Kevin & Stan

Kevin is the rather idiosyncratic cat and Stan is the Irish Wolfhound. They live with my step-sister in Suffolk.

I am not sure what they are reading there.

Gedankenexperiment 2: Schrödinger’s Cat

The blog seems to be drawn only to thought experiments that involve cats. I suspect there is not an infinite supply of these (thought experiments involving cats, not cats, of which there may well be).

When I run out, I will have to think up my own.

Schrödinger’s cat explores the interpretation of quantum mechanics through the possibilities for the fate of the cat in the box, before the box is opened and observed.

It’s a good mental warm-up on a Sunday for the woman thinking of cooking an unobserved roast dinner.

07.10 Walk to School

The butcher sets out red flesh on stainless steel trays
I notice he has grown a beard.
It’s too early for the delivery lorry
with its pig carcasses,
split lengthways.
The bookseller has cleared out his van
I can see the wheelchair hoist
Once covered in cardboard boxes.
Strange that he walks everywhere -
Without a dog
In school the parent grills the Maths teacher
In gentle Canadian
They both wear jeans
A carer lets himself into the one-legged woman’s house
His wrist is strapped up
An industrial injury?
Someone is missing their b&w cat, Mouse
A one hundred pound reward
Look in your sheds
Please?

Feeding the cat – an epilogue

I returned the neighbours keys yesterday. I hope your cat is alright I said, I never saw it once. By the way is it a he or a she?

Oh, he’s a he. And you wouldn’t have seen it because it was shut in the wardrobe. We heard it miaowing and let it out when we got home. He was very grateful and ate three packets of food.

Oh dear, I said. I must have been feeding a fox with all that cat food I left outside. I think it was a fox because when I wasn’t leaving cat food outside in a bowl the creature was ripping into the black bags of rubbish that I kindly meant to leave out for the dustman in my neighbours absence… After all who wants to come home to a smelly heap of rubbish torn out of your black bags? Not me.

Then the neighbours gave me the ‘thank you’ gift for taking good care of their cat and said that being on holiday with the dog was a bit restricting. I obviously then volunteered to take care of the dog as well next time they are away. Hopefully they’ve got double wardrobes.

It’s not funny though, is it?

It's a disgrace says Kevin

Feeding the cat

I am ‘looking after’ a neighbour’s cat whilst they are on holiday.  So far, I have not seen any evidence of said cat, which is a bit of a worry.  On Monday, when I was in there doing my duties, someone knocked on the door.  A young man, quite good looking, slightly earnest.  I can’t remember what his opening gambit was but I quickly replied, oh, I don’t live here (meaning don’t try and sell me something).

He looked at me quizzically, so I qualified with, I am just feeding the cat.

Oh that’s a good one, he said.  I’ve not heard that before…

It would have been quite marvellous if he’d knocked at my actual house when he was working the other side of the street and I would have taken great delight in repeating the line at my own front door, but when I got in, he had already been.

Clearly, he’d not been reading the signs…

Ok, it is in a posher part of town, but still

State Hospital (Marmaris)

Since the recent holiday in Turkey, I have learned the hard way that it is a high risk country for rabies, up there with India or Afghanistan. My children were given the lecture about not touching animals whilst on holiday, but given the outcome of the lecture I now wonder if I should have taught them to be scared to death of all animals abroad, like I was as a kid. My extreme fear back in the day was partly due to watching an Information Film at school of some poor person in the last stage of rabies dying a horrible death; this horror backed up by all those X-ray skull posters they used to plaster on the stairwell walls and car decks of channel ferries in the 1970s.

Anyway, on Easter Sunday during the holiday, due to a combination of happenstance and bad luck (probability taken personally, remember) the youngest daughter was scratched by a street cat. A pretty sick looking street cat with quantities of drool hanging out of its mouth.

And so it was we visited this hospital on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday whilst away. Easter Sunday for the first rabies vaccine, the second day for reasons that are still unclear but involved a policeman carrying a gun telling us that we should return the following day. Then we went again on Tuesday because, according the UK Public Health Agency, we should be getting another rabies shot that day. It transpired that, in fact, the shot was not due until Wednesday (that is a Letter of Complaint waiting to be written).

Please note dear blog reader that I could now go into a lengthy, confusing and LOUD rap about all the shortcomings of how the UK handled this whole deal and how I have had to fight, whilst containing my ferocious temper, to get my daughter’s subsequent vaccines administered in the UK on a Sunday but I don’t think you need to know about the vagaries of days 0 and 1 in the schedule or indeed how I… Anyway, I am sparing you all that. For now.

So we became fairly closely acquainted with The State Hospital Marmaris. In Turkey there do not seem to be appointments. Everyone waits in the corridor. Then when they have had enough of that they get up and try the doors to the consulting and treatment rooms. If a door is found to be unlocked, everyone piles into the room waving their paperwork. Then everyone is shooed out again, apart from one lucky patient. It is all quite good humoured, mixed with a little resignation perhaps.

This was the tea tent. We tried to make a day of it.

A Holding Pattern Post

I have this post in the pipeline that is taking ages to do, it’s not even that long, but it’s causing me problems. I thought I might finally have cracked it this morning but actually I haven’t.

So rather than leave a blank space on a Saturday morning I thought I would share this.

The kids wanted pancakes for breakfast, a reasonably regular request. The thing is, since the kitchen got plastered, everything has been in a state of flux. Half the kitchenalia is hiding in the dining room and things are commuting between the two rooms on the misery line. In fact, I have given up trying to keep track; the kitchen is like the enemy within at the moment. So the pancake batter is made, but we can’t locate the frying pan. In complete harmony with my defeatist outlook, I sat down and the kids went off to investigate. They came back initially and reported that it should be by the toolbox: it was not. Then after some time had elapsed they came back and said it had turned up and could I go and get on with making a breakfast stack.

Where was it? I said.

Under the dog’s bed! they replied.

How, how is this possible? I wonder.

Just don’t go there… what is left of my rational mind whimpers.

“Worn to a ravelling”

The moment you have a child your future possibilities for sleep are completely in the lap of the Gods. Every parent knows this, but you don’t really know it until it is actually too late.

I crawled through the first years of motherhood on my hands and knees in utter exhaustion and I can’t say it hasn’t improved because it has. The eldest is a paragon of virtue remaining neatly arranged in her own bed all night, every night. She even has the decency to lie-in a bit. The youngest however is a different matter. Since a babe in arms she signed some kind of secret hideous lifetime timeshare to occupy the parental bed and although she starts every night in her own pit she invariably makes her way into mine 75% of the time.

At 6 she is too big. She is too elbowy and sharp-kneeed, she is too leg-drapey and hair-tickly and she keeps me awake. She ignores requests to vacate and just burrows further into the mattress like a mite. Worst of all she clutches items of desire in her sleep and brings them with her. It turns out last night I was not sleeping with luminous green slime called Halloween Goo. I am stubborn though. As much as she disturbs my sleep, I refuse to play musical beds. If I go down that road I end up in a narrow single with a dog, and a cat and then she often follows me back and gets in there too. It is a nightmare.

So this is how I was listening to Radio 4 this morning before Farming Today was even on. There was some programme that went like this.

This woman with a rather saccharine lilt was saying how it was miracle that she was no longer crippled by her back. She had been on Incapacity Benefit for 12 years. That’s not working for 12 years you know, because your back hurts. Then she had had this miracle. Someone had suggested she remove her piercing. They surely said whereabouts on her body this piercing was located, but because I was trying to sleep I must have missed it. A piercing that crippples you for 12 years? Where the hell was it? I’m thinking a bolt in her neck. Anyway, let that be a lesson to you all. Metal junk in your body is unnecessary and evil.

Then thank goodness that was over and I had Clare Balding and her Ramblings round Glasgow’s Necropolis with a load of women history detectives. Rather unkindly I admit, it has crossed my mind that the wee small hours are the time programme schedulers let women on the radio because no-one is bloody listening. The theory is flawed because Ramblings is on during the day and rightly so because Clare is still excellent, even when I would rather be in the Land of Nod than wandering around a cemetery in Glasgow. Then I had to suffer the actual Farming Today, but I hung on long enough for the Today without the farming, wherein the great John Humphrys was caught out reading a piece on “peasants and phartridges” which turned out to be a typo from Simon Barnes’ article in today’s Times. Tut, tut.

By the time we got to torture in Iraq and Rooney as the greediest man alive (you’d never guess it to look at his face would you?) I was comatose. So no song lyrics in my head this morning, just a bit of a headache, a stiff back (no piercings, STUPID woman) and a distinct affinity with the Tailor of Gloucester.

Simpkin, alack I am undone. No more twist.

Pity our cat can't make tea

*These are the ramblings of a sleep-starved person so if they make no sense (nonsense) what else did you expect. I might be pulling myself together to predict the loser of the Pacing Rost Trophy at Donny later…

I love my pets but… (title shamelessly plagiarised from Old Stokie)

I have spent the night with the dog pinning my legs down and the cat perched on me as if I were the shed roof on a sunny day.

Then there is my one wish about pets: to be free of their hair. Actually, that’s my one wish. If a fairy ever visited me and offered me wishes I wouldn’t want money or endless wishes, I would just want to be an anti-magnetic device for animal hair. When I had dogs to begin with in my mid 20s I went through rolls of sticky tape weekly. I could not tolerate a single hair on my clothes. My mother is the same now. She has two dogs, but you wouldn’t catch a stray pet hair on her. Not in a million years. I think she does a lot of hoovering.

Now my “standards” have slipped terribly. My two measures are to tell the girls not to roll round on the floor (hairs in their hair) and I usually give the settees a quick bash with a hair-covered cushion before I sit down. Then the dog comes and leans all over me anyway, leaving my left arm covered in cream hairs. The cat hair is worse, it can sort of float around in the ether before coming to rest where you don’t want it.

Once I bought some magic US scraping device in New York that was meant to easily get hairs off upholstery and so forth. It did not. So this is my mother’s top tip for pet hair removal: scrape affected areas whilst wearing a rubber glove. I have modified that slightly and find that a quick scrape with a Havaianas flip-flop does an excellent job too and you don’t even have to bend down. Except I can’t use the method on the cashmere cardies.

Officer Dibble

The corridors have been bare at work for months, but now the students are back and it is bustling and interesting once more. I don’t blog about work, because that would be wrong and it would be a whole new blog with anonymity for all concerned. However some things are ok because they are mere observations about passers by.

Did you know that if you want an entry-level job that does not involve using computers in any way, you are especially likely to be expected to complete an online job application? No paper form to fill out. That’s not even an option. Great, except there are a lot of people that want a job that can’t fill out an online job application.

It seems a bit to me like the world of work disappearing partway up its own bottom. So when I walked past Officer Dibble this week near reception I was rather fixated on identifying his job role via his insignia (remember no specs for distance)…

This pic is dedicated to Mr Daftburger cos I know he loves cats

Can you guess what it is yet?