cat napping to success

As we all know you can learn a lot from cats. They made us invent the internet, after all.

Our seventeen year old cat Eve has been poorly lately. She stopped eating (incredible!) and stopped drinking her water. She seemed OK for a few days. She still craved a cuddle on the long grass on the back lawn. She got slim for the first time since 1998, though what I call her ‘guts’ now dangled like an old man’s scrotum beneath her.

Don’t tell her I said that.

When the weather forecast for Sydney predicted 40C ahead we knew we had to get her to a vet. They kept her in overnight to rehydrate her and test her vital functions. Needless to say she passed with flying colours. They wanted to keep testing (just leave your credit card with us) but we wanted her home, even – especially – if she was dying.

She not busy being born is busy dying, as Bob Dylan might have said.

We got her home and she moped and licked her shaved bits but then she started eating and drinking again. This week she caught a mouse for the first time in a decade and brought it inside to show us. She pucked it around the warm wooden floor in the sunroom.

‘Magnificent!’ we declared. The poor little dead thing.

‘You’re next!’ she more or less meowed ‘if you take me back to the vet again.’

Lesson learned. But what lesson? Slim down? Rehydrate? Kill things? Live forever? Do what you want to do, be what you want to be, yeah?

She has slowed down a little again now and spends a lot of her time sleeping. I think that’s what she is trying to teach me; fall asleep in the shade. And show off when necessary.

It’s towards the end of another year and I’m blogging off to spend more time rewriting that almost published novel that I meant to use this blog promoting this year. Thanks for reading.

I hope to show you a dead mouse next year.

it is most mad and moonly

I’ve just been out looking at the first full moon of Spring. The Blood Moon in the East. It more or less rose over Point Piper where the Second Reign of Malcolm has begun.

And a few hours ago I was facing the other way. My tribe. The Black Cat Sun in the West.

I love this time of year in Sydney. The garden is berserk. I’m back.

Notes from Cribyn

We’re off road at a cottage in mid-Wales after weeks of wonderful hostings with family and friends.

The pace has been frantic and friendly and we’re ready for a rest. On the way to Wales yesterday I shouted ‘why are we still only going 40?’ and Wallington said ‘Who are you asking’ and I said ‘I’m shouting at the signs!’

it’s time to stop and smell the silage.

It’s weird driving across the UK with a three inch GPS screen as a map. You never quite know where you are on a broader scale. All you know is that you follow the A376589 for another 17 miles and then turn left. Now an then you need to turn around when possible. We’re like two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, mile after mile.

But fuck it is fun. The hedges down here in Wales are profuse and plump and vivid with Spring. Unbelievably gorgeous. If Wallington could ever get sick of me being happy it would happen now, but I think she prefers it to the very occasionally grumpy Redsall.

Just to make sure I don’t explode with joy I have a shithouse cold and I buggered my back over in France, as you do, but I won’t complain. I’m on the mend.

I’m reading books on Kindle which is a bit like driving via a GPS. Once I’ve started I’ve got no idea what the book is called (I have to go back to the menu page to find out) and I only know what % I’ve read. I can’t tell when chapters end (‘I’ll just finish this chapter/%) and when a dog (it wasn’t me) spilled a glass of wine on the Kindle in France it stopped working. The Kindle, not France. France was already out to lunch.

Anyway, even the orchestra is beautiful.

It is so peaceful and superb here in Wales, though Wallington did shed a tear at lunch because she misses all the wonderful kids that have been loving and entertaining us for weeks now. Me too.

We ate sandwiches and read The Guardian In the Wiston church graveyard today, and said our hellos and goodbyes to Wallington’s mum and the rest of the departed Welsh relatives. We’ve  got washed socks and undies over the heated towel rail in the bathroom, we’re miles from nowhere, and we’re happy – in case you were wondering.

Hong Kong

I finished reading Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread today. That’s a joy of being on holidays. I’ve been reading it for a month and I finished it in a day in Hong Kong. Poolside in a 32 degree day, then in the bar with a glass of Italian red wine.

I ended up weeping, which surprised Wallington as I’d spent most of the flight telling her it wasn’t a very good novel.

In the end, and at the end, I found it very affecting. It’s about family and loss and time passing.

Time passes quickly at 500 miles per hour at 38,000 feet. By the time I finished the book today it had four bookmarks. There was a boarding pass for flight CX162 to HK. There was a Gleebooks bookmark. There was a Cathay Pacific sanitised towelette in a foil wrapper. There was a Cathay Pacific individually wrapped toothpick. There was a business card from a concierge called Christian, from the Phillipines but working in HK.

All these bookmarks were a bit like the novel on fast forward. The things we accumulate as we speed through life.

I’ll leave them in the book and I’ll leave the book somewhere in the world and someone will find it and know where I was, briefly, in that world. And what I was reading.

Je suis despair

A warm day in Sydney. Beers after work with a mate who works at SBS TV.

Much beer debate about Charlie Hebdo and the appalling murders. I think the current magazine cover is a valid and sincere response. It provokes and placates. Well done.

Most of the Je Suis Charlie ‘movement’ I have found to be insincere, social media and real world nonsense and bullshit. Governments have piled in temporarily and hypocritically, media organisations ditto. Others ditto. I hope the next ironic zombie movie has them all carrying placards.

It won’t last. It already doesn’t exist. It’s a ghastly, ghostly, shallow left-wing and exploitative right-wing-Occupy vapour.

People walking together in the street in Paris and elsewhere in their millions is another thing. That is active, collective defiance with exercise built in. It says and means and demonstrates something.