, and Mum moved boxes so that something crashed loudly. The kitten flinched, and I said “do you mind, I’ve got the kitten here!”

A bit like when people say “not in front of the children, dear!”

I don’t think they’ll be jumpy forever, but it makes me jumpy in case I scare them off.

I’ve never had such problems with kittens, not even Fusspot the Siamese. Oriental cats in general are bold and extrovert – Sharky certainly was. I told Kristin I would miss him forever, and that’s no lie.

It doesn’t take much to set me off again. Last night I was watching Ugly Betty, and [censored – I've just realized it's a spoiler]. The desperation in her face reminded me of how I felt as we got closer to Sharky’s time, especially when she said “that’s the first time I’ve been able to say it out loud.”

I keep talking to Sharky in my head – mostly just “I love you.” But I don’t say “I miss you,” because that’s admitting he’s not even here to get my message.

I don’t think it will help the kittens if I sit here bubbling miserably, but maybe it’s been making the Sulk sorry for me – who knows?

…and where have the pair of them got to now??