Mid-month Musings: November

Cat On A Cold Steep Roof

Our cat Tilly has another house across from ours. We think of this as shared ‘ownership’ and she thinks of it as simply having a second home. Her other home has a posh cat-flap, and is bigger, cleaner and more nicely decorated than ours, but it also has a West Highland terrier and a four year old, so Tilly, who is elderly and a little arthritic, has decided our house is more peaceful.

The arrangement is amicable. Tilly eats and sleeps at ours and spends most of her days, unless the weather is very bad, either lying on the porch or on top of the waste bins at her other house. She gets lots of cuddles and attention at both houses. They pay the vet bills and we buy her food. Her life is idyllic and enviable in many ways.

Tilly has always been an eccentric cat. She is very affectionate but will happily bite you if you annoy her in any way - for example, by stroking her too much. Or too little. However, her bites tend to be warnings and don’t generally break the skin, so that's all right. 

She is also highly intelligent. I’ve never known an animal who could arrange its own life entirely to its own satisfaction as well as Tilly does. I imagine her sitting in a big chair, stroking a white fluffy mouse, and thinking to herself: ‘Now, all I need to do is get rid of that ginger bastard who keeps bullying me, and the world will be perfect. Do you think we could ‘persuade’ him to eat catnip laced with deadly nightshade…?’

Anyway, this is the heart-stopping place I saw her when I left my house yesterday:

This is a sharply sloping roof on the side of the house next to her other house. Clearly, she is contemplating adding a third residence to her portfolio. Remember, this is a tiny, elderly, slightly arthritic cat and we are astounded that she can even get up there, let alone manage not to slide off!  Later the same day, I saw her sitting on the roof just below the arrowed window, staring into the house. Can you imagine waking up after an afternoon nap in your bedroom and looking up to see a tiny furry black face staring at you through the window with piercing yellow eyes? I mean, it's an upstairs bedroom! You just don't expect to be spied on at close range when you're in an upstairs bedroom.

Notice also how, in order to get to that bedroom, Tilly has to jump across an admittedly small gap between the roofs - but that gap is big enough for her to fall down if she miscalculates. I know cats are incredible athletes with absolutely no fear of heights and superb balance - but she's an old lady! Her eyesight isn't all that good these days. I've seen her fall off our dining room table when she forgets how close to the edge she's lying. 

So now I'm waiting for her previous owners to knock on our door with the sad news that the cat we share has fallen to her death while trying to inveigle her way into the house next door via the bedroom window. Or maybe the visitors at the door will be the neighbours themselves asking if we mind if they share our cat.

This, by the way, is what she now does every time I try to use the laptop when she's in the house:

          Proofreading my work                                     Using keyboard as a cushion

   

    Investigating the bag I put there                  Guarding the USB stick/flashdrive

    as a barrier to keep her away from

    the laptop keyboard - she's meant

    to be at the other side of the bag,

           Writing her own blog                            The detritus on the floor round the table 

                                                                          after she has pushed it all off - laptop 

                                                                          would be next if she was strong enough.

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DIET UPDATE

I am still on the diet, in case you were wondering. So far, I've lost 1 stone and 5.5lbs. That is impressive if you visualise it in the form of bags of sugar. It hasn't been a smooth glide from fat to thin, however, and often the weight loss defies reason. For example, a few weeks ago I missed a session due to going out for my sister's birthday, and I broke the diet a lot during that fortnight, but I still lost 3.5lb. The subsequent week, I stuck to the diet religiously and did loads of exercise, but put on half a pound! The week after (last week), I was frustrated and a bit depressed so my will-power faded and I had several treats and did no exercise, but I lost 2lb. This weirdness is not really helping. But I'm keeping going.

I refuse to put 'before' and 'after' pics on here, but I'll put a recent couple of pics of my face below so that you will be able to compare it with my face in a few months - I'm expecting that, as I lose excess fat, I will gain wrinkles and end up with a neck like an ageing turkey. Maybe by then I'll look less dopy than in the picture on the left, and less miserable than in the picture on the right! 

 

  

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CHOIR UPDATE

Not only am I still attending the weekly choir practices, I have actually taken part in a performance! My two friends, B and T, and I went to a workshop and informal performance in a church in Matlock last weekend. B and T are old hands, having taken part in two previous performances, but I have been a tad reluctant to 'perform' in front of actual members of the public. Also, I've missed quite a few choir practices due to working on the same evening and having to drive a long way from my place of work to the place where the choir rehearses, so I don't feel that I know the words, tunes or dance routines very well.

        I have to admit, however, that I enjoyed the Matlock gig. It was great fun. We positioned ourselves at the back of the stage, and - even though we kept forgetting the words, and B and I kept bumping into each other during the swaying dance movements - it was, as they say, a 'giggle'. We've signed up to sing with Barnsley Rock Choir on Friday 24th November - they are singing as part of the celebrations of turning on the Christmas Lights. Three songs on the playlist are new to us, so I'm desperately trying to practice them and learn the words. As I get older, my memory is increasingly atrocious and I'm finding remembering the words a real trial. P is finding listening to me sing the wrong words and tunes quite a trial too!

        T has a bad back, poor soul - but it does mean she gets out of doing the dance routines [which are very simple but still often beyond my ability to remember!].  It was raining heavily in Matlock and the church was on the side of a steep hill - as we walked towards the car park, T found herself stumbling down the hill and even her walking stick didn't help her - she'd have rolled all the way down the hill and onto the high street if she hadn't been saved by a conveniently parked car. This set B off laughing - she excused herself by saying T looked like she was about to break into a Gene Kelly routine! 

        Poor T's back has been playing up a lot of late, and when we went to Harlow Carr RHS Gardens in Harrogate recently, in heavy rain, she agreed [after some persuasion] to use one of the on-site mobility scooters. The poor woman resembled Davros once she donned the rain-tent they gave her:

T at Harlow Carr, face redacted to avoid embarrassment

Nevertheless, it would have been worth it, had not the mobility scooter stopped working halfway round! After B and I risked giving ourselves hernias trying to push the thing back to the reception area, and T herself made her back worse by attempting to push it along with one foot like a child's scooter, B got a young man from Reception to come and help us. 

        Fortunately, we were able to recover from our traumatic visit to the rain-sodden gardens by stuffing ourselves full of fat and sugar in Betty's Tea Rooms. [see Diet Update above!] 

        All's well that ends well!

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COSTA NOTICE

Here is a notice I saw recently in a local Costa:

This is the sort of pompous circumlocution favoured by guest-house landladies of a certain era. Why can't they just write 'Please don't throw nappies and sanitary towels down the toilet. Use the bin provided. Thank you'?  In fact, the 'thank you' itself isn't necessary. I mean, what sort of anti-social moron throws nappies and sanitary towels down a toilet?  Surely, the very least we could expect from any civilised human being is that they don't block up our public lavatories. Thanking them for not doing so seems superfluous.

        It's a step up from the last Costa notice I saw, however. That one asked people to make use of the 'disposable bins' and warned that if they pulled the emergency cord staff members would 'immediately appear' in the toilet. It was tempting, but I held myself back...

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YE OLDE CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS!

Isn’t it odd that, in a world where Ukraine is still fighting Russian attacks, thousands of innocent people are being killed in Palestine and Israel, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage still exist, and Cruella Braverman wants to steal homeless people’s tents, what seems to be playing most on people’s minds is…Christmas TV adverts.

            Maybe it’s not so weird, really. When faced with an increasing cost of living, continued wage freezes, roads full of potholes, an NHS which appears to be breaking down, schools which believe that the shop kids’ parents buy their uniforms from is more important than the actual education the kids are getting, an ex-Prime Minister who is proven repeatedly to be a liar, buffoon and elitest yet remains astonishingly popular, a current government who despise anyone ‘weak’ enough to be an immigrant, northern, poor, vulnerable, or working in the public sector, maybe we need to focus on the trivial and the heartwarming to keep us from freaking out completely.

Marks & Spencer has released an advert that has apparently incurred complaints from some humourless viewers. Apparently, poking fun at pointless Christmas ‘traditions’ is considered to be just as much of a no-no as voicing the opinion that maybe Israel has overreacted just a tad to Hamas’s terrible attacks on its citizens. I read that a headteacher wrote an open letter accusing M&S of spoiling Christmas for ‘the children’ and undermining the efforts of hard-working teachers. I haven’t seen the ad, which I believe might even have been removed following such criticism, but I understand that it involved various celebrities destroying the elements of Christmas they personally found most irritating – such as writing Christmas cards, or the elf-on-a-shelf nonsense. I might be way out-of-line here, but I don’t think these things are actually the ‘true values of Christmas’. These things neither disabuse kids of the existence of Father Christmas, nor undermine the story of Christ’s birth. If anything, it's an own-goal as it undermines the purpose of M&S itself – to sell us lots of unnecessary and expensive Stuff that bears little relationship to the ‘true spirit of Christmas’.

            I have seen the John Lewis advert and I can officially say, for what it’s worth, that I loved it. I understand that people have been complaining that the family in the advert is unrepresentative of ‘normal’ families as there is no dad or grandad – some poor fragile men with a lot of time on their hands apparently feel excluded and unrepresented.  Well, welcome to the world women have put up with for generations. One male complainer particularly amused me when he said he wouldn’t be doing his shopping at John Lewis as a result of their supposedly discriminatory ad – well, I doubt they’ll notice, mate. I mean, let’s be honest, who does the vast majority of the Christmas shopping, wrapping, writing on tags and cards, cooking, decorating, delivering, organizing, baking, cleaning in preparation for, etc, in most households? I think you’ll find it’s the women, not the men. And families without men are very common. My own parents split up when I was seven and I never saw my dad at Christmas [I haven’t seen him at all since I was in my late teens and I’m 59 now!]; my sister’s husband left when their daughter was three, so she also grew up spending Christmases with her mum, auntie and grandma. A high proportion of the kids I’ve taught over the past several decades have been from one-parent, blended, or same-sex-parented families, or they’ve been brought up in care homes, or fostered, or brought up by other family members, predominantly grandmas, aunties and great-aunties. As far as I’m concerned, the John Lewis ad represents reality for many families [except for the sentient Venus Fly Trap, of course!]. And it symbolizes the inclusiveness of Christmas, a time when even Cruella must surely agree that no one should be put out in the snow [except of course for the tentless homeless people].  

            The bigger issue is why so many people are spending so much time discussing what is, in reality, a trivial bit of commercial promotion. When did this become a Christmas tradition? 

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