It's Official! Summer has Gone

She's back inside again! (See posting of 16 March.) Mind you, this was the scene outside this morning (30 March). Good grief!

A Flying Visit

When our former boss and good friend Mr DJC invited us to attend a celebration to mark his passing the age of 70, I was really torn. We both very much wanted to attend but, sadly, Mrs A was unable to come with me as her work once more put a crimp in her social life. Right up to the deadline for accepting/declining I blew hot and cold but, in the end, I decided that the opportunities to see Mr & Mrs DJC, as well as some other old friends, and to see our daughter, Miss A, were too good to miss. So, hanging my environmental head in shame, I flew across to England last Friday, returning on Sunday.

What a good choice I made. The journey went without a hitch. I had a lovely time with Miss A (including spending some time, and money, in a genuine London pub drinking genuine Young’s Bitter). I thoroughly enjoyed wandering around my old haunts in West London and re-visiting the campus where I spent 20 years of my working life, marvelling at all the wonderful new buildings my ex-employer has built with the money I (!) so carefully shepherded. I even had time to drive through the village in which we used to live.

The celebration itself was great. I re-encountered several old friends/colleagues – the hosts, Mr DJC and H, of course; Mr PDB and H; Mr JGW and M; Mrs HMN & A; Mrs DC; Mrs EP; Mr CRB and S to mention but a few – and thoroughly enjoyed a warm and friendly 4 hours or so with friends and family of Mr DJC.

Given that my footwear was, from time to time, a subject of comment when I worked at the University, I was quite pleased that no one appeared to notice that I was wearing a very unsuitable pair of worn and grubby brown Dr Marten’s boots. This deeply unfashionable choice of footwear was rather forced upon me. I discovered that morning that the pair of black shoes I had packed in my suitcase was actually one black slip-on (left) and one brown lace-up (right). What an eejit. However, I rather wish I’d worn them now!

Although I was in England but a few hours, the following really made their mark on me:-

How strange the commercial world has become. For reasons too boring to relate, I needed to lay my hands on close to 2000 euros in cash. Imagine my surprise when a fairly sizeable branch of my bank in W. London told me they couldn’t meet my needs but directed me to Marks & Spencer instead. I wandered past ready-made meals, corduroy trousers and bras and knickers (why do I always have Father Ted flashbacks when I do that?) to the travel department where a friendly young man handed over a large pile of notes. In future, will I have to go to NatWest for my socks?

How much money there is sloshing about. I was stunned by the number of people who, in a branch of Tesco near the university at 5pm on a Saturday evening, were buying hundreds of pounds worth of electronic equipment. Flat screen TVs the size of tennis courts were being wheeled out of the shop in their dozens, often being transported to BMWs, Mercs, big 4-wheel drives etc. It all felt very uncomfortable to me.

The new Wembley stadium. From the M1 and North Circular at least, the new stadium looks fantastic, especially at night when the arch is illuminated.

Masticating in public. As in France, a significant proportion of the population seems to be addicted to chewing gum. It may just have been because I was among large numbers of people for the first time for ages but the constant movement of jaws, accompanied by slurping and chomping by those who chew with their mouths open, was really striking. I’m sorry if you are one of the addicts because I have to say I find it nauseating.

The activities of Big Brother. While filling up at a service station near Stansted, I noticed a sign on the fuel pump asking my understanding for the delay in the delivery of fuel. This, it said, was to allow the police’s automatic number-plate recognition system to log my car details before I filled up. Is this for real? Dear me, Tony, what is going on? I fear for our liberty.

It’s Official! Summer is Here.

For the past 20 years, Mrs A and I have had the dubious privilege of sharing our home with our cat, Gin. She was one of two cats we acquired in 1987. The other, hold your sides to prevent them splitting, we called Tonic.

Tonic was a character. She was intelligent (by cat standards), great fun to have around and always wanting to play. Gin was, from the very first day, frankly, not very nice. When she wanted to be affectionate, she was always just too cloying. When she didn’t want to be affectionate, which mercifully was most of the time, she was just plain bad-tempered. She was always very greedy and prone to yelling loudly when she wanted food, or to be let in or out. She was also a bit thick.

Unfortunately Tonic, being an adventurous creature, decided that playing on the far side of the busy road outside our house of the time was much more fun than staying in our (large) garden. The consequences were as inevitable as they were sad and she was pushing up the daisies before she was 5 years old.

Gin, on the other hand, appears to be indestructible, despite her tendency to walk behind the car when we’re reversing. She is now the human equivalent of about 92 years and, apart from being a bit stiff and wobbly (for which we have to give her tablets: cue much wailing, struggling etc.), deaf and even more stupid than ever, is in fine health. However, her personality has not changed over the years. She now has two modes, ‘bad-tempered’ and ‘asleep’ (and for all we know, she’s bad-tempered while she’s asleep). She has taken to waking us up with loud wailing in the early hours. She can’t really wash herself properly so apart from being a bit sticky and smelly, she can’t rasp out the dead hair in her coat so she looks a bit like a charity shop fur coat. We, of course, have to brush out her coat for her (cue much wailing, struggling etc.). Because she doesn’t move much, and gave up hunting a couple of years ago, her claws never get worn down and we have to cut them (cue much wailing, struggling etc.). All of this means that she’s pretty high maintenance. Whoever reckoned that cats lower your blood pressure obviously never encountered Gin.

Gin can be seen mostly in the three poses in the photographs. First is ‘waiting to be fed’. This takes up about two hours of her day and usually involves quite a lot of prowling around the kitchen when we’re busy. Frequently, therefore, she gets trodden on (cue much….). Second is ‘feeding’. This used to take about 1 minute of her day but she’s a bit slower of late. The third is ‘unconscious’. This is her favourite activity, taking up about 20 hours each day. Not illustrated are ‘yelling’, about 2 hours, and ‘leaving smelly presents’, usually just beside the driver’s door of the car. We’ve no idea how long she spends doing this and don’t wish to know.

What has all this got to do with summer? We’re glad you asked. Well, one remaining aspect of Gin’s personality is that it is well and truly split. Lurking inside that ‘bag of rags’ body are in fact a summer cat and a winter cat. We must say that she does change from one to the other so consistently close to the equinoxes that there must be some mechanism at work inside her. One day it can be sunny and 15°C and she can’t abide being outside. The following day it can be sunny and 15°C and she loves it.

The defining characteristics of the winter cat are that she sits outside the front door screaming to be in. Once in, she lies by the fire and sleeps for hours. Contrast that with the summer cat. That version sits inside the front door screaming to be out. Once out, she lies in the sun and sleeps for hours.

Well, despite what the weather forecasters are telling us about the next week or so, Gin decided a few days ago, about a fortnight before the Vernal Equinox, that she is now a summer cat. No amount of snow and ice will change the firing of the neurons in her walnut-sized brain until around the end of September. So there you are. Enjoy the summer everyone.

Sick as a Parrot

‘Make God laugh; tell Him your plans.’

This posting was going to be about our much-anticipated trip to Paris. We were going to write all about the wonderfully comfortable, and remarkably cheap, train journey up there; how much we’d enjoyed seeing our old friends M. et Mme. Fudge (http://6eme-etage.blogspot.com) for the first time in five years; the wonderful time we had wandering the streets and sitting on café terraces, watching the world go by; the marvellous restaurants we went to and the fantastic museums we visited.

You’ve guessed by now, haven’t you? We didn’t go. Our non-refundable rail tickets and our (first-night non-refundable) hotel bookings were arranged weeks ago but, sadly, the normally unsinkable Mrs A was laid low by some foul (we hope not fowl) virus.

Mrs A suffers from ‘hay fever’ in February, March and April. I ought to be more precise as a French doctor rebuked her when she said it was hay fever. It is ‘une allergie de la saison’. For a while we were deeply puzzled by what could be causing this. February and early March are, after all, usually deepest winter here. We eventually reached the conclusion that catkins on our numerous hazelnut trees were the villains of the piece. At this time of year we are pruning/coppicing the trees and the catkins give off clouds of pollen as we’re working. This turns Mrs A into one of Kleenex’s biggest customers overnight.

Without wishing to be too graphic, coughing, sneezing, wheezing and nose-running are quite the norm at this time of year so, when Mrs A started feeling very wheezy and suffering from tightness of the chest, we both assumed she needed stronger anti-catkin medicine. We were wrong. It turned out that some hideous virus – which was about as welcome as a rattlesnake in a bran tub - had installed itself and had settled in for a long struggle. Ten days after she returned home from work in the guise of a shivering, quivering, coughing waif she’s a bit better but still struggling to stay upright and awake for more than a couple of hours at a time. For the first four or five days she was sleeping for 19 or more hours a day. Anyone who knows Mrs A will agree that she could never be accused of carrying spare weight but she’s managed to lose about 2½ kg (5 to 6lbs) in a week.

Of course, it’s at times like this that we can rely on the French health service to swing into action and, sure enough, the doctor came up with the goods. After a quick tour of Mrs A’s chesty regions, he pronounced that it was, as we suspected, a virus. He told us he wasn’t going to prescribe antibiotics, as the infection was not bacterial. It is essential for any French doctor to make declarations like this because French people expect to be prescribed antibiotics for every malady, both real and imaginary, known to humankind. He did, however, give Mrs A a prescription with four different items on it and we were staggered to discover that two of the items were paracetamol and cough mixture.

Since for the vast majority of people, 70% of the cost of visits to the doctor and of prescribed drugs is reimbursed by the state (the balance being reimbursed by the private health cover that almost everyone has) we can now see one of the reasons the French health system is so expensive. Why would you buy your own paracetamol and cough syrup if you can get it for free by taking up the time of your GP every time you have a cough or a cold? It also explains one of the reasons that paracetamol and other ‘everyday’ painkillers cost ten times as much here as in the UK. If you don’t pay, you don’t care. (The other reason is that pharmacies have a monopoly on the sale of such items. You can’t drop into the local equivalent of Sainsbury or Tesco and buy cheap aspirin here.)

Still, as long as you've got your elf! (Or a gnome to go to.)

There, I’ve got that off my chest! (If only Mrs A could get the bug off hers.) I bet you wish we’d written about Paris, don’t you?