Challenge? You've 10 Trillion to Dinner

I'm not much of a scientist. When I was at school (back on Noah's Ark), Science wasn't a collective subject, there was Physics, Chemistry and Biology and they were three separate things.
I loved Physics. Miss Alfred, a young black woman, was an inspirational teacher, and had I stayed in the West Indies, perhaps the whole path of my life would have been different. Perhaps I would have grown up to agree with a boy I later knew, who, complimented on his college First, or Double First or whatever it was, laughed deprecatingly and said: 'Oh, Physics is just a game!'
But we moved to the UK and the inspirational teachers I had at school in England weren't in the Science field.
I didn't get to study Physics at all, Biology faded from my curriculum, and I was asked, very politely, if I would prefer to leave the Chemistry set.

My school, BAHS in Trinidad has changed beyond recognition, but this is much as I remember it. Painting by Angelica Awai Barrow

Arts and the Humanities beckoned - or at least, their teachers did - and because school timetables are built solely around exam schedules, many things in life have remained a bit of a mystery. But in the last year or so, some aspects of science have increasingly fascinated me.
Such as the countless millions who, apparently, are more me than I am.

I am not an individual, I am We. (The Royals have known all along.)
Suddenly, it's not so much 'I think, therefore I am', but more a case of 'I eat, therefore I'm not sure who I am'.
We are, it seems, only the sum or our microbial cells. The heart and soul and mind that makes me an individual, comprise a mere 10 trillion human cells; but I am inhabited by as many as 100 trillion other microbial cells, so 'I' am outnumbered 10 to one. But by and large none of us knows what those inner cells amount to, and, at the moment, we have very little control over what they make us to be.

Just over a year ago someone recommended that I read Gudrun Jonsson's book Gut Reaction. It is a slim book, first published nearly 20 years ago. I imagine it could easily be 'overlooked' nowadays as its tag lines about losing weight and detoxing would rank it in the 'fad section' for many people, including me. But I trusted the person who'd told me about it.
Reading it made me feel as if a light had suddenly been turned on in a dark, dusty and unknown cellar, revealing endless secrets that I wished I'd known sooner. These gems of information made sense of stuff that I'd been grappling with for years - mainly health issues, but other related problems. It wasn't so much that I discovered a set of missing links, reading the book rather gave me a feeling that up until now I'd assumed I knew the building I inhabited - my body - but was suddenly aware that actually all these years I'd only been living on the upper floors, I'd totally missed the basement where the key archives, guidebooks and manuals were stored.

A mind opener

For example, take the immune system. We all know about our immune systems, largely because they seem to spend half their time broken, or working below par. If stopped on the street and asked to point to my heart, my kidneys and my immune system, I'd certainly have had trouble with the third.
A gland somewhere, maybe -
'That's an interesting one,' I'd probably have said. And meant it.
I daresay most people are more clued up than I am, but I was spell-bound to realise that my gut comprises practically all of my immune system.
Or rather, the trillions of microbes that inhabit my gut. The microbes that make me me and you you. The microbes that are different - or differently balanced - in all of us, rather as our fingerprints are different.

Microbes are the flavour of the moment now. Perhaps they have been for years, but they're only just reaching those of us who live on the edge of science, like me.
It fascinates me to know that during birth, we are 'innoculated', if you like, with our mother's microbial cells as we pass through the birth canal. So vital are these to our future well being that huge studies are now taking place where babies born by C-section are being coated with their mother's vaginal microbes as soon as they are born. Microbes, they now know are central to everything we are and everything we will be. If we miss out on getting the right ones at birth, things may never go right. They help us digest our food, process drugs, educate our immune system, resist disease, and - it seems - they even affect how we behave, think and live.

They can tell, with 90% accuracy whether you are obese or lean without looking at you, just by looking in a lab at microbes taken from your stool sample; and they are increasingly linking microbial make-up with diseases/conditions, including IBS, heart disease, colon cancer, autism and depression, as well as obesity.

How our microbes make us what we are

It's not just the manner of our birth that affects our interior selves. It's what we eat, how we live and the medicines we take. Rob Knight, a leading scientist in this field, has said that we may come to look on antibiotics with the same horror as nowadays we view the metal implements with which the Egyptians mushed up the human brain in order to drain it from the body before embalming could take place. Quite a thought, but not outlandish considering how antibiotics destroy the balance of microbes in our gut.

Last night I watched Trust me, I'm a Doctor on BBC2, which is a fascinating programme. Two women of the same age were given an identical diet for a week and their blood sugar levels were monitored constantly. (Also their sleep, activity and mood.) It was found that foods that spiked one woman's blood sugars had the opposite effect on the other, and vice versa. So the old adage of 'Chocolate is bad for you, brown rice is good' has gone out of the window. It may not actually be true for everyone. It all depends on your gut flora. And your gut flora depends - to a large degree - on what you eat. Does that sound like a mind-bender to you too? Whichever way you look at it, minding the diet of 10 trillion is tricky.

BBC 2's Trust Me, I'm a Doctor

I am beyond fascinated. 

I had amoebic dysentery as a baby in Africa. Who knows what havoc that may have wreaked? It was my own fault - the dog and I shared a shoe and between the two of us I believe we ate a good bit of it, but now I want to turn the clock back, and get the aftermath of that episode dealt with by a chap like Rob Knight. But also I want Miss Alfred back in my life to see whether, given a different start in secondary school, I might  have become a scientist like my brother, at the cutting edge of such amazing discoveries. 
And speaking of school, how long will it be, do you reckon, before notes home from the teacher cease to read: 'Dear Mrs Bloggs, Tommy is being disruptive again. Please will you attend the Principal's office on Tuesday at 10am', and say instead:
'Dear Mrs Bloggs, Tommy is being disruptive again. Please will you arrange for a stool sample to be delivered to the school's Behavioural Lab by 10am Tuesday, so that dietary adjustment can commence.'
I don't know about you, but I'm certainly going to be watching this space.

 

A Trick of the Light

I have been dreaming in Panavision, Technicolour and 3D recently.
Well, not recently exactly - my dreams are generally pretty full-on.
But this last while they have been - weird.

When, over the breakfast cups, I casually say: 'I had the strangest dream last night,' the In-Charge rolls his eyes and pulls a face that says: 'Here we go again'. 
But then, as I don't hesitate to tell him, he hasn't an ounce or romance in his soul.

Last night I dreamt that I flew to London and checked in to a hotel. (Why would I do that? I have lots of friends in London.) The American woman in front of me at Reception was having her earrings minutely examined by the girl behind the desk, and I nosed in just in time to see the eagle-eyed Receptionist remove a tiny, pin-head antennae from the top of each earring.
The American was mutely astonished and allowed herself to be led away.
As I say - weird.

No sooner had I got upstairs to my hotel room than the extremely over-efficient girl from the foyer came racing up to accuse me of having flown to London with a knife attached to my keyring. The knife in question was a miniature (and I'm talking doll's house here) folding penknife.
How did she know? And what had it got to do with the Hotel Receptionist, anyway? If the airline didn't care, why should she?
I admitted this gross misdemeanour and was immediately locked in my room pending an investigation.
In my dream, this seemed an entirely logical step, and I acquiesced without a murmur, just like the American..


But I was concerned about the dogs being locked in with me. They were looking anxious and had their legs crossed, so to speak.
(Did I not mention the dogs? That could be because it was only at this point in the dream that I realised I had all three dogs with me - Top Dog, Under Dog and Model Dog.)
Obviously I was dreaming in the past. I dream in the past more often than not.
Maybe everyone does.

You don't really want to know any more.
It got weirder and weirder as the night wore on.
I believe our dreams can happen in a very short space of time, but while you're dreaming them, it feels as if they go on forever.
And in some ways they do. This one has lingered around me all day, like my shadow - perpetually just out of sight.

I sometimes wonder if dreams are actually reality and our day to day lives are the dream.
I rather hope not, as in that case, my life is very odd indeed.
But not as odd as my sister's. She once dreamt that she was half a glass of water on the moon.
How does that format itself into a dream, exactly?
I've never been able to work it out.

I often wonder why it is that in my dreams I regularly revisit places, houses - streets, even - that I recognise but which bear no relation at all to the actual places they purport to be. Yet frequently they are the same from dream to dream.
So the same as what, exactly?
And I remember other places I have dreamt about, with that strange, intangible clarity that attaches itself to childhood memories. Pictures that cannot be described. Atmospheres devoid of words.
What weird games the brain plays on itself.
Like juggling with a trick of the light 
But why?

Lights Out!

Years ago, our first ever Wwoofer, Bill, sent us a letter after he'd gone back home.
It said how much he'd liked staying with us, and it enclosed a piece of paper that puzzled us for some time.
There was nothing written on it, just a black, photocopied - well, blackness, relieved by lots of white sploshes and dots, some running into each other, where the original document was obviously getting a bit past it.
Or so I thought.
But after a long time - several hours or days, I don't recall sixteen years on - the light suddenly came on behind the In-Charge's eyes. He didn't exactly shout 'Eureka!' but it was something along those lines.
'It's Europe,' he said. 'At night.'
And then it all made sense.
The sploshes were the huge centres of population, the connecting white areas the busiest parts of each country.
Needless to say, our own wild west coast of Ireland was unrelieved black.

I wonder if it would still be black on a similar image today?
I think, compared with most of Europe, it wouldn't be too bad.

One of the benefits of living in - basically - the middle of nowhere, is that our night sky is choc-a-bloc with stars. They don't have to fight to be seen here. They are overwhelmingly bright and fantastically numerous. The Milky Way is a pale, gauzy scarf stirred through the heavens, Orion marches all around us, sword at the ready, the Plough looks permanently on the boil (it appears to my unscientific gaze more like the porridge pan than anything else) and the morning and evening stars are as bright as the moon. From the hills - even from the sea - you can, if you're lucky, see the Aurora Borealis at certain times of the year. You can watch the satellite stations Big Brothering us. You could lie in the garden and identify every constellation in the Northern Hemisphere, if you felt so inclined.

But drive a few miles along the coast and there is an orange haze in the sky over Sligo Town - just a reminder that in the real world total darkness is a thing of the past, and Sligo is just a village compared with most of the world's cities.

As I am writing this, the lights have just gone out! How ironic.

Fortunately the candles are never far away

Well, our powercut lasted for an hour, but it was about 26 hours too soon.
Tomorrow is Earth Hour, and - as in years gone by - we will turn everything off for an hour, starting at 8.30pm local time, lighting our numerous candles instead.

In the six years since it started, Earth Hour has grown and grown, and now involves 'hundreds of millions of people across 7001 cities and towns in 152 countries and territories'. (Taken from the official website.)

Which is fantastic.
But it's all well and good turning the lights off for an hour, welcoming, for once, the darkness - but what about after the hour? Do we just go back and flick it all on again?
Will anything have changed?
Hopefully. But only if we all join in, talk about it, and maybe turn off the lights an hour every month, every week, every day. Changes start with small things, after all.

Have a look at the challenges on the website. Maybe you can commit to taking up one or two, or starting your own.
I don't know what I will do for mine, I'll have to think about it while the lights are off.

One thing is certain, if we don't face up to some of the real challenges facing this planet that we call home, there won't be any need for an annual moment called Earth Hour, because the earth won't be here anymore.

For some reason I can't upload the YouTube Earth Hour video, but you can find it by clicking on this link:

And here is another link:

Earth Hour

Passing

The little bay

I took the dogs to the headland this morning.
The tide was right out, the little bay awash with seaweed, the water thick with seagulls.
The smell of the sea was so intense, it caught me in the back of the throat and sent me spinning through the years, to other days, other beaches, other dogs. Memories of another lifetime, it seemed, way back when time wasn't measured because it didn't matter.
Those days didn't feel like thirty years ago, but they did feel as if they'd slipped beyond reach.

Time changes as you get older. It is no longer a haphazard, generously proportioned patchwork, a kaleidoscope of shifting possibilities, an empty frame in which you are creating the picture.
It becomes mean and sly and penny-pinching. It stands at your side, licking the end of its pencil and noting everything down. Nothing slips by unremarked, and one way or another, everything must be paid for - even though the hours it measures out to you slip through your fingers like water.
But it's only when the past comes swooping back to grab you, that you realise how much everything has changed.

I found myself walking through the rough grass aching for days and people - for eras - that will never be again.

But it was a blue morning, calm and quiet, the sun warm on my back.
The headland horses came to say hello as we passed on our way to the lumpy dunes where the dogs love to race, or lie in the grass and ambush each other.

The headland horses come to say hello

It's probably the miniature hills and dells that make the headland so exciting for them. Whoever is playing the hare can never quite tell if she's about to be caught.
And it was only when I got to the top of the highest lump and looked back, I saw that one of the mares has had her foal. The tiny, dark creature was standing close to her, still wide-eyed at this world of mornings and evenings, of sunlight and starlight - too young to realise that all these things are just marking the passage of time.

Later, the tanker-man came to deliver heating oil. We stood in the sunshine and exchanged news. He always knows far more of what is going on than I do.
He was looking pensive as well, despite the spring weather.
'Someone up the road killed himself, this morning,' he told me.
I'd seen an ambulance, going past our gate - a rare sight in this quiet place.
Shocked, silenced, I didn't know what to say.
Tragically - in this quiet place - it seems to happen more and more these days.
'You never know how it is with people,' he said, eventually.

You never do.

Blue Moon

Sickle Moon

Wonder Brother is getting married again.
He went public with this Momentous News at his 50th Birthday Weekend (it was a Capital Letter sort of occasion) and although no one was exactly blown away with surprise, we were all blown away with happiness at his happiness.
He looked positively runny all weekend, as we would say in our house.

It was a great party.
Although - hideous thought - I nearly missed it.
He had, with great forethought and much consideration, rung to talk through possible dates for the marking of his half century, and we'd agreed a weekend that I'd be able to get to the UK.
But a few nights later I woke in a schwett (as they say here), remembering that we had already accepted another, equally important invitation for the same weekend this side of the water.
Ye gods and little fishes, where were my wits?
No doubt nestling somewhere with my lost NavBar.
As dawn broke, I sent him a text with trembling fingers. His reply was - well, curt.
I had no one to blame but myself - I should have kept my calendar up to date. But isn't it typical? Yummy invitations are like buses. You can loiter palely for months on end and then, when they come - if they come - they all come at once.

It took me another few days to clock that actually his do was on the Saturday, our other invite was for the Sunday night, and for once the dread Ryanair played a blinder by flying in and out of our local airports at the right times for me to be at both events.
Joy of joys!
I packed a bag and headed to pastures new in Cheshire. My parents and siblings all packed bags and did likewise - from the west coast of Ireland to the east coast of England, from Scotland to the West Country, we all converged on the newest outpost of the empire. 

Waxing Moon

It is hard to describe just how lovely the weekend was. Not simply for the Event, but for the people that went with it.

Perhaps it's only as you get older that blood really does thicken up a bit, but increasingly I find that time spent with my family is very precious. Looking back over the years, family get-togethers have been occasional markers, rather than the norm - we've been splattered hither, thither and yon most of my life.

It's made me think, once again, about locality. Even in this day and age, lots of families are still on each other's doorsteps.
Is having your family on hand a luxury or a pain, I wonder? I've never had the chance to find out, but I suspect that, despite all, it is probably a luxury.


Families love each other and hate each other, they embrace and bicker and argue. They slam doors but usually - eventually - open their arms and hearts wide. And many drop in and out of each other's lives almost daily. But not having grown up with that, I've neither looked for it, nor missed it, until now. Living in rural Ireland has highlighted the gaps I never knew I had.
Here, I am surrounded by collective families who have deep, subliminal connections with the places where they live. It is impossible not to sense the roots, the tensile bonds of kinship that link so many people together, the layers of history, relationship and intimacy that underpin communities, the invisible maps which they know instinctively but which I know nothing of. The warp and weft of blood with locality.
The intricacies of it all are something I will never unravel or understand because there is no imprint within me that recognises the pattern.
 
It is why, no matter how long I live here, I will never belong as my neighbours do. I will always be a 'blow-in', just as I would be if I came from Dublin, or Donegal. I may have a home here, but I don't have a homeplace. People use that expression often - 'my homeplace'. The soil from which they sprang.

The thing is, I don't have a homeplace anywhere else either, or yards of relatives to people it. No entrenchment. Does that make me a kind of locus-orphan? I don't know. For me, belonging is moveable and  lodges in the soul rather than the soil. It is about the people I carry in my heart, and those who carry me in theirs. That is my homeplace.
So, strange as it may sound, my first visit to Cheshire was like going home.



Wonder Brother and his fair Betrothed had planned the weekend to perfection. No easy task when catering for the interests of an age-group ranging from 14-91, but our packed schedule flowed smoothly from one event to the next without anyone being aware of a cunning plan underlying the whole.

Full Moon

Yet, sitting out under the stars in their charming town garden, I realised that it wouldn't have mattered if we'd done nothing and been nowhere. Watching everyone laughing and joking over laden plates and glasses of wine, it struck me that it's all about the ease with which you pick up the threads. No matter where you all live, or how different your lifestyles, your opinions or your priorities; once together, the blood recognises its own and mingles seamlessly, the heart remembers the echoes the mind has long forgotten. Those are the things that mark out our nearest and dearest from all the rest. Those relationships are future-proofed, time lapses and locus notwithstanding.

I watched the young ones who'd managed to be there - the under 30s - catching up, swapping news, so full of their lives, and I remembered with blinding clarity and some nostalgia the place they are now at. At that age how radiant and full of promise the world is. Everything is an adventure, every dawn a new beginning, and time, if you ever think about it at all, is just a remote bank vault, bulging with funds. Happy as I am, it is an unalterable truth that living wears some of the shine off that polish, and eats quietly through that largesse.

But it is good, and right and proper that my nephews and nieces are still millionaires in that regard, that they too will have these spendthrift days to look back on. And family get-togethers that replenish the collective memory.

And it is beyond good that my brother and his lovely Betrothed have both come full circle - through the tarnished years back to a point where energy and happiness are raw and vibrant again. When life is for living and each dawn an adventure. Maybe, as he puts down tentative roots alongside hers, he will learn what it is to have a homeplace. But it hardly matters. He has found the homeplace of her heart, and she his, and I am so glad for them. Glad that they have found it, and known it for what it is, and seized it with both hands.

The chance of love, with the happiness it brings, the belonging it bestows, isn't like buses, chugging along at stolid intervals.
It is more like a blue moon, rare and special.
And oftentimes not even acknowledged or recognised.

Blue Moon. We had one last month, and the next one falls on July 31, 2015

Friends

Knocknarea in a silver sea

 
I was thinking about variety today. How rich and diverse everything is. So many different plants, and landscapes - personalities - friends.
It was the friends that started the thought process.
Each friendship is a microcosm - a spectrum - all of its own, containing the same essential elements as others perhaps, but different dynamics, different points of contact, different anchorings.
And each is indispensable to the nurturing of our wellbeing, the feeding of our souls.
And through some indefinable, blind instinct, we turn to the friend who can give us what we need precisely when we need it.

Rosa Crazy For You

I poured out my heart to someone this morning - someone who becomes increasingly dear the more I get to know her. It was a moment of spontaneity - an unexpected outburst that tapped into a slowly, oh-so-slowly healing well of distress that lies very shallowly buried beneath my surface.

I felt afterwards that I had burdened her with something that burdens me, and apologised.
She smiled and shook her head. 'Don't! You haven't!' she said.
She hugged me tightly, and I know she meant it.
She wasn't burdened, but I have felt lighter all day for the loss of it, for the release.
How grateful I am.
And blessed.
Little by little, the healing steals in like winter sunlight - barely discernible, but effective, and, ultimately, self-perpetuating. 

Campanula

And this afternoon another friend's words came to mind.
While I was out replenishing the sadly depleted garden tool department - there is only so much you can achieve with a one-pronged fork and holey gloves - I inevitably got waylaid by the glorious plants on offer.
I have always found that the plant-buying triangle loops nose-to-tail as surely as night follows day.
First there is the delight at discovery, then there is the glorious vision of the plant embellishing your very own garden, and later there is invariably the pang of guilt when you remember those imminent household bills whose budget you have just wantonly slashed.
I confided this to my friend a year or two ago.
'Don't,' she said. 'Your garden is your art. You have to let it out.'
And she was right.
I'm not the quickest, but there is one thing I have learned, which is that we stopper our creativity at our peril.
I believe it's the cause of half the frustration and unhappiness in the world.

Peruvian lily

Years ago, a third friend said something to me that I have consciously tried to take to heart ever since.
I haven't always been successful, but there's no doubt in my mind that she went right to the crux of it.
'Don't worry about anything as trivial as money,' she said.
Neither of us had any money at the time, and still don't. Like most people in Ireland, I'm constantly going through my coat pockets in the hope of finding a fiver and always grateful beyond words for any windfall that keeps me afloat, but that's missing the point of what she meant.

It took me awhile to 'retrain' myself  - I remember well the nights I used to spend lying awake grinding my teeth over finances. I still worry about all kinds of other rubbish, but I've just about got there on the money bit.
Somehow the electricity bill will get paid. Maybe we'll have to live on beans on toast for awhile - again. (It's known as a Gourmet Treat in our house.) Maybe we'll end up selling all our worldly goods at a carboot sale, but ultimately, which is more important? Something that makes your heart sing, or all the bills paid?


Life is short, and as far as I can make out, richness isn't about money, it's about the simple, beautiful, ordinary things and people that surround us. It's about walking round my garden with my first cup of tea and enjoying every new flower. Perhaps that all sounds a bit naive or twee, but I think the key to being happy and fulfilled has little to do with hard currency, it's about doing the thing I was born to do. I am a writer and I love gardens. Those two things are what give me equilibrium, and it doesn't matter if I have spent the electricity money on a new rose or a purple passion flower. Just as it doesn't matter that I have written this post instead of clearing up the kitchen and getting supper ready. Getting in a tizz about the ups and downs of everyday life is so easy, but it's the surest way I know of neutering the creative spirit - the individual, intrinsic, elusive essence that waits in each of us to be discovered and used.


So, dear friends, how glad I am to have you.
I think it must be because of you that when I can't sleep in the wee small hours, I don't lie in bed wrestling the black dog that walks the night, I get up and join my own, real, sleeping hounds in the kitchen, put the kettle on and write, or immerse myself in a book of other people's inspirational gardens - sometimes for hours on end. I often feel quite tired the next day, but not fraught, or hunted, or guilty! And little by little, the hurts we all carry can be healed, and nothing is wasted, nothing is lost. Every part of our life has a bearing on what we produce.

Don't is generally considered a negative command, but sometimes it takes a friend to turn it into a life-line of positivity.
Thank you, dear friends.

Purple Passion Flower

Fanfare for a Model

I am sorry to have abandoned you recently, but it wasn't intentional.
There has been aught on my mind.

You know those bathtub-moments I've mentioned before?
Well I've been having more and more of them in recent months.
Bathtub-moments can be good or they can be bad, but they are usually deep. Like the bath that spawns them.
Mine haven't been good. In fact they have been full of woe and peopled by ghosts in daylight.
They have centred around the divine duo.
And that in turn has caused me to hark back to the divine duo's mother, Juno.
She was my darling and missing her is still like toothache.

The divine duo as divine infants - or possibly enfants terribles?

The ghastly fact of the matter is, the divine duo will be thirteen this year. They were born in the fading weeks of the last century. They are Millennium Dogs. They are Special. They are Beyond Compare.
They are certainly Divine, but sadly they are not immortal.

My darling girl - what a good mother she was!

Alas we had to visit the Needle-Lady recently - she who is unilaterally loathed by all my animals, although she is kind, extremely competent and has known them all since birth or adoption. There are in fact three Needle-Ladies, which, I am reliably informed by those on four legs, only makes matters worse.
'But she makes you better,' I cry as I try to coax them out of the car.
'Huh! Look what happened to the Empress,' they retaliate. 'She was sad and sorry and you took her to the Needle-Lady and she came back dead. We watched while you planted her. We don't want to be planted.'

Therein lies the crux of my anxiety.
I don't want any divine funerals round here either, but time, tide (and trains) wait for no man.
Or dog.

Top Dog likes to be clean but he prefers the personal touch

On our recent, exceedingly unpopular visit to the Needle-Lady, it transpired that - as I feared - Top Dog has a slightly dodgy ticker.
He has been too generous with his heart for too long, and now there might not be enough left to see him through.
Under Dog's problems are more immediately obvious. He had a nasty accident many years ago, which nearly broke his back and although he made a wonderful recovery, it aches and nags him and he isn't as mobile as he was.
'It doesn't hurt in the woods,' he tells me brightly. (He's not very subtle, Under Dog.)
'I noticed,' I reply.
'It doesn't hurt in the river, either,' he assures me.
'That's because the river is so cold, nothing hurts,' I explain.
He looks slightly crestfallen. Obviously he'd hoped to be bumped up to two walks a day.
'Two swims a day might dissolve you,' I say. He doesn't look convinced.
Under Dog goes for a constitutional swim in the river most days - just a dip to rinse out his pyjamas, you understand. He, too, likes to be clean. The term 'swim' might imply something a little more energetic than the gentle immersion which actually takes place.

Under Dog rinsing his pyjamas

Trotting and swimming are fine, it's steps that are Under Dog's problem - jumping into the back of the car is no longer on his agenda.

You can see why my bathtub has not been the quiescent, lulling place of yesteryear.

'It is time,' I said to the In-Charge, 'to get another dog. Before push comes to shove.'
'Don't be ridiculous,' quoth he dismissively.'They're only plippies!'
It is a sad comment on the general senility of this household that both of us still refer to them by this diminutive term (meaning 'puppy') despite their grey whiskers.
'They are old men,' I said, but I could see the In-Charge's head ducking firmly into the sand.

So I took matters into my own hands and started watching Irish Rescue organisations on Facebook.

Over the last few months, there have been many dogs that have twisted my heart, brought tears to my eyes, or fond words to my lips, but none of them have wrenched my guts and shredded my peace of mind.

Until this:

Fordogsake Dog Rescue's picture

.
Even then I found myself thinking: A new dog? A young dog? A possible - a probable cat-hazard? Someone else to feed, someone to train, more fur to sweep off the kitchen floor...
And now, of all times...

Go and see her, I told myself.
Just don't do anything impulsive, I implored myself.
Just take it a step at a time.


Enter Super Model Dog - tall, leggy, gorgeous and photogenic.

We took the divine duo to meet her, and they all greeted each other like long-lost friends.
We took the three of them for a walk near the Rescue Centre and they behaved as if they had walked together every day for the last ten years.
We put her in the back of the car with them and they all slept the sleep of the just for the three hour journey home.
We stopped en route for a walk in the bluebell woods, and though we didn't let her off the lead, everyone was very happy.
It could all have been a scene from a movie.
In fact, I was quite disappointed not to find the cameras rolling as we got back to the car - they've missed a chance, there, I thought.

Everyone enjoyed the bluebell woods

So here we are.
She has learned to 'Sit'.
She has agreed to re-consider her first impulse to eat all the cats.
She assured me that she wouldn't dream of chasing hens if there were cats around to eradicate first - though later she asked me to wipe that from the record and apologised profusely. What she'd meant to say was she'd try not to chase the hens, and she can't think how 'cats' came into it at all.
She takes food from my hand as gently as whispering.
She believes in starting conversations with lots of kisses.
She thinks her name is 'Good Girl' - and she follows me around like a shadow.

So far the only thing she has taken a large bite out of is my heart.


She has, as the Rescue Centres would say, found her Forever-Home
In movie terms, I think we can call it a wrap.

A blissful sleep after a warm bath

Four Legs and a Tail are Forever

Bunny with the first of her babies, PipSqueak.

You know how late at night, or lying in the bath – often one and the same thing – you are occasionally drawn into reviewing your achievements in life, or lack thereof?

I sometimes wonder if God, reclining in his celestial tub wielding his back-scratcher, looks back on that epic week at the dawn of time and wishes he could have a second crack at it. 

Or perhaps just at some parts of it – because admittedly, by and large he played a blinder. In the interests of transparency, I’d have to say that personally I think there were one or two – well, hiccups. I reckon, given a bit more time, he might have re-thought the whole arachnid thing, and who knows, given the chance he might have scrapped homosapiens.

You have to agree – as a general concept homosapiens are - breathtaking!

Anatomical design: brilliant.

Psychological infrastructure: well – staggering, anyway.

Overall success: hmmm – decision postponed.

Don’t get me wrong, I mean no disrespect, but maybe he just peaked too soon. It happens all the time, and after all, it had been quite a week.

Do you think he wonders, when he’s scrubbing his toes, whether he should have stopped while he was ahead? Like when he got to dogs.

Surely one sight of that wagging plume, that head kicked just a little sideways – ears up, eyes locked-on – surely that should have been enough to tell him: ‘this is as close to perfect as you can hope for.’

The apogee of creation.

Four legs, a tail and a heart the size of a small country.

Going to the seaside

Dogs are on my mind at the moment.

Actually – that’s a total lie. There’s no ‘moment’ about it – dogs are always on my mind. How could they be anything else, with the divine duo lying at my feet day in, day out? (Metaphorically speaking, of course. They have extremely comfortable, cushion-lined baskets, thank you very much, not to mention the spare-bed for restless moments, so don’t be picturing them stretched on the remorseless floor, now.)

Anyway, it’s not the divine duo who are occupying my thoughts. They aren’t even occupying their own thoughts today. They are momentarily comatose. Despite a cold wind flinging hail, they have checked the hens over, raced around the orchard, their feet have walked in the high places, Under-Dog has rinsed his pyjamas in the river, Top-Dog has pee’d on the farm gate (hard work, but someone's got to do it) and they have both hoovered up bowls of delicious scrumptiousness. The prospect of the Master’s return and a long, lazy basket-afternoon are enough. Their joy is complete.

It is the hounds of yesteryear who prance on gentle, ghostly paws through my mind. My neighbour had to have her dog put to sleep. She was a fabulous black and white collie called Finn, and for 15 years they had been inseparable, so she will be sorely missed. 
Sorely missed.
Oh glory be, what a huge gap they leave behind.

You're only a puppy once

 

Lord Oaksey was once asked on some radio programme whether, looking back over his life, he had any regrets. (A bathtub moment, if ever there was one.) After a moment’s pause he replied that yes, he had. He regretted all the dogs he had loved and lost over the years.

I have to say I am at one with him on that. They just don’t live long enough – I think their gene motherboard got muddled up with parrots. Or sparrows.

(Either that, or God in his wrath decided that actually, shortening a dog’s lifespan was a better punishment for us than either serpents, childbirth or being cast out of Eden.)

But it’s not just Finn who’s in my thoughts. It was at just this time of year – late January – that one of my own dogs had to be put to sleep many years ago. Her name was Beshlie, but she was more often called Bunny, and known to her nearest and dearest as Djibouti-Botswana-Babbetina-ShishKebab. (I have no idea!) She came from a rescue home when she was 6 months old, and we had her until she was over 13, a fantastic age for a lurcher, but it’s never long enough, is it? 

Her preferred method of sunbathing

I took her for a last, slow walk on our favourite beach when I knew it was the end, and we pottered along the shoreline, stopping and starting, gazing out across the wide blue edge of my world to her world beyond. And early the next morning, before the vet arrived, we went into the garden together one last time, a white butterfly leading the way, and she was happy. She knew, and she was ready to go. There was so much understanding and trust in her eyes that morning, I felt as if she was the grown-up, I was a child on the edge of loss.

I found a flat, heart-shaped stone on the beach, that last day – which I still have. And I still have the poem I wrote for her, but most of all I have an impregnable store of memories, and in all of them she is full of joy, full of life, full of love. 

Her heart was the size of a small country.

For the short time they are with us, they make life inexpressibly better, don’t they – dogs? I just wish they didn’t have to go.

My husband once summed it up perfectly, and his words still break my fall, still catch my sadness and hold it tight:

‘We don’t have them forever, but they have us for their-ever.’

They surely do.

No such thing as an orphan when Bunny was around

                         

 

                        Talisman for a Hound

I find a keepsake on our last day.

A heart-shaped stone, cold and

grey in the sea. It is the clone of

my heart without her.  But castaway

in the foam, it is her old

and faithful heart given finally

into my keeping.  I hold it fast,

folding my hands around it,

folding the past in on my creeping

grief, seeking some hidden alchemy,

to leech from stone some vast,

last, heart-rending relief.

Her thirteen years dissolve with the foam

on my hands, with the rain, with the

tears.  She is ready to go, fearless,

waiting to roam another shore, and her

silent ghosts are baiting her this

morning, warning me as they lure her on,

that she is already half-gone, gone,

done with her life, skittish on suddenly

sapling legs that prance her to the

edge of the wind.  And I am left,

pinned to this world, watching a

butterfly dance, new wings unfurled.

And the heart that I found in the sand by the edge of the sea,

beats for her still, though it’s years since she gave it to me.

LF

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