Yesterday after a rather frustrating day I sat down in the lounge to relax for a couple of hours before bed. Before long Bernard came into the lounge and settled down on my lap and began to purr. It may sound like a very ordinary thing, hardly worthy of comment, but for Bernard it represents a huge improvement since she became part of our family a year ago.
For those who don't usually read the blog we first became aware of the cat a couple of days before Christmas 2011 when the turkey that was left in the utility room to defrost was partially eaten by an animal. It turned out that a stray cat had broken in through a sealed cat flap. This is what I wrote about it early last year.
"The saga of the cat continues, every time we put her out she sits outside meowing all day and all night, then just when you notice that it has all gone quiet you realise that she has broken in again! We can't go on like this so I decided that today I was going to take her to the vet to see if she has been chipped. There were just two small problems, catching her and getting her into the cat carrier.
Yesterday evening my son and daughter caught her - eventually! She had hidden herself behind the fittings in the utility room again and it took forever to coax her out. Finally she was confined to the kitchen (where we hoped she wouldn't be able too hide, but she had other plans. She made her escape and this morning she had to be coaxed out from under a bed!
Once again she was confined to kitchen and when the rest of the family had been despatched to work and school, I was left to get her into the cat carrier. There was just one problem the cat had decided that there was no way that it was getting into the cat carrier. She grew several extra legs (or at least it seemed like that), she did some amazing gymnastics, the only thing she didn't do was get into the cat carrier. Then after about ten failed attempts I managed to get her in and lock the door of the carrier behind her. I took a few minutes to calm her and let her get used to the carrier before heading off to the vet.
According to the vet she is a female and aged about three. She is not significantly under weight, but she is timid. She is not on any missing lists, I have checked with every group in the area, so the vet thinks that the best thing to do is to look for another home for her."
We didn't plan to keep her, but she was so skittish that it was not easy to find anyone to take her. She has always been a very clean cat, never any accidents but she spent months hiding away from us, she just coming out to to eat before darting back into her hiding place. For some reason the bathroom was her favourite hiding place, she liked to scramble right behind the bath where no one could reach her. We were reluctant to give her a name or to get too attached in case we were able to rehome her and until we had taken her to the vet we didn't even know if she was male or female so we jokingly referred to her as Bernard (named after Nursie in Blackadder, a girl with a boy's name) and by the time we were ready to give her a name she had 'become' Bernard.
I think she will always be shy especially with strangers, but she has a family now and she seems happy. When she came to us her coat was dull and harsh to touch and she was always hungry, but now she is in lovely condition and her coat is soft and silky. We didn't intend to become a three cat family but it is nice to see what a bit of love and attention can do to change the life of a stray.
It has been a very difficult few days. On Sunday lunchtime I had a frantic phone call from my step father, my mum had blacked out and fallen on the kitchen floor badly cutting head open - I have never seen so much blood! He had already called an ambulance and I dashed to their house (in a village about 6 miles away) to be with my mum. As I ran down the lane to their house I realised that there was no ambulance there and I assumed that my mum must be already on her way to hospital. When I opened the front door I realised that I was wrong, my mum was sitting on the floor propped against the kitchen units holding a blood soaked towel against her head. The kitchen floor was covered in blood and my step father (who is terminally ill) was standing there ashen faced looking totally helpless.
I did my best to make my mum comfortable and then I rushed around getting everything ready for a trip to the hospital. The ambulance control had told them to leave mum on the floor and to leave the blood as it was. We waited and waited but no ambulance came. After an hour I spoke to the ambulance control they still insisted that I should not move her and they said they would make mum a high priority and an ambulance would be there soon. I told them that I needed to clean up the blood as it was making it impossible to move around the kitchen to look after mum, and when I got off the phone I cleaned the floor. Still no ambulance came and I was very worried about my mum's condition, so I called my brother (who lives in a different county) he came with his car and between us we got mum up (she was very wobbly) put her into the car and took her to the hospital. By the time we left her house we had waited two and a half hours for an ambulance!
At the hospital her condition was taken very seriously, they said her pulse was dangerously low and she was kept on close observation in the resuscitation area. She is still in hospital, they think she may need a pacemaker, but they are still doing tests. I am disgusted that a woman who is over 80 can be left to wait so long for emergency medical care. We will be making a formal complaint, but our first priority is to look after mum.
Believe it or not there was yet another chapter to the trouser saga! Just in case anyone reading this has not read my recent posts I will recap briefly. Some time before Christmas we agreed that Robbie needed a new suit so he did his research, which included several trips to Marks and Spencer - his favourite shop. He chose the suit that he wanted but our local M&S had no stock in the size he needed so it was necessary to order the items online. They sell the jackets and trousers separately and much to Robbie's annoyance they had the jacket that he wanted in stock, but the trousers were not available in his size. So we decided to order the jacket and wait for them to get more stock of the trousers. Christmas came and went and Robbie (who had been checking the website twice a day) had almost given up on ever getting the trousers. Then finally the great day came, they were in stock and Robbie placed his order, he knew what size he needed and he ordered exactly the same size as the trousers he already has. He collected his trousers on a Friday from M&S in Birmingham, but he got distracted when leaving work and he managed to leave his trousers on his desk. The trousers had to be 'rescued' the following day but when he tried them on he found that they didn't fit, they were a bit on the tight side. It didn't make sense, they were exactly the same size as the ones he already has that fit him perfectly. He ordered the next size and when they arrived he said they were much more comfortable so he wore them to work.
Sadly that was not the end of the matter, he claimed they were too loose even with a belt and they kept slipping down. I don't want him to be arrested, so we will need to take the waist in a bit, next he said that they are too long and he is afraid of treading on them as he walks so we need to do something about the leg length too! I am sick of the whole trouser issue and Robbie seemed deeply affronted that he may be a non standard fitting. Anyway after weeks of constant complaint about trousers I have come up with the perfect solution - a kilt! It would certainly turn a few heads!!
We had a rather unusual Friday evening. We were going out to a rather special event on Saturday and the only instruction was to wear something that we would feel comfortable in. To me comfortable means something that will not dig in when I sit down and something that makes me feel reasonably confident (or at least something that doesn't make me look like the back of a bus) I had thought about it during the week and by Friday evening I knew exactly what I wanted to wear, Robbie on the other hand hadn't given it any thought until Friday evening. Asked my advice and I suggested jeans and his red T-shirt, but he rejected that idea on the grounds that it was not smart enough, then he vanished.
Anyone who knows me reasonably well will know that one thing that I find very difficult to deal with is being lied to. According to my family I have a built in lie detector, and on many occasions one or other of the children has indignantly demanded to know how I could tell that they were not telling the truth. It is not an straightforward question to answer, some of it is picking up on clues, such as facial expression, tone of voice, body language and such like, but some of it is just instinct and experience. If things don't add up either it is not the truth at all or not the whole truth.
Sam is much like his dad, if he is caught in a lie his voice gets higher the more he protests. My brother is much the same, but he also becomes indignant and argumentative when challenged, until his voice is within the soprano range and he has to accept defeat. Of course I don't always know when someone is trying to pull the wool over my eyes. The family still laugh about the time when my late husband Eric 'accidentally' bought a full set of golf clubs, managed to keep them hidden for weeks and even packed them in the roof box and managed to take them on holiday with us without me finding out! I was so cross with him when I found out, but with the benefit of hindsight it wasn't such a terrible lie, it didn't harm anyone else and a set of golf clubs really isn't such a big deal. In fact I am glad that he had his golf clubs, you need to live life while you can because you can't always take tomorrow for granted.
I found myself pondering the whole issue of truth and lies rather deeply recently. It seems it is never too late to learn from experience. I have always thought of myself as a very open and understanding person, so I felt hurt and confused when I became aware that someone I trusted had not been honest with me. Sometimes it takes me days to process a situation in my head (the cogs turn extremely slowly at times!) but if I ponder a situation long enough I can usually make sense of it. Gradually I became aware that much of the blame rested with me, it is hard for people to be honest if there is insufficient trust. If you want complete honesty you have to be open to hear the truth and to deal with it responsibly when you get it. People are what matters most, everyone should have the freedom to be their own person and to do things in their own way. We often laugh at my stepfather because he is quite fixed in the way he does things and he always thinks his way is the only right way - even when he is wrong. When I stopped to think about it I realised that my attitude wasn't so very different.
They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but I hope that is not the case. I am finding it much more comfortable to open my mind and to listen and learn than to be kept in the dark. It is usually Robbie who rambles on, but today it is my turn, my thoughts may not make much sense to anyone else, but for me it has been an important, maybe even life changing experience and it has made me feel so much better to reach this point.
I am starting to think that I am better off when Robbie is half asleep. He was a bit more lively this morning and he managed to get up without too much trouble. I thought that we would have an easier morning, but it turned out rather differently. First he scared me half to death by galloping around the house looking for his favourite knickers. Then he told me in far to much detail why that pair provide just the right amount of comfort and support and how the other pairs let him down in various ways!Just when I had started to relax he ambushed me with a complicated explanation about a formula to calculate the chances of meeting a string of red lights if you have already been stopped at a red light. If he carries on like this he will send me to sleep!
