Cat Therapy

Tags

Blood pressure, psycho cats

Two years ago my middle daughter came back for lunch with this on her shoulder:

We’d already heard how one of the tenants where she worked had left leaving all his animals behind including three cats with kittens.  To save them from being shot or poisoned my daughter rounded up all the mothers and 16 kittens and took them to the SPA.  Two days later the seventeenth kitten, which had been frightened by a dog, emerged from the woodpile.  He was four weeks old and so weak that he could barely walk and of course once he got his furry little paws under the kitchen table there was no question of taking him to rejoin his Mummy and siblings.

Within a week Bankie (he was called Bandit originally  but my husband nicknamed him Ban Ki-moon…) was plump, strong

and  really suffering from his hard life in our household.

We all love Bankie, it’s not his fault that being grey he’s the colour of the night so you absolutely can’t see him as he makes a dash to come inside and he isn’t really the embodiment of evil like several people have claimed (he is a cat after all) but there’s no doubt he has … issues.

My daughter says it’s because he’s still suffering from abandonment issues and a traumatic kittenhood; all the information I read about bringing up very young kittens said that if they survive they become very attuned to humans and enormously affectionate.  All I can say is that in that case Bankie shows his affection by playing ‘bite ankle’ – done at high speed as he dashes from one of the kitchen to the other, ‘bite sleeve’ – enormous fun with my husband’s dressing gown especially if he’s suffering from – ahem – a late night.  Extra points are scored if he gets through the sleeve to the arm below.  Then there’s ‘climb leg’ – only played when the wearer has shorts on.  The object is to hook one paw in the fabric and to use all the crampons on the remaining three paws to inch his way up.  He can be affectionate – at meal times, he used to bite if you weren’t quick enough with the can opener but is intelligent enough to realise that meant the tin went back in the cupboard as his victim searched for plasters, so he’s now sweetness and light.  Funnily enough the one person he never menaces is my daughter.

Currently Bankie is very fond of lounging on our bed, he’s quite well behaved there and even purrs but you’re never quite sure when the voices in his head will start up.  This morning my OH was sitting on the bed, half dressed, taking his blood pressure when Bankie started chirruping and purring and rubbing himself against the OH’s bare back.  Normally  my husband’s blood pressure is about 130 over 90, this morning with the Bankie effect it was 87 over 65.

I wonder if we could patent him.

The Desert Island (Suffering A Cold) Bookcase…

Tags

Colds, Jennifer Crusie, suffering

I’ve been horribly lazy about updating my Desert Island Bookcase, currently it’s only got a few books in it, but the necessity of compilling a collection of books that you’re always going to want to read was bought sharply to mind this week when I caught a cold.  I’m lucky enough to be extremely impervious to colds, while the rest of the family is hawking and snuffling, I breeze about suffering at worst from a mild sniffle which disappears within 24 hours, so of course when I do snag the dread disease, I suffer far more – and make everyone else suffer – because I’m not used to being ill.

I tried my usual trick of denying that I had a cold (known in the family as ‘Mum’s got a Notgotta’) but had to give up on the strength through joy weeding the rose bed act when I started to sneeze so much that I couldn’t see the bindweed.  So I retired to palely loiter on the sofa with a good book.  And there lay the nub.  To palely loiter in a satisfactory manner you’ve got to have the right book, one that isn’t too taxing for the poor germy brain, one that’s doesn’t have anyone with a severe illness – for goodness sake you’re the one who’s taking centre stage on suffering here, one without an annoying plot for you aren’t up to being irritated and one that, hopefully, is going to make you feel a bit more cheerful.

Even better than the sofa… I could do with this every evening.

The first two books, bought at the euro a book sale, hit the floor within 25 pages each on the grounds of being pompous and hideously badly written.  The third was consigned to the bin on wet heroine grounds, I couldn’t take another page of wanting to grab the woman and shake her yelling ‘Of course you’re never going to have a good job and win the love of your life if you behave like a self-sacrificing doormat.’.  In no mood to risk another disappointment I turned to old favourites.  My fingers lingered over EH Benson, Georgette Heyer, Diana Wynne Jones, Kate Atkinson, then alighted on the row of Jennifer Crusie’s.

Jennifer Crusie is an American writer of romance who stands way above most others in the genre because she can write and because she’s funny.  Genuinely funny, not slapstick funny but play on words funny.  And her characters are people, the women are mature, often in their thirties, who look after themselves and wouldn’t dream of hearing a suspicious noise at the top of the house and going to investigate it wearing a transparent nightie and armed with a hair brush; likewise her men are a long way from the fantasy cardboard cutouts that populate most romance novels though they do share one thing in common with those creatures – they’re really good in the sack.  Oh yes, there’s sex in Jennifer Crusie’s novels, she’s known for her ‘hot’ sex scenes and, believe me, they can make you forget you’ve got a cold, even when you’ve read them before.

And last but not least, the romantic elements are believable.  Her characters don’t argue for nine tenths of the book then fall into bed and find everything’s sorted out and it’s true lurve, they might cross swords but there’s always a connection, they talk to each other, they fancy each other of course – there are those hot sex scenes after all – and the difficulties in the path to a happy conclusion are understandable and reasonable and never because the heroine believes the bitch ex-girlfriend who sidles up and says that actually the hero’s secretly engaged to her…

I’ve had a lovely two days revisiting Welcome To Temptation – the title refers to the signpost outside the small town of Temptation in Ohio and not what the two main protagonists get up on a pool table – and it still makes me giggle.  So that makes it a worthy inclusion in the Desert Island Bookcase, along with Faking It, Fast Women and Bet Me and a couple of other Crusie’s.  OK, that’s more than a single book by each author but it’s my bookcase and I’m entitled to change the rules.

And if this cold goes on I’ll be going back to Georgette Heyer…

Gate Guardians

Tags

Dalmatians, statues

Last year when I was staying with my sister in law in Kew I saw a pair of stone pointers in an antique shop.  It was love at first sight and I knew that they would look wonderful outside our gate – if a little eccentric as our gate is tatty wood and not the elegant wrought iron that a pair of beauties like these would normally demand.

They weren’t even very expensive but I hummed and hawed and havered over whether I could really drive them back to Bordeaux and eventually wimped out.  And of course I curse myself for being so wet, I could have managed to bring them back, it wouldn’t have mattered having to drive really slowly as there was a problem with the accelerator cable on the car and we had to do the whole 900 plus kilometres at a snail’s pace anyway.

I still regret the ones that got away but since the nice vigneron who has the vines behind the house mowed the grass and provided some nice comfy beds we’ve found that we’ve got a pair of decorative gate guardians anyway…