Bewitched

I actually went to the ballet recently.
That's about the third time in twenty odd years. How sad is that?
I love ballet, but we don't get a huge amount of it here in the North West, and when we do, I miss it, or am too broke, or hear about it after the event.
But this time I actually made it to the one and only performance.

Ballet Ireland Swan Lake photo by Ros Kavanagh, taken from Internet

I have my friend, the Goddess of Plenty to thank, because if she hadn't invited me to go with her, I'd never have known it was on.
Ballet Ireland in Sligo, dancing Swan Lake. Goodness gracious.

DodoWoman joined our happy band, and when the three of us arrived at the theatre in Sligo, we wondered for a moment if we'd got the wrong night and were in for a Panto instead. The foyer was heaving with  hordes of excited children.
I have to confess, my heart sank slightly as we took our seats in the balcony - three solid rows of young kids behind us, more on either side. I wondered whether it would be Swan Lake to Tchaikovsky or to a stream of burbling chatter.
At least that took my mind off what sort of performance Ballet Ireland had in store. The last ballet I'd seen on our relatively modest stage had been performed by a very reduced company. Lovely, but not the full monty, and I although I was just happy to be there, deep down I didn't really want a compromised Swan Lake - I wanted the traditional, full, unexpurgated version in all its moonlit, feathery glory.

Ballet Ireland photo from the Internet

I have heard the music many times in the intervening years, and it never fails to move me, but there is nothing like hearing it in the hush of a darkened theatre, waiting for the curtains to rise. What I hadn't expected was to be transported, with the first bars of the score, back to my own childhood, sitting in the stalls at Covent Garden at the tender age of eleven, staring at the rich velvet curtains, waiting, waiting, hardly able to breathe with excitement. As the ballet unfolded, I recalled every nuance of that first magical experience, the haunting music flooding through me like adrenaline, the dancers an enchanted dream just beyond reach - the exquisite romance of it all, the pathos, the heartbreak.


It was a fabulous performance, that night in Sligo. The Swan Lake I had fallen in love with all those years ago, not changed, or reduced, or modernised, just the tried and tested classic that bewitched me as a child.

Wonderfully, it betwitched the countless children in the audience too.
There wasn't a peek out of anyone during the whole evening.
Thank you, Ballet Ireland.
And thank you, Talentui Goddess  

Photo: www.balletandoperaireland.com  taken from the Internet

Zen and the Art of Gardening

According to my friend DodoWoman, my new model garden would make a perfect home for Madame Butterfly.

It was odd she should say that, as when I was constructing it, I spent some time wondering how to create butterflies that would sort of - well, flutter-by, but I didn't quite manage it. However, I don't think DodoWoman and I are talking about the same kind of butterfly, but then I don't share her personal acquaintance with Puccini's opera, or its tragic heroine.
(I shall have to take her word for it on the garden's suitability.)

The Temple glimpsed through the cherry blossom

Perhaps I'd have done a better job with a full orchestra on the other side of the kitchen table. They say children learn better if Mozart is playing softly in the background. Perhaps Puccini was just what I needed to bring the abandoned butterflies to fruition.

I was a little disappointed with the state of the sand after my attempts at raking it into gentle curves.
I don't think there is a career ahead of me in a Japanese garden.
When I mentioned this to my friend of Talentui fame, she said: 'You probably weren't using the right implement.'
'A kitchen fork,' I replied.
'Quite,' she said. 'I don't think they use forks in Japanese gardens.'

However the fossil pavement and the Sun and Moon Stone are truly remarkable, as is the Yin Yang stone - not, or course, that I take any credit for these items - all were found on our local shore.
The Yin Yang stone brings tears to my eyes whenever I see it. The In-Charge stooped down and picked it up just as we were leaving the beach one day at the end of November last year. He's good at spotting things, the In-Charge.
He handed it to me with rather a sad smile.
We had taken Under Dog to our favourite beach for one last walk there. Of course Top Dog and Model Dog came too. We didn't know it then, but as it turned out, it was the last time either of those inseparable twins ever walked that beach.
Sweet boys. How I miss them still.

The Yin Yang stone

But I digress.

It seems hard to believe, but it's a year ago that we were at this lark the first time round - making tray gardens with the kids at Beltra Country Market

Such fun, everyone loved having a go, and this year we had more kids than ever, not to mention a few parents 'helping' their offspring along. It's amazing what you can do with a supermarket tray full of sand and a load of found objects, or inexpensively bought things like lollipop sticks, pipe cleaners, pompoms and feathers.

Amazing fossils and the Sun and Moon Stone in the background

I decided to go for the Zen-Yogic-Buddhist-Transcendental-Japanese-Meditation-Temple-Garden this year, while DodoWoman built a Mayan jungle with an Aztec teocalli in the middle - the only thing missing (as she was the first to point out) being the whatsit containing a sacrificial human heart. However, don't be thinking that the kids were cheated here - she had featured a beach-combed-treasure that looked a bit like a dinosaur, rearing up on one side behind the trees. Six out of ten kids would probably prefer a dinosaur, anyway.
Probably.

Now I come to think of it, it looks more like a Dodo than a Dinosaur on the left

Jil, one of my lovely German wwoofers, did a rough blueprint design for the temple. She and Marco then built the walls, but it was the In-Charge who created the roof. It is constructed from card and - well, lollipop sticks; plus one or two other stabilizing bits and bobs, like glue, gold paint and such. We were very pleased with the glittery pipe cleaners creating the necessary lilting curves, and I thought my Chinese lanterns came out a treat - especially the tassels made from embroidery silk.

The string of prayer flags was a hot favourite.

And we were pretty chuffed with the stream as well, and the ponds and the waterfalls - not to mention the dinky bridges. And the water really did cascade down over the little rocks and shells, and swooshed over the koi carp (designed and created by Jil and Marco) before collecting in the bottom pool outside the temple.
Totally thrilling.

Dinky bridges

Sadly, the water then started to dissolve the play-dough from which the stream itself was constructed, but one has to rise above such small inconveniences, stiffen one's shoulders and raise one's chin. No self-destructing pond is going to take the edge off my garden, and koi carp probably like sinking slowly into the sludge at the bottom of the stream.

Anyway, if it does slowly dissolve, by the laws of Zen, surely that's meant to be - so then the pond, the water and all will be as one with the rest of the garden..

 

Shame about the butterflies, though.

(You can see last year's miniature garden here.)

Teen Queen and the Frenchman

It's been a long time since I had a teenager in the house.
I'd forgotten what it was like.
But I'm remembering with a vengeance.

It's a state of never really knowing where you stand.
Of grinning and bearing whatever is thrown at you.
Of smiling even when you want to yell.
Of yelling and instantly wishing you hadn't.
Of coaxing and cajoling - sometimes with amazing results, sometimes with no results at all.

You know what they're like.
It's kisses and cuddles and flavour of the week one minute - which leaves you feeling absurdly privileged.
Then rudely ignoring you the next - so you wonder if your voice is accidentally on 'mute'.
Looking straight through you when you're speaking, 'Whatever' writ large upon bored faces.
It's rarely doing what they're told, and never coming when you call.
Treating your friends with disrespect, just when you want them to be their charming best.
Foul language and gutter manners amongst their peer group.
Going off without leave and coming back if and when they feel like, invariably losing some item you will have to replace in the process.
It's raiding the larder the moment your back is turned, devouring all the good bits and leaving everything in a mess.
It's a trashed bed like a a fleapit you can only be thankful you never have to sleep in.
Filthy feet traipsed through the house.
Any liquid refreshment sloshed everywhere.
Your accessories 'borrowed' and never returned...

Recognise any of these symptoms?

Fortunately, it's only a phase.

And fortunately we love them, so we just repeat ourselves when ignored, coax even harder, are simply relieved when they finally turn up, write off the borrowed items, and - in between - mop, hoover and clean up as necessary.

Fortunately I've been there, done that and - as they say - bought the t-shirt.

I must say, I wasn't expecting to have to do it all over again, but there you go.
I keep telling myself she can't help it. It's just her age and stage.
Look how affectionate she can be.
Look how beautiful she is.
Look how sweet she can be when she feels like.
One day it will all be worth it.
And in the meantime, I'll just keep loving her and hoping for the best.
After all, she is very special.
She's a SuperModel.

Teen Queen

And in the meantime, joy of joys, one of my gorgeous French boys has returned for a visit!
Hurray, hurray!

Tuesdays and Thursdays

The In-Charge takes a packed lunch to college every day, and being the perfect wife, of course I rise before dawn and make his sandwiches. This morning, only half awake, I pulled the lid off his lunchbox to find yesterday's banana still in residence.
I barely saw the banana, because the smell I had released in removing the lid had instantly transported me back through more years than I care to count. I was once again a young child, opening the lunch at school that my mother had prepared for me early, early in the mornings of long ago. 
She often put a banana in, and its pervasive aroma would mix inextricably with everything else the box contained. Smelling it this morning, I could almost taste the freshly-squeezed, frozen lime juice she also included, juice that by lunchtime would have defrosted to a sweet, delicious slush - more refreshing than water in the heat of a tropical noon.


I was no longer at my  kitchen counter, but back in the Barbados of my childhood. I was six years old again, with memories unrolling around me like film clips.

St Josephs, Barbados

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, my mother picked me up after school and took me home. I presume we had tea, did reading practice, played with my brothers and younger sister. All the things that families do. Who knows?
I have no memories of Tuesdays and Thursdays.
What I remember are the other days, the days when my father had the car in town so I couldn't be collected when the school bell went. I remember the Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Of those three special days, Friday was my least favourite.
On Fridays I went home with another small boy whose glossy mother was a friend of my parents. We would sit at the kitchen table, he and I, and I would stare at the big, red checks on the gingham table cloth, and at the fly paper, obscenely blackening in the middle. I remember feeling a curious distaste for that fly paper, even though I wouldn't have known the word 'obscene'. Perhaps it was because my mother never had a fly paper on an old blue saucer on the kitchen table. Or a gingham cloth.
And all the while, the maid would make us peanut butter sandwiches, the glistening, sweaty butter heaped thick on white, cotton-woolly bread that was a world away from the bread my mother made at home.

All of us with my mother - although I was more than six in this picture

I suppose it all fascinated me, as did the boy's mother who floated around the edge of this scene - a doll who has no substance in my head, whose mouth moved around magazine words. She wasn't the sort of mother who slapped you for biting your fingernails, as mine did. She didn't notice fingernails. But deep down, I knew she wasn't the sort of mother who would sit all night turning a cool flannel on my head through the endless bouts of tropical sickness that plagued me. Without conscious reasoning, I knew this even then, as I also knew that at home we would not have been left alone to play the afternoon away down beside the walls of the house, without anyone coming to see what we were up to. To my young conscience, the games of doctors and nurses - innocent as they were - would not have stood my mother's scrutiny. But she just lay - my classmate's mother - on the cool verandah hour after hour and we did as we pleased.


On Mondays, there was freedom of different kind, because I would stay on at school after everyone had left, and the place was mine then. It was a big, two storey house. The school occupied the ground floor, while the headmistress and her family lived above. No one ever went upstairs - except on Mondays, when I did.

When all the children had gone, a vast silence would fall over the garden that was our playground. Hordes of small feet had reduced what might once have been grass to hard, bare earth interspersed with feathery tamarind trees, and - in season - these hung heavy with pods of tangy, acid fruit. Unable to resist, I would collect them, my mouth salivating spontaneously as it salivates now, just at the memory. Chipping off the crisp brown shell, I would eat them until my tongue was raw, even though for days afterwards I would barely be able to eat at all. But I never learned, either with those or the small green fruit we called Chinese gooseberries which caused tummy ache like early apples.

But on Mondays, I wasn't interested in tamarinds or Chinese gooseberries because I had a very special job. I used to stay and help Miss Boyce make buns for Tuesday's school tuckshop. Miss Boyce was stolid, uninspiring and very plain, but she was enormously kind. She was also very careful with her small charges, enforcing on us behaviour she envisaged our parents would want, yet untouched by many of those rules herself. At midday we would sit neatly at our small desks and open our lunch boxes - those same lunch boxes that have winged me down this chute of memory, and the intermingled smell of bananas and sandwiches would waft around us, locking us - had we but known it - into a time warp for evermore.

But while we ate our sandwiches and peeled our bananas, our eyes feasted on something altogether different and infinitely more fascinating. Miss Boyce, facing us from the teacher's desk, would lunch on hoops of baloney, slabs of bread and butter and whole lettuce leaves and we watched mesmerised as her hand passed seamlessly from her box to the gaping concrete mixer of her mouth.

But on Mondays, even Miss Boyce's table manners were forgotten in the excitement of bun-making. My reward for the laborious greasing of endless tins was the icing. We made oceans of icing in a shade of pink that only small girls love, and then spread it thickly over the buns until finally, my small sticky fingers could press pieces of bright, glace cherry into each one. Oh, how happily we would sit at the table in that quiet kitchen and sample our produce. The concrete mixer didn't appal me in that intimate setting - I was too busy luxuriating in having no other greedy little fingers competing to lick out the bowl.

In those days, there was no edible glitter, no sugar butterflies or fancy dragees to add the glitz that these days liberally sprinkle the cupcakes I make for the market, but the rows of cherry-topped, savagely pink buns gave me far more satisfaction than their modern counterparts ever could. I remember, years later my baby brother drew a picture of a woman on whose bosoms he gravely coloured in 'the cherries'. Those pointed, red-tipped breasts looked like nothing so much as my tuck shop buns which he had never seen.

My baby brother. I seem to remember making him pose for my photo in this ridiculous way!

But it was Wednesdays that I loved most of all.
After school, I was delivered to some old family friends who lived along the coast, a couple whom I called Aunt and Uncle, but who stood in lieu of grandparents to me then. They lived in a wonderful house that was only feet from the sea, something that never ceased to thrill me, even on that tiny, ocean-ringed island. From the courtyard beside the house I would climb up the stone staircase that led to the kitchen on the first floor, and there the elderly maid would laugh and fuss over me while in the background I would hear my Aunt's voice calling, and the sea calling, and the smells of hot food calling.

The ritual was always the same. My satchel was taken into custody by the maid, my hands were washed and then I was sent down the few steps into the dining room to await my 'lunch'. It was a remote and formal room, always cool and somehow disconnected from the rest of the house, but I loved it. A great, polished table stood in the middle, at which a solitary place was always set for me - the rest of the household having eating hours before. Through the slatted blinds and the railings beyond, the street beat hot and vibrant in the afternoon sun, but inside, the family silver gleamed dimly on the sideboard, flowers stood in a vase, and I would sit with my back to the window and drink in the room's gracious elegance as I ate the flying fish and potato pie, or whatever had been saved for me. Subconsciously, I felt my mother would somehow know if I misbehaved in that room, so I never did.

My mother and surrogate Grandmother, Aunt Ercell

But afterwards I would run up the stairs to the most magical place of all - the upstairs drawing room. And there I would chatter to my Aunt and Uncle, and play and 'rest', bouncing in the rocking chair that stood in the wide bay window overlooking that translucent, aquamarine sea. Down beneath the window was a small paved yard with a table and some chairs, and then just pale, dry sand, a few palm trees and the sea. And the sound of the sea, and the smell of it and the endless lure of it have drawn me back helplessly my whole life since, tinting the marrow in my bones and the unsung dreams in my head to aquamarine.

I couldn't wait to get out into it, but I would have to bide my time until 'lunch went down' but then, at last, it would be time to go and change into my bathing suit and walk with my Aunt down the beach. We rarely swam just there, in front of the house, we would walk a short distance and then go in.

I couldn't swim, to begin with, I would just play, revelling in the warm, clear water, the afternoon sun dancing in bright skitters across the undulating surface. We would take an orange with us, or a mango and she would peel it and dip it in the sea and we would eat it, warm and salty, the juice running down our faces. But soon the day came when I had to learn to swim, and she picked me up and carried me, screaming, to the depths of the ocean where the water must have lapped at her waist, and she dropped me, terror-bound into that sweet blue void and behold - like a dog, I swam, coughing and spluttering and totally unaware of her hands hovering around me.
 
And afterwards, walking back to the house, my face and the back of my neck where my bathing suit tied all tingling with sun and salt, I would be totally happy. Until, that is, the day when my happiness turned to cold, six-year-old despair as half-way down the beach I suddenly remembered that I had left my knickers on underneath my bathing suit, and now they were wringing wet. I would have nothing to wear home under my dress. My silent feast in the dining room, the bay window, the sea - everything was lost; and when my father's car finally turned into the yard, my misery was further compounded when I saw another man, a business man, a stranger, sitting beside him. My ally was gone, the chance of any confidences banished, my father in one instant changed from saviour to foe. My world ended in tears and I couldn't believe that he and his companion didn't know in one glance what had befallen me. In that moment I longed miserably for my mother, the only one who could set things right.

My father's desk photo - posing for it was an annual nightmare, but in hindsight, I'm glad we did

I never swam in my knickers again, but once, on my honeymoon, I went to the beach in a bikini with a sundress thrown over the top, and at the end of the day, with the bikini soaked and nothing else to put on, the sea and my childhood tangled in aquamarine around me all over again, and we laughed all the way back on the bus, my lover's arms around me, and me with nothing on but my dress, and I was a child again, who didn't go home after school except on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

_____________________________

COMING SOON: 

In celebration of Writing from the Edge's first birthday, 
I will be having a wonderful Giveaway! 

Don't miss it!

The 32nd Amendment

 
Yesterday, for the second day in a row, and despite it being Sunday, I set out bright and early to take Model Dog to the vet. On Saturday morning she went in to be spayed - or 'splayed' as one ditsy old woman we knew used to say.
Poor Puffalump. (Model Dog's affectionate nickname springs from the fact that despite her long legs and undeniable beauty, she shares many characteristics with heffalumps.)
It has not been a good weekend for her. It started badly and only got worse.


We've had Model Dog for six months now, during which time she's never been out in the car on her own, so I quite understood her perplexity at being driven off without Top Dog and Under Dog. She didn't howl or whine, but there was a wary look about her that didn't respond to reassurances.
Although her nickname could be Tigger, because she is constantly bouncing, never far beneath her joie de vivre, remains the dog that was abandoned before she came to us. She is permanently anxious about being separated. We were told that she eventually found her way home again, tired, hungry and bewildered, the first time she was dumped, whereupon her owner immediately took her out and dumped her again - still tired and hungry. The second time he left her in a state of collapse outside a shop in some town, after telling someone what had taken place and saying he couldn't 'be arsed' about her.

When we got her from the Rescue Home, she immediately attached an invisible bungee to my knee. She somehow manages to slip through doorways simultaneously with me to avoid being left on one side or the other; she walks so close beside me that I have several times poked her in the eye with fingers hanging innocently at my side; and she watches me constantly, until she is sure I have 'settled' at whatever I'm doing, and won't creep away without telling her. If I'm inconsiderate enough to go off somewhere without her, she transfers her bungee temporarily to the In-Charge.

Of course, now that we are back into college routine, the In-Charge is not always at home, but mercifully as the months have gone by, she has become content to have the odd duvet-day if I have to go out.
It was not always thus. Before we realised the extent of her separation anxiety, we did have the Water Day, but perhaps it's unfair to mention it, as there was just the one incident.
Shortly after we got her, the In-Charge and I went to town to execute various commissions - as you do.
We left all three dogs happily ensconced in their beds in the kitchen - or so we thought.
When we returned a few hours later it was to find chaos of near-Biblical proportions. She had obviously jumped up to try and follow us via the kitchen window which - thankfully - yielded not, but in so doing she  not only managed to turn the tap on (the cold tap - lots of pressure!) but also to swivel it round so that it gushed not down the capacious sink, but into the extremely receptive window sill.
It is probably best to draw a veil over the rest. Suffice it to say that the In-Charge was Not Amused, and even Less Amused when I laughed. The wall was saturated through to the outside, the floor was awash and opening cupboard doors brought forth walls of water Moses would have been proud of.
I daresay you are getting the picture.
We won't go into the dirty paw prints the entire length of the kitchen counter. Or Model Dog's completely innocent demeanour. That would be hitting below the belt.

She is much less insecure now, but even so I would have taken the other dogs with us on Saturday morning, were that journey not Top Dog's particular Torture, and had we not been bringing Model Dog home barely conscious afterwards.
Fortunately our vet is very user-friendly and despite the In-Charge's mutterings about being surplus to requirements, we both stayed with her until she was out for the count, and were back with her before she woke up.                          

The operation itself was completely successful, but the Needle-Lady (Who-Will-Be-Obeyed) commanded Puff's re-attendance for a post-operative check-up the next morning, Sunday notwithstanding.
Yesterday, on our return visit, the vet declared all to be well, but poor Puff wasn't a happy bunny and proceeded to be hideously sick on the way home. The after-effects of the anaesthetic, no doubt, coupled with the morsels of bread and pate she'd finally toyed with at midnight after her 30-hour fast.


I stopped in a deserted car park to clean the car up. I'm not a good traveller at the best of times - let alone in a vehicle reeking of vomit. Reluctantly Puff got out and stood watching me in her shapeless hand-me-down dress - an old, baggy T-shirt adapted to prevent her from removing her own stitches, should the desire suddenly prove irresistible.
She looked heart-wrenchingly forlorn and stared around the car park bleakly. I wondered if she was weighing it up as an abandoning-site.
I found my mind straying to the person who'd dumped her before. They weren't good thoughts.

Poor Puffalump

As soon as I'd got rid of the worst of the sick, I helped her back into the car and stopped at the next garage to buy some hot sausages from their breakfast bar. Hot sausages are the food of dreams for Puff and I felt she needed cosseting. She ate two, after I'd broken them into little pieces, but apologetically declined the third. I put it back in the bag - I didn't want anymore cleaning up.

On the way home I saw a poster nailed to a telegraph pole. It was about children's rights.
Currently our Constitution doesn't provide a separate statement of rights for children, and Ireland has a referendum this coming Friday on whether to change the Constitution to include a new Amendment.

On the whole I think 'Rights' can be a difficult issue. Of course we need them, but people talk very glibly about their 'Rights', and it feels like we are obsessed with enshrining as many as possible in law; yet sometimes it also feels like the more 'Rights' we all have, the less well we all treat each other - as if 'Rights' somehow obviate both the need to focus on the individual and the requirement for the individual to assume certain responsibilities.

But be that as it may, the poster made me aware that I hadn't really thought about the proposed Amendment.
Yes - every child does have the 'Right' to be cared for (in every sense of the word) by its parents, or to be given over to someone else who will. No child should ever be abandoned or abused.

But neither should any animal.
And for that matter, every animal has a 'Right' to be cared for (in every sense of the world) by its owner, or be given over to someone else who will.
Maybe it's about time we had an 'Animal Rights' Amendment to our Constitution as well.
The 32nd Amendment.
Something that could then be enshrined in law.
And enforced.

(And maybe they could add in something about 8 out of 10 dogs preferring sausages for breakfast.)

COMING SOON: 

In honour of Writing from the Edge's first birthday, I will be having a wonderful Giveaway! 

Don't miss it!

Pussy-Footing Round the Problem

Coco and McCosker, the first two kittens we found in the garden, so tiny we put a hot water bottle beneath them, and a cuddly toy beside them for company.

I was reading Isobel's blog last week, in which she quoted a Seamus Heaney poem, and threw the subject of unwanted kittens and puppies into the arena. It was done with her usual light touch, and left many unspoken questions hovering in the air.

It also reawakened a memory that has haunted me all my life.
Of finding a bucket of drowned kittens, their bodies, not as Heaney describes them 'sluiced out on the dunghill, glossy and dead,' but rather drifting in a kind of dream world, their fur fluffed out in the water, their paws stilled, their faces closed.
I still see them now.

I wouldn't be able to drown a kitten.

McCosker tried to drown himself. He learnt how to drink by bathing in it

But drowned kittens aside, it never ceases to startle and appal me how some people try to dispose of animals
How some people treat animals.
It makes me want to reach for a gun.
(And it's not the animals I want to shoot.)

Someone once rescued a puppy that had been thrown into the river here in a sack. They saw it being dumped and rushed in after it. And I was brought a kitten by a sobbing tourist, many years ago. Driving along a road not far from here, they had witnessed with horror someone hurling the small, inoffensive creature out the window of the car in front, presumably to perish beneath their wheels. The woman - her entire family - were, not surprisingly, distraught, not least because, on a touring holiday, there was nothing long term they could do to help.

We called the poor little mite Tattoo, for the scar her ordeal left above one eye.
She was, incredibly, only superficially hurt, and never looked back.

Tattoo enveloped by her new family

On another occasion my small son came rushing home from school, fierce, angry tears streaming down his face. He was clutching a tiny kitten to his chest in one hand, his school bag in the other.
A parent, collecting their child, had dumped three kittens underneath a bush outside the school gate. My son's fury was only equalled by his grief. The other two had scattered in fright and he'd been unable to catch either. They were long gone when I returned to the school with him.

For years and years, when we first moved here, we would find unwanted kittens dumped in our garden, or inside the gate. Coco and McCosker were the first - who we found two days apart, and who clung to each other when re-united. There were four once, in a sack left outside my henhouse door where I'd be certain to find them. One tiny black tarantula of a creature was shut into a box made of field stones outside the back gate. It was the day of Prince Edward's wedding to Sophie I happen to remember. It rained all day, and every time I went outside I heard this plaintive crying. We called him Pink, because the aforementioned Tattoo took him under her wing like a mother.
('Tattoo was the mother of Pinkle Purr,
A little black nothing of feet and fur,
And by and by, when his eyes came through,
He saw his mother, the big Tattoo...'
A A Milne)

Inky black Pink with Top Dog and Dottie

On another occasion three little boys came to the front door one summer's day carrying yet another tiny kitten. 'We found her on the bridge,' they said. The bridge is old and narrow and bears all the traffic passing through the village.
I asked whether they had tried this house, that house - everyone I could think of who liked cats. 'We've tried all of them,' they replied. I didn't think their kind impulse would stretch much further.
So Pushkin arrived. She is now Senior Cat and is sitting on my lap purring as I write.

I could go on and on. There have been so many.


When I was a child in the West Indies, it was common practice to put unwanted puppies in dustbins. One in each dustbin down the street - or probably down someone else's street. It was seen as giving the hapless creatures a 'chance of life'. They weren't wheelie bins, remember and there would have been food scraps. Maybe whoever dumped kittens in my garden thought the same.

Would it have been better if they had drowned their 'litter' in a bucket?
It would have been better if they had prevented the litter in the first place.
Not difficult to do, these days. And there are plenty of charities to help with the cost for those who aren't financially able.

To my mind it's about taking responsibility. Which brings me back to Isobel's post.

Life was tough in years gone by, but I don't think I would have been inundated with unwanted felines during the deep watches of the night back then. I don't know whether country people had a more 'robust and practical' approach to their animals then or not. I suspect they did. I suspect they needed to have. My mother spent her summer holidays on a farm as a young child. She remembers seeing the matriarch of the farm knocking new-born kittens' heads against the wall. The idea fills me - and filled her - with horror, but rather like pulling chickens necks, I suppose it was quick and clean, when you knew what you were doing. She was a kind, good woman. All her family and her animals were loved, well fed and cared for. She was, I suppose, taking responsibility, at a time when that was the only option to prevent over-breeding, in-breeding and uncontrollable proliferation.


Now, conversely, when it's so much easier to take responsibility, so many don't, and now that none of us need get our hands dirty, need even contemplate having to drown kittens in a bucket or dash their brains against a wall, we have become increasingly squeamish.

Pushkin was delivered to the front door.

And woolly in our thinking.
Sentimental.


I don't know about you, but personally I rate quality far higher than quantity. I would rather put an animal down than see it suffer. Like my poor little Empress last week. Like my first dog Alfie, who developed severe epilepsy. Like Pink who developed HIV when he was only a few years old.

It's always heartbreaking, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the one thing we can do for an animal that we love but cannot mend, or an animal that no one wants. I really don't buy into animal charities - who in all other respects I wholeheartedly support - putting animals through endless treatments for illnesses or accidents when it would be kinder and better to put them to sleep and spend those much needed and hard-earned resources on the endless queue of fit and well animals needing help and a home. And what about the innumerable puppies and kittens they receive?

Ireland ships untold numbers of unwanted dogs to the UK and Sweden. Surely the UK and Sweden have enough unwanted dogs of their own? Can the organisations that ship these animals out of Ireland guarantee that each and every one goes to a loving, domestic home? I don't believe all of them can, in which case they cannot know what potential suffering those animals might yet endure. As far as I know, cats aren't shipped anywhere, but the cat rescue services are overrun with cats that no one seems to want.

If people won't neuter their animals, then dealing with the endless litters will become a greater problem than ever - an unsustainable problem. Perhaps it's kinder to be robust and practical. And we're lucky enough to live in an age when that doesn't have to entail brutality.

I guess kindness is the key.  The third essential qualifier to the robust and practical approach.
Together those three make for something stronger than sentimentality.
They make for love that puts the animal's best and long-term interests first.
Tough love, if necessary.

Christmas Magic

I love Christmas.
I love the start of Christmas, which for me is the carol service from King's College on Christmas Eve - as the sky is turning to the blues of night and those pure, light voices reach out to ignite the deepest recesses of my heart.

And I love getting up early on Christmas morning - before it's light, before anyone's awake. The quiet hour or two in the kitchen with that same music and my animals for company as I prepare food and watch the day creep in. It is never just about this Christmas, is it? It is always about all Christmases, so the day is rich with the presence of all those we love, have loved, still love... is imbued with the memories and traditions and rituals that are sacred to us and ours.

For me, all that intensity is held in the moment, early in the morning, when the sky is washed from cyan to duck-egg blue, and the last few stars hang low on the horizon, diamond bright. It's a moment that could happen every morning, I suppose, but somehow it is inextricably tied into Christmas.


When I was a child I lived in the West Indies and on Christmas morning we rose before dawn to go to church, as was the custom there. My mother would wake us in the dark, and we'd sit by the Christmas tree drinking hot chocolate and bursting with sleepy excitement. There was only time to open one present from our stockings before setting out, but that made it even more thrilling.

I'll never forget those early mornings, the room in darkness, lit only by the warm glow of old-fashioned Christmas tree lights that you don't see much anymore - the ones in the shapes of snowmen, and little houses, and Father Christmases; the deep glimmer of decorations catching the light in rich, royal shades of purple and blue, pink and gold; the spiky scented pine needles; the pile of presents like promises beneath the tree - alluring, mysterious and all still to come - still to come.

It was magical.

And then the journey in the car. I'm sure it was then that I learned to love the early morning sky, the pale wash of colour, the stars hanging like decorations. And finally, when we got to church, the Christmas carols that wrapped the whole, perfect, mystical moment in music and sealed it in memory like a fragile butterfly caught in amber forever.
Forever.

 
Painting by Viggo Johansen 1891