A Cat's Tale.

 Not everyone wants to be saved from their current life-style. Some could be quite well adjusted to living in a manner that others may think is not ideal for their best physical or (heaven help us) mental health. Hoarders, for instance. Feral cats for another instance.

This is not a portrait of the cat that has recently been moved into my neighbourhood. He is reluctant to pose for a portrait during his very frequent visits to my garden, despite the fact that he's spending so much time here. He glowers through the windows at me as he scampers past on his way to the killing fields at the bottom of the garden. If he had fingers I'm sure he would raise a couple of them in my direction. However, I think the portrait sort-of sums him up, a shifty-looking loner. I hope I'm not being too hard in my judgements, but if I am it's because I have good reason.

He's a townie, a street-wise city cat; a thieving, murderous cat.  Or at least he was until he was rescued by a well-intentioned neighbour. He's oldish, sexually active, an enthusiastic hunter, a fighter and has probably been fed by numerous other well-intentioned people in the city centre, such as those very kind ladies (usually) from the Cats' Protection League. Or he's a skilled scavenger. Or possibly he knows about cat-flaps and how to get through them when they are left unattended. Or all of these in combination. But he's survived independently, lived a busy life, may well have numerous children of all sorts of sizes and ages.

But now he's been brought to live here, alongside many other cats who have their own devoted owners and their own cat-flaps which open and close in conjunction with their own microchipped shoulders. Not much chance of a nifty raid on someone else's supper dish. Not even much chance of a dustbin raid during the night. Everyone has those massive wheelie-bins, and if a cat falls into one of those he won't get out again. I expect he knows that. Even less chance of a quickie with a local girl. The local girls have their flaps locked in the early evenings. They stay at home, watching television programmes about wild-life, or just sleeping comfortably on  a cushion or a lap while being stroked. Not even the chance of a fight. The local boys don't go out after dark either. They have all met with the local Vet.

During the day he can run across the road, causing vehicles to swerve, and go hunting in a garden full  of dear little fluttering birds. Some of them can hardly fly and are just a mouthful. There are all sorts of birds that he won't have met in the town-centre. There are great hiding places, and easy pickings. The only problem is that he now knows there's a rather fearsome white-haired old lady who's recently spent about £40 on bird-food and who is very much against the continuation of massacre.

What he doesn't know, and what the white-haired old lady knows is that he has an appointment with the Vet coming up soon.

Ha! 

P.S: He's had his treatment from the Vet and is recovering in his new home. It seems that he's realised his new home could have benefits, because he hasn't been seen in my garden since Operation Day. My neighbour says he (the cat) is completely different. The birds and I wait and see.

P.P.S. Oh no he's not!

Letter to a Fairly New Grandson.

 

Dear Smallest Grandson,

Such good news!

You arrived in England, coping well with a long drive into Germany and a shorter flight across to London and have stayed on for a holiday. You have met your English Granny, your Uncle and Aunt, your two cousins and even a few of your parents' friends. It has been a very special time for us all, and I think it has been for you, too.

I hope you will have some memories of it because your parents managed to organise such a lovely location for our meeting (and went through all the necessary isolation and testing processes needed for travel). You did it, they did it, we all did it. Even the weather was kind to us.

So you have met us all, not as the baby we've seen on Skype, but as a walking, very aware, fully interactive toddler, full of curiosity and specific interests.

Music! Yes! (A specific musical toy handed on from your cousins which has been used an awful lot.)   Birds! Oh yes! Any birds, large or small, anywhere. Good on water, good on grass, good zooming about overhead, good but a bit frustrating to chase. Food! Usually enjoyable, always interesting at so many levels (literally; on the plate, on the floor, on the face and hands but being manipulated with increasing skill into the mouth). Your Daddy's and Uncle's 40 year-old toys; I'm so glad I have an attic large enough to store the best for you and your cousins. (Well done, Fisher Price.) Textures, especially the giant bear called Ollie Gark, and the sheep-skin rug that your cousins think is a polar bear.

                                       (And you've had a smart London haircut since this photo was taken!)

You enjoy your bed, too. Even an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar place. You settle into it at around 7p.m and sleep, peacefully sleep for nearly twelve hours. What a wonderfully calm and happy toddler.

You came, you saw and you certainly conquered, Little One,

With lots of love from Granny.

I Didn't Intend This to Happen.

                                            

 Easter Monday, and the near-by hills are veiled in mist, low cloud and swirling hail-stones. Yesterday their sky-line was dense with silhouettes of walkers, cyclists, runners, and the sky above them swirled with multicoloured parachutes and their dangling navigators. 

We live with unpredictability, all of us, and sometimes see safety being sacrificed to opportunity - the chance of a crowded get-together in the sunshine versus the risk of infection, the chance of airing the parachute versus the chance of a freak gust of wind. Sometimes it feels quite like the Good/Bad/Dangerous Old Days; a bit of  'let's grab the opportunity', 'let's do it before Someone stops us again', 'it's going to snow tomorrow - let's do it today'.

In my younger days (a long time ago) I valued opportunity and generally went for it at full-tilt and occasionally at some risk to myself. I had a few somewhat alarming experiences and never mentioned them to anyone, knowing I might be prevented from having such adventures again. Health-and-Safety and Mental-Health were not on anyone's agenda in those days. No one knew such things existed, let alone tiptoed around the mine-fields that they have become. Risk assessment? What was that? Looking back I'm quite surprised that I'm still here but I have no regrets about any of my past adventures. Well, hardly any. I still haven't told anyone though.

What I didn't see coming was caution, concern, a low-level anxiety, even a small measure of what can only be called timidity. How truly awful; how cramping of the life-style. And now I have to think, 'what life-style?'

I'm so fortunate, so appreciative of having had two doses of Pfizer. Genuinely fortunate, genuinely appreciative, and still the kind, caring, sheets of information come, signed by Matt (Hancock) who is fast becoming my most faithful and regular correspondent. I feel cared about, protected, thought about - and fearful. Still hugely appreciative, but also aware that I am no longer able to be true to myself.

This is a time like no other. I have very vague memories of War Time. I was born shortly after The War started - the Second World War, that is. But my memory tells me that shops were open, cinemas too. I went to see Snow White and Lassie Come Home and had to be removed from both in floods of noisy tears by my embarrassed mother, making vivid memories of an afternoon in 1945. There was rationing, there were no bananas, no new clothes, the only toys were homemade. But we, my small gang of girls and I were free agents when out of school, and never once was there a term-time weekday when school wasn't open. Bombs fell, people died, bad things happened but life went on for some of us in the most unbridled and adventurous way.

It was never on my horizon to become an anxious old woman but that's what seems to be happening. As the external situation seems to be improving my internal one splutters and fails. My anxieties are all for  others, a category now constantly referred to as 'loved ones'. I've been vaccinated but I know that I could still infect others, unknowingly, stealthily dangerous.

I have been informed many times that I'm in a position of extreme vulnerability and now I'm afraid that I feel it, and I don't know how to escape from it.  The Shielding Category officially ended on the first of April, but not for the shielded who are advised to continue as far as possible.

I really didn't intend to become old and anxious.

Sorry, Loved Ones!

P.S. The cure for timidity seems to be driving on three motorways twice each (for completely valid and essential reasons). Encountering hurtling lorries seems surprisingly good for Mental Health.

Just About a Year.......

  

Just about a year of near-isolation. Shielding. Initially being told not to leave the house, then not to leave the premises, being allowed out a bit, but then back in again, now to remain shielded until the end of the month. Then what?

A project, that's what.

Just about a year of sorting out house and garden. Everyone now has sacks and boxes and bags full of  amazing STUFF; unwanted, outgrown, outdated STUFF, and no one can donate it to the charity shops. For a long time no one could even take it to the local rubbish dumps. We've all been living with it and now we really want to live without it. I am resolved to need considerably less, and I never needed much to start with. Not really. Books, paper, pens, cooking things, a few clothes. It's interesting to find how much I've been able to do without this year. 

My garden has been my refuge. It has protected my sanity....or has it? I was having help with it, but initially I was not able to continue that. I lost weight and, surprise, surprise, I could cope without help. 

I bought myself a Christmas present on-line. Ratchet, telescopic long-handled loppers. I could cope. I could do almost everything from ground-level but not heavy building and deconstruction work.

So now there's a project about to start.

This garden is complex and labour-intensive, made even more so by my husband's determination to use only recycled materials for his projects. He died fourteen years ago, and the garden had remained as something of a memorial to his skill and persistence. The stained glass portrait above is a rather surprising likeness of him on a bad day. It's supposedly of Saint Luke, but there's a resemblance. He placed it above the door of his second home-made summer-house. The rest of the summer-house is built from old timbers, including doors which his grand-daughter is always hoping will lead to Narnia or somewhere involving Harry Potter. 

There are magical play-places, but increasingly risky play-places as old and rotting timbers and much more ancient stone crumbles away.

There is a great deal of stone and grandchildren love climbing on it. There's an area they call 'Flower Mountain', partly built of stone removed from a local church during restoration work. You can see exactly why the stone masons needed to remove and replace such stone. It crumbles away, disintegrates in frost. It's trying to get back into earth. It is no longer safe for small scrabbling feet and hands.

Quite soon there will be different stonemasons working here to restore and stabilise Flower Mountain so that it can be climbed safely, but Saint Luke and his rather warped surroundings will be leaving the garden and will be replaced by a new patio area.

I find this difficult because I think I know what my late husband might feel about my actions. It's really hard to do this, to change something that has the nature of a memorial, but I've had a lot of solitary thinking time this year. I may need to be somewhere else while Saint Luke is taken down though, shielding or not.

Fourteen years after a death and the moving-on can still be difficult, but during this extraordinary year we have all changed. My husband never met his two daughters-in law, nor his three grandchildren. Who am I to say what he would be thinking? He would possibly have been prepared to tear down his garden structures with his bare hands in order to keep them safe. Or to get them climbing ropes and make them do it properly.

Saint Luke will be safely rehomed within the family.  

Perhaps the children will make him look more cheerful.

And I will be here, keeping busy and waiting to see what might happen next.

 

Keeping the Rules

 

I went out for my permitted walk yesterday, and returned to find this, photographed through the vine leaves by my neighbour. I thought there had been a sudden snowfall on my lawn, but there was a magnificent Sparrowhawk, being a Pigeonhawk and doing some socially-distanced outdoor eating.

She was keeping the rules, just as I am. ('She' because she is so much larger and more powerful than the male. Please note that this is a fact and not a sexist comment, and this girl was huge - even more huge when she tried to take off with a pigeon-filled crop.)

Although the very difficult 'shielding' situation has been lifted, people in my situation of extreme vulnerability have been advised to return to isolation with the exception of being able to meet one other person outdoors to go for a walk.

In recent days this has been good, in sunshine and with magnificent autumnal colour surrounding us all. In rolling mist it's not so good, but still possible. In wind and rain it's still possible and it has to be, otherwise my legs will drop off. 

What is not possible is travelling to meet people far away, or even relatively near. Not even going next door to say thank you for the photograph.

How I wished that my nephew was here to photograph this beautiful bird, but he's in New Zealand in Southern hemisphere spring-time. He has created so many superb photographs of birds (and many other things). However, two days ago we managed to talk via Skype, in the evening for me and the next day's breakfast time for him. As we concluded our talk another Skype call came through. It was my elder son and my youngest grandson, playing in a sunny room at mid-day on the same day as here. They were stacking wooden bricks and grandson was chewing on a plastic giraffe in front of huge windows with views of sky-scrapers and distant snowy mountains. Not their usual views in Austria. Grandson is in Canada for his parents' wedding tomorrow and the distant mountains are the Rockies.

I've not yet been able to meet my nine-month old grandson, I won't be able to attend my son's wedding, I haven't properly talked with my nephew for a long time, but I genuinely, genuinely feel a very fortunate old biddy.

I'm still here, and there is now some hope of this solitude changing. In the meantime technology enables me to reach across the world, over time-zones, through night and day, into tomorrow and back to yesterday: to see and talk to people who are so important to me, to have virtual suppers with grand-daughter and grandson senior, to witness the development of a baby and to have some form of attendance at a wedding half a world away.

We keep the rules in the huge hope that they, and the possibility of vaccines, will work.

Migration

 

They come and they go,  leave and return, sometimes travelling huge distances, scything through the air before arriving at a familiar site, arriving for food, warmth, safety and comfort. They are mysteriously drawn to the place they knew first, where they learned to fly, to swim, to crawl. They can travel through darkness, cold and heat. Then, in this place of ancient memory their offspring are imprinted with the knowledge of the same journey and will be able to navigate the same complex route, following the patterns of the stars, the smell of the rivers, the temperatures of the changing seasons, the many other chemical and geo-physical factors involved, most of them still mysterious. Here, in this special place they too will realise the  importance of familiarity, the value of sanctuary. In turn so will their offspring. And so on, through the generations.

I live quite close to the river Severn, near to a place where a special route is being created to enable returning salmon to continue their journey from the cool waters of the Atlantic ocean, upstream to their spawning ground in the middle of this country. There, often in the exact place where they hatched, they lay their eggs. As the eggs develop into infant smolts the tiny fish leave their freshwater spawning grounds. Their bodies develop the ability to live in salt water as they begin their journey back to the sea. A form of adolescence perhaps? After several years of travelling huge distances in the oceans many adult salmon return to the exact location of their hatching place. Where they die creating more life, but I don't need to emphasise that bit.

Sometimes, not quite so often in the last few years, I can watch and hear the screaming aerobatics of house martins, swifts and swallows who have flown thousands of miles to raise their families here, then to return the youngsters to warmth for winter. In turn their off-spring will make the same annual journey from the heat of Africa and Southern Europe to raise their own young in the cool, damp, insect-rich British countryside. They have left now, as the nights grow cool at the equinox. Not all of them will make it back to their warm holiday homes, many will die, young and old during the course of their extraordinary and perilous travelling.

The frogs hop back to the garden pond where they were hatched. They know where they are in the garden. They know the good, soggy hiding places. They know all about the Spring Frog-Fest, the noise and spluttering excitement, and the tadpoles know too. They come back and join in the next year or so. Those that the heron and the grass snake haven't met.

The family raised in the house come back too, equally attracted by familiarity, comfort, memories and usually at least three puddings at lunch-time. Their offspring are (and hopefully will be in the case of the yet-to-be-met little one) familiar with every bit of this house and garden. They know where their parents' old toys are kept, the best hiding places, the incline where a plastic motorbike can roar down-hill, the warmth of the stone seat beside the pond, and where all the really good books are (answer: in every room).

Like the swallows and martins and swifts, their visits have been diminished this year, and the little one hasn't been here at all. But migration is a part of life for all of us, and the going is as significant as the returning.

Part of life and death.

Coming Out

  

 

Rain drips steadily in the garden, although sometimes it thumps down. I have been steadily dripping inside the house too, also coughing and feeling unwell and miserable and alone and wishing someone, anyone. could come and make me a cup of tea. But they can't. So I do it myself and not tea either, but one of those lemon-type drinks with various medications that help you feel a bit better. Eventually.

I haven't really ventured out of my rather rigid degree of isolation, and now I'm back in it because I realise that I might be infected and infectious. Then I also realise that any time any of us gets a common-or-garden cold we are going to think, 'This is it! The end is nigh! One of those dreadful things with prongs all over it got through the holes in the face mask even though I have never been closer than a metre to anyone since this whole business began, let alone for more than fifteen minutes.'

Coming out of lock-down is hard to do. Harder than going into it, because at least we all knew where we stood on that. I don't want to know how long it has been, but I can measure it by the age of my youngest grandson, and he is now a bit more than six months old. We have not been able to meet yet. In earlier times I was  sort-of joking about hoping to meet him before he starts school. That wasn't funny at the time, and now it's even less funny because it becomes a realistic situation.

There was a fragment of chance a week or so ago, but it evaporated rapidly because I got very cold feet about going through Heathrow and getting on a plane. The cold feet are not for my own sake, but out of a deep mistrust of almost any of the so-called safety conditions in this country. I am in the much-at-risk category, and my fear is of picking up infection during the journey and transporting it to members of the family who are otherwise safe and well in a country where rules are clear and (mostly) obeyed. In England they are neither.

This account is not strictly true, either. There have been two occasions when family members in this country have visited here for the day, and one recent occasion when I visited them and stayed overnight. All these visits were made after much thought and discussion, and with young children firmly in mind. We needed to see each other, and I had been self-isolated here for weeks on end so that I would not pose any risk to them.

As an accredited at-risk oldie I think it is my duty to be as well-informed as possible about the risk factors, and then to make the best decision I can in any situation. There are risks in close contact with young children who are at Nursery and playing with a variety of other friends, but what are the risks to them of not seeing their only grand-parent or, much worse, thinking their only grand-parent may not want to see them?

The only way to stay safe may be to stay in lock-down isolation, disinfect every scrap of food and wash your hands every time you touch anything. Being born is probably the most dangerous thing we ever do because the whole of life from then on is beset with perils, some much worse and more likely than others. Perhaps instead of wishing each other to 'take care' we should be saying 'take risks', small ones that we've thought about and balanced against the other odds, but risks all the same.

And then we should go out and dance in the puddles, socially-distanced and silent.