Do you have any pets?
I am still sweating away on the FAQ for the web site. Some of you may have noticed the site’s new opening page*; it also says the new site will be up by the end of this month. Blog/sitemom keeps saying patiently, just choose a few crucial bits and deal with those; the nice thing about a web site is that it’s never finished. But the FAQ is, to me, obsessive that I am, the FAQ. Must. Get. It. Done. Great swathes of it can remain pretty much the same; other swathes . . . cannot.**
Some of this you’ll have seen before (I have only the one life, and less than one memory; repetition is inevitable), but some of it you haven’t.
Q: Do you have any pets?
RMcK: Oh my. How life moves on, leaving tyre tracks over tender portions of your anatomy as it goes. After I sold my horse–because I couldn’t afford him: it had been a gamble, and I knew it, and I lost–which must be close to ten years ago, I updated the answer to that question like this:
Three whippets and a 1965 cream-coloured MGB convertible. The whippets lie around in graceful, anatomically incredible heaps and assist in the Doing of Literature. They know the system, and if we aren’t at our desks by 9 am they come round and stare at us accusingly. It’s astonishing, the force of accusation beaming from the eyes of a creature that barely comes up to your knee. I seem to have had to give up horses for the moment so the MG is my horse equivalent: exhilarating and temperamental. With your eyes half-closed — especially if you privately think the old classic MGs are the most beautiful cars ever made — she actually quite begins to resemble the perfect, cream-coloured ponies of your distant childhood fantasies, the ones who might secretly be unicorns.
Those three whippets–Holly, Hazel and Rowan, to whom DRAGONHAVEN is dedicated–have all gone on to that big squashy sofa in the Elysian Fields, and very happy they are there too because the silly rule that they can’t get on it till a human sits on it first and invites them has been dismissed forever. There isn’t a day that goes by, however, down here in mundane reality, that I don’t think of each of them in her turn; most of my favourite walks are ones I first discovered in their company; and the current canine generation often strikingly remind me of who has gone before–or strikingly remind me how different they are.
There are only two of them this time around, because I have only two arms for holding two long extending leads–I feel that leads are a necessity with sighthounds in this landscape, which is riddled with roads and barbed wire, when they can be over the county border after a rabbit before you’ve drawn breath to call them. (Whippets are, pound for pound, the fastest dog on the planet. Greyhounds are only a little bit faster, and a lot bigger.) And Peter at over 80 years old no longer feels like racing over the countryside the way the five of us used to.
Chaos and Darkness [there will be a link to hellhound photo gallery], AKA the hellhounds, are litter brothers, just two years old as I write this in August 08, seven-eighths whippet and one-eighth deerhound. Our whippets were all little–Hazel never quite made twenty pounds, the other two were a pound or two over: but they were long-legged and whipcord-muscled and you’d never mistake them for small dogs–so these boys at a pound or two over forty pounds (Darkness) and a pound or two under (Chaos) each seems enormous in comparison (especially when I have to heave them over dog-impassable stiles). I was also not prepared for dogs who can lay their heads on the kitchen table, or your desk. The whippets were all the right size for putting their heads on your knee and looking at you beseechingly about one thing or another, probably involving a lap or a sofa: when a hellhound wants a lap, he just throws his front half into yours, and when only the three of us want to watch TV together we need a camp bed in front of the sofa for extra leg room. (It’s an old horsehair sofa with a camber, and it’s remarkably easy to slide off of.) I find it very difficult to negotiate the concept of air space with a dog, although they’ve (mostly) learnt that objects on tables and desks are forbidden.
The main shock to the system about the hellhounds however is that they’re boys. I don’t do boys. (Male dogs pee all the time! Male dogs pee every five feet when they’re out on walks! And they pee on everything! I put them on short lead and frog march them past the antique shop, which usually has a few chairs out on the pavement, to lure in passersby.) The majority of the dogs I’ve ever had much to do with, with one notable exception, have been girls; even back in my house- and pet-sitting days the critters I bonded with tended to be girls. But when I saw the ad in the local paper for ‘whippet lurcher puppies’ it was a year since my last whippet had died, and the first local ad for any sort of sighthound that I’d seen. (Note that they aren’t really lurchers, they’re longdogs. Lurchers are any sighthound crossbred with anything that isn’t a sighthound; longdogs are any sighthound crossbred with any other sighthound. Whippets and deerhounds are both sighthounds. But people generally know the word lurcher, and generally don’t know longdog.) I had begun subscribing to a country-sports newspaper for the puppy ads in the back–I wanted a working dog family rather than a show dog one–but the whippets all seemed to be in Yorkshire or Wales, and I wanted to meet the little furry thing before I bought it. So I was instead in the process of deciding to adopt an ex-racing greyhound (or two), and had half an appointment–if one can have half an appointment–to visit a greyhound rescue not hugely far from here.
And then this ad. And I made a little hole in the floor getting to the phone fast enough. The woman sounded very nice, but after saying there were eight puppies and four were available, she asked cautiously if I was looking for a dog or a bitch? And I said, oh, a bitch (or two), I’ve only ever really had girls. And she said that there were only two bitches in the litter and they were both already spoken for. This stopped me about two thirds of a second–hey, I was seriously whippet-deprived by that time–and I said, fine, boys are fine, when can I come see the litter?
The rest is history. Much of it to be found in the blog. Although have I ever told the story of how I finally made up my mind to have two of them? Karma, it’s all karma.
But good karma for my MG has run out. She’s for sale. I don’t want to sell her, but I don’t really have a choice; I haven’t had her out of the garage now in two years–since I brought the hellhounds home. When it was undersized whippets, I was always going to figure out a way to put some kind of mesh roof over the slender fillet of space that passes for a back seat in an old MGB, because the whippets would have fit. The hellhounds won’t. And in my MG’s heyday I was using her to commute to ring bells–my home tower was twenty minutes away, and my most regular second weekly practise slightly farther yet. My home tower now is a two minute walk away (or a one minute bolt on Sunday mornings to not be late to ring service) and my second weekly practise is too far to walk but too close to recharge the battery.
She’s not only a car to me. I hope she goes to a good home.
I also want to mention my poor budgie. That was during the eighteen months I was really flattened by the first full onslaught of the ME. I wasn’t walking dogs; I couldn’t. I suppose I wanted something that would keep me company while Peter was out with the dogs and I was home alone with the several hundred rose bushes I was too feeble to take care of either, and the several thousand books I was too braindead to read. And I’d always rather fancied one of the small talking birds. Because of puppy farms I was chary of pet shops for any purpose; I found a (relatively) local breeder who had huge open aviaries and obviously adored their birds. They bred show birds, which appears to mean large bulgy feathery foreheads which look very strange to me, and they were happy to sell me a young bird who was insufficiently bulgy. I picked him out because he was so beautiful: I can’t remember now what you call the colour, but if you start with the standard budgie turquoise and take it down to something near opal, that was what Angel looked like. He was a young bird, but he was still past the age where he’d be easy to teach to talk, and I didn’t. He’d perch on my finger though–astonishingly warm, those tiny claws–and he made nice friendly bird noises.
He only lived a year. When he began growing listless I found a specialist bird vet who went off on a rant about overbred show birds: wild parakeets live thirty years, he said. You’re lucky if a show bird lasts five. He could do nothing; and one morning Angel glided down to the bottom of his cage . . . and stayed there.
I’m just not good about things dying. I was so traumatised by Angel’s early death that I haven’t tried again with a bird, although I still think about it. The specialist bird vet says that in the case of budgies, you’re better off with a pet shop bird. Those bulgy foreheads on show birds, by the way, are for some reason known as buffy. I named him Angel because I named him Angel, but it was Peter who said, ah ha! He’s Angel because he isn’t Buffy!
I do have a horse to ride again, although she’s not mine. (Calling a horse a pet is always a trifle ludicrous. But who with animals in their lives ever calls them pets? They’re the animals in your life. The word pet was devised by someone who didn’t have any: and my Oxford dictionary calls its derivation ‘unknown’.) I’ve had horses to ride several times since I sold Impi (registered name Impala II. His previous owner had called him Impy, ugggggh, and with a misspent childhood reading H Rider Haggard I had no trouble immediately changing it to Impi) but this is a particularly nice one. She’s even a pretty mare with a lovely face, although I have to say she’s grey, not cream, and I really doubt there are any unicorns very close in her ancestry. But I feel a great rise of spirits when I walk down the stable row toward her, especially when she puts her head over the door and whinnies.
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* Isn’t it pretty? Hint: if you don’t think so, don’t tell me about it.
** You know there are lots of people, even lots of people who write words for a living who, when faced with a question like ‘Do you have any pets?’ would say, yes, two hell- I mean, two whippet crosses, litter brothers, named Darkness and Chaos. Next question?’
Robins! We have robins!
. . . I got to supper at the mews late, which is not a surprise, but the manner in which I was late was a little unusual. Peter had asked me to ring before I started down, so he’d know when to put the asparagus on. I rang. I climbed in the car* (with hellhounds) and I’d already arrived when a nasty little voice in the back of my mind got very much louder and shouted, WHERE’S YOUR MEMORY [STICK], YOU STUPID COW?** Back at the cottage, with the robin photo on it.
So I turned around, snarling, and raced back to the cottage, hellhounds hanging on with their teeth and their extra-long tails. And then of course I couldn’t find the wretched thing, because I’d pulled it out of the computer already and laid it down somewhere on my way to put it in my knapsack. Arrrrrrgh. I know it’s one of their virtues that they’re tiny and portable and utterly invisible but . . .
So I got all the way to the mews rather late. As I walked in, I said, I’m sorry, I . . .
Peter said, It’s all right, they rang.
Goldfish-mouth fish-face from me.
The palace, Peter went on. They told me that you had to wait in for the phone call from the Duke of Edinburgh, who wanted to tell you how much he enjoyed reading SUNSHINE aloud to the queen in bed.
At this point I think I had to lean against the wall or sit down or something. The Duke of . . . in bed with . . . ewwwwww. I’m not sure I’d wait in for a phone call from the Duke of Edinburgh, I said.
I thought you’d have mixed feelings about it, Peter said.***
It had been a slightly surreal day already. In the first place PEGASUS continues to move at a pace strongly reminiscent of molasses in January or hellhounds in July† so I am what might politely be termed out of sorts. But we had something almost passing for sunlight this afternoon so I had a long whack in the garden, mostly at the cottage. Where I’d more or less given up on the robin’s nest. I always check cautiously for occupants when I first go out there but there never are any. She was in there sitting–and looking remarkably cranky, I might add–once, or maybe twice, that I didn’t manage to scare her†† and although there’s been an awful lot of robin activity††† in the garden there isn’t any in the nest box. So I’d given up. And when I first went out there this afternoon there wasn’t anybody in the nest box and I was only checking because I’m now in the habit of checking and because I’m horribly disappointed because I was looking forward to baby robins‡ plus having told several people‡‡ I had a robin’s nest in my greenhouse again this year I was going eventually to have to say that nobody had laid any eggs in it.
And then when I went out the last time to tidy‡‡‡ up . . . there were robins. And these are big guys. I missed it! I’ve missed almost the whole shebang! How do you miss something this large? These guys are nearly fledged! I think robins do a chick-moving deal the way cats move kittens! They’ve been somewhere else till 7 pm this evening! I’ve missed all the baby bird stuff, and am going to be plunged almost instantly into the nerve-wracking tiny-hopping-shadows-at-ankle-level stage! And I may be dumb as a post and blind with it, but mum and dad are missing a trick, because if they’d made more of a fuss over the happy event I’d've been providing mealworms right along.
Better late than never. Mealworms tomorrow, as soon as the pet shop opens.
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* Yes, I use the car way too much for the commute to the mews, which is seven minutes on foot. However I’m usually coming back to the cottage at around 1 am, so tired it’s an effort to recall which end of a hellhound you fasten a leash to, and I’m usually transporting something in at least one direction I would dislike carrying. This evening, for example, I brought the sack trolley from Third House to the mews. Peter did offer to trundle it down the main street on foot–I don’t think I could manage a sack trolley and hellhounds, unless I attached them to it as a kind of land sleigh-but . . . we have a car. If the governments of the world had got together on this years ago when the predictions on air pollution and fossil fuels started getting scary, we would have been spared SUVs, America would have a passenger train system and Britain would have a better one^, and I would have a double-ended lead so I’d have a hand free for wrestling sack trolleys.^^
^ The rest of you will have to invent your own mass transit. Do they really make that cross-country train in Australia pay for itself? Or is it one of those theoretic forms of transport that doesn’t really exist except on alternate Tuesdays when the moon is full and involving sixty-seven changes, several of which don’t exist either, the way Amtrak is in the States?
^^ Although I’d need some kind of safety harness to prevent the hellhounds from taking my arm off at the shoulder. I’m sure Abraham Whistler could run me up something.+
+ He is not dead, and if they’d just hire me to write the screenplay, Blade IV would be the best of the series. I could get it done by the time Snipes gets out of jail.
** There, that will look good on amazon’s opening page.
*** Maybe we could leak it to the press in time to make the reissued SUNSHINE this autumn really sell.^
^ No! True! Really! I’m going to have another of my five minutes of in-printness in the country I live in this September!
† The long range forecast is that June and July are going to be unusually wet. The government is trying to pass a bill to provide free snorkelling gear for every citizen.
†† I’ve told you, haven’t I, that the apparent trick about robins is that they don’t mind how close you are so long as you’re below them. The greenhouse shelf with the nest box on it is chest high. You figure it out.
The other thing that fascinates me even though I know this is because birds are used to trees, duh, is that you can grab the shelf or put things on it or take things off it–from behind, where she can’t see you–and the rattling and shaking don’t bother her at all.
††† It’s making me crazy that I can’t get a photo of the robin sitting on the top of the hanging basket pole. But photos come out grey when I shoot through the glass of the kitchen door–and yes, since you ask, it’s been washed recently!–which means I can only do it if the door is already open and have the camera handy. He or she also sits on the top of Eden Rose’s climbing frame, which is just as maddening. One of these days.
‡ Because I am crazy, see previous footnote. It’s a huge stupid nuisance having robins in your greenhouse! See footnote before that!
‡‡ I mean aside from the blog, if my life has an aside from the blog any more
‡‡‡ Tidy, you understand, being a relative concept
Not photos of roses
I have millions of photos of roses. Thousands anyway. And I know a lot of them are in a great seething wodge in a nice big old wooden box that probably wonders why it couldn’t have been left a tree if this is what it’s going to be used for, it had more in mind carrying provisions on journeys to the North Pole and similar adventures–and maybe it did that before I got it, and therefore spends its days in romantic memories of past splendours–but it does improve the tone of my attic, at least before you lift the lid.
But a lot of my rose photos are actually organised and filed, amazing to relate . . . right up to the moment I try to find anything. I can find the ‘A’s . . . but they mysteriously start with Albertine, which means Agnes is still hiding in the shadows somewhere (with Abraham Darby and Adam). I can find the ‘Mme’s but the only Mme Gregoires are offcuts, and I know I did this whole amazing series of Mme Gregoire with the wisteria one year at the old house. And there is no Mme Alfred Carriere. What have you done with Mme Alfred Carriere? I’m talking to you. And I can’t find Old Blush at all either, nor any other Os (Omar Khayyam, Open Arms, Ophelia), and neither she nor Mme Gregoire is really out enough here now to start photoing this year and if this weather continues everything is going to be over in about a day and a half and the moment will never happen at all. Aside from the fact that I still haven’t settled down with one of my copious free hours to figure out how to use my new digital camera, and I don’t think the old simple-minded one has a zoom function. I’m also missing film. You can’t see what you’re doing properly on a digital, which means you’re leaving far too much of it up to the camera. And how do I know that this camera loves roses? I don’t see this mentioned anywhere in its CV. I don’t feel like relying on a silent assistant who doesn’t really love roses. Being on speaking terms with my computer would be a plus also.
When in doubt, revert to critters.
First, I never posted the platypus link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/08/genetics.wildlife
Second, a brilliant clever person* sent me these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPaK_W3ACLk also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goA5V7lq0Mw
There are several more of these. I haven’t watched all of them (yet) but so far this one’s my favourite:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TYvCu1z-Q&NR=1
Given Winston’s attitude toward ingestibles, however, I’m amazed he’s not walrus sized. Maybe he mostly sticks to plastic forks. I’m told plastic forks are very low-cal, and if you stir-fry them with a little soy sauce they’re not at all bad, but I’m having trouble finding organic plastic. . . . **
And last but absolutely not least another brilliant clever person sent me this link a little while ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXBL6bzAR4
. . . which it seems to me improves on repeat watching, thus declaring it to be art. I’ve now got it bookmarked, like I Has a Sweet Potato.
And I heard my second cuckoo today.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/worldonthemove/reports/the-cuckoo-chorus/
Which is one of those serious heralds of summer in England, and one of those things that gives me a jolt of Hey! I live here! every year, year after year. Cuckoos are England, like skylarks and King Arthur. And they’re now on the endangered list–with skylarks (if possibly not King Arthur). So hearing them gives me an extra little frisson of and we’re all still here: especially because there are noticeably fewer around in this area than there were seventeen years ago when I heard my first one, lying in bed on a blue April morning. Heard the first one this year, hmm, three or four days ago? At the beginning of this effing heat. I’m glad it’s pleasing someone.***
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* I have tended not to identify people who send me links because it feels a bit like outing somehow.^ Here you are mildly sending a nice link to a friend/acquaintance/some maniac who writes a blog, and the next thing you know there’s your name in lights. What do people feel about this? I’ve always identified recipe posters (at least I hope I have) because your recipe is yours and it would be rude not to, like not mentioning the author of a book.^^ Links aren’t yours in the same way.
^ Unless I’m turning you into a Heroine for the Day. I haven’t done that in a while. Mwa ha ha ha ha.
^^ Perish forfend
** It’s not a funny one, but I’m riveted by the video of Winston getting a bath. Are all Persians this mild-mannered? I think this guy’s tats are disguising all the scars from attempting to bath normal cats in shorts and a vest. Although the next question is, why do you bath a cat? Barring an unfortunate encounter with a skunk, which I believe is more dog territory, and I didn’t see any tomato juice or peanut butter, nor do you cuddle the wretched animal, even after the tomato juice. (Peanut butter is supposed to work too, but I don’t want to have to get it off again.) ^
^ Speaking of peanut butter, usually the mice in my garden go away during the summer when they can ravage entire vegetable patches elsewhere, but this year they seem to have decided to settle down, buy a house and a dishwasher, have a few kids+. . . .So before they destroy the roots of every plant I have in a pot–don’t they know tulip season is over? Tulip bulbs this time of year aren’t fat and juicy, and are not worth diving for: stick to the herb patch, will you? I’d be positively grateful if something discouraged the mint, sage and rosemary a little. Just a little–I unearthed a few mousetraps, baited them with peanut butter, and put them inside broken pots so the birds wouldn’t make any mistakes. I like peanut butter because it’s sticky. A mouse has to be a bit authoritative, which is what you want in a bait-taking situation. This morning two of the traps were untouched. The third one, the peanut butter was gone, and the trap unsprung. Maybe I need new traps. Maybe the mice have invented frictionless retrieval.
+ And when I see a mini-SUV chuntering over the gravel or winding among the dahlia cuttings there will be SCREAMING.
*** Both hellhounds still somewhat heat stricken. We had our late walk around town and met everyone we know, all of whom said, gosh, they’re so much calmer! Well done you! –Nothing to do with me, I reply sadly. They’re just hot.