False Alarm

We thought for a while that we’d been rather clever. This is a great year for mushrooms: the woods, where Miss Dog is walked when we have time, are full of them. There are some highly suspicious shiny lipstick red ones, varnished looking yellow ones, brown ones of all shapes and sizes, and a whole range of whitish grey excrescences on old treetrunks. We were inclined to admire the display in general, but were also rather pleased to see a lot of little egg-yolk yellow chaps poking up through the moss. Chanterelles are very nice, so we filled our pockets and took them home. Alas, investigation via Google suggested that they might be the false chanterelle, not the edible kind, so we chucked them, on the better safe than sorry principle – the other day the Professor met a couple of Poles in the wood who were happily collecting all sorts of fungi, but really, I think you have to be brought up to it. By the way, it’s been a funny year for plant life more generally; rather moist with low light levels, which has benefited some things while disadvantaging others. My geraniums haven’t been very good at all and the roses have been terrible, but the begonias are twice their normal size. When they eventually die down I think they’ll be leaving corms the size of saucers. All the better for next year.

Adventure becomes mundane

Once in a while, the BBC’s bland little bulletins can stop you in your tracks: I was brought up short by a casual sentence in something today: ‘the melting sea ice has also opened up new shipping routes. Russia is now advertising the Northern Sea Route, which cuts the journey time from China to Europe by up to two weeks’. Centuries of Arctic exploration and discovery, the world of Barentz and Bering, Nansen and Amundsen, the long dream of finding the North-West Passage, a route over the top of Europe which suddenly it seems just to have materialised, not as an occasional venture of the insanely brave, but an advertised route to be undertaken by container ships.

Antique Solutions

I had a sad accident yesterday. I was wearing a favourite thing, a loose shirtlike linen overgarment in a particularly nice shade of dark turquoise – the sort of thing I love these days because it is a lovely colour and it has pockets and I no longer go anywhere without reading glasses. I put my hand into one of said pockets and came out with a damp, sorry mess of blackened paper tissue and the remains of a malfunctioning pen, which had, unfortunately, given its all all over the pocket. I rushed upstairs, soaked the garment in cold water, then stain remover, then washed it, then left it in more stain remover overnight. Then I suddenly remembered our Norwegian friends had left us with an archaic product they strongly recommended, a bar of oxgall soap, vix, made with the gall of an ox. Do not say ur, yuck, or eeew. Ox gall is a strangely useful substance, which I’ve had in the house before to help with making marbled paper, which it does. A day of being rubbed with oxgall soap and left to sit hasn’t removed the black blobs entirely, but they seem to be so reduced I have some real hopes that when the fabric is dry, the marks will not obtrude. Three cheers for old fashioned methods. Incidentally, I was also thinking kindly of the Norwegian houseguests today for a completely different reason – they left me a container of vegetable broth in the freezer, and I ended up deploying it today with a couple of lettuces and a lot of peas which were fresh but had, some of them, been picked a little late. A bit past being a special pea risotto or whatever, but they made a very nice soup, so thank you, both.

We Acquire An Aunt

The Professor came across a naïve painting the other day which took his fancy, and ended up buying it. It’s of a nice, Jane Austenish little lady circa 1810, attired in chaste, provincial finery ‒  a plain white dress with a fichu modestly filling in the neckline, wearing no jewellery, but possessed of a spangled white turban that one suspects was the secret joy of her heart. She is now in the drawing room, and looks as if she has always been there. Her face is very well painted, but the body is so slight in relation to the head that it has an air of caricature. She has an intelligent, noticing look, and she will do very nicely as The Ancestor’s maiden aunt. She doesn’t look, somehow, as if she married.

Phew

We thought our little Miss Kit was really taking a turn for the worse, and hauled her vet out to see her – she has been utterly miserable and run down for a few days, pulling bits out of her fur till she looked moth-eaten, with her skin twitching and shivering. His interim diagnosis was, to all our surprise, a flea. Miss Kit has never had fleas. I use a fine tooth comb on her regularly and there is not a sign, I protested. But, I am told, if a cat has never had fleas and one turns up, there can be a terrific allergic reaction. Anyway, Hamish said practically, start off by seeing if that’s it before getting into anything gloomier. He gave her an anti-inflammatory to deal with the itch on an immediate basis, and prescribed a back of the neck flea treatment. These I think are utterly no fun and irritate the skin, but once it dried, she was suddenly miles better, and is now scarfing down her food and generally cheerful again, enormously to our relief. Her large friend is not being entirely good at the moment - she has taken to plootering about in the mud on the edge of the pond and charging back in to distribute what seems unnatural quantities of mud about the house. Her feet are quite large, but there are only four of them, and somehow her mud-distributing capacity seems almost beyond the bounds of nature. She remains cheerful in herself. It was National Canine Naughtiness Day a while back, marked by a series of small crimes, most of which I now forget, but since then she has been really quite good. She is rather touchingly solicitous of Miss Kit's generally tottery state.

Not being entirely good

We went to a party on Sunday. It was a very large party. There was champagne by the bucket, pink pompoms, a white marquee, and many, many people in jolly summer clothes. It was off and on, a nice day. We made conversation (‘how beautifully blue the sky the glass is rising very high Continue fine I hope it may And yet it rained but yesterday Tomorrow it may pour again I hear the country wants some rain … ‘). Then there was the conversation about Not Being Able to Sell One’s House (putting it on at 150% of what it’s worth might have something to do with it, chum, one thought privately, while gratefully accepting another drink from an ambient colleen with an expensive bottle). Then … oh, you know. What a nice time we’re all having and doesn’t so and so look well. An hour and a half passed. There was no sign of anyone moving towards the long tables set out for lunch. Everyone, in the way of parties, was talking louder and louder (at least half of those present were older than us, and many  of them a little deaf). The Brownian motion of party circulation brought us together, and not too far away from the open door of the marquee. We looked at each other. Discreetly, we put our glasses down on a nearby table, and drifted out to look at the flowers. The Professor put his mobile to his ear, and drifted a bit further, with the air of one looking for a signal. Twenty yards, and we were out of the sightline of the marquee, round the corner of the house, and ungratefully shanking it up the drive. Very bad of us, really, but I’m sure we weren’t missed.

Not good news

Miss Kit is not very well – and has not been very well for some time as you all know. Having been away for a fortnight, we came back and saw her, as one does, with fresh eyes, and reckoned it was time she had a professional once-over. She’s got so scared by the vet’s after some bad experiences we got a vet to come and take a look at her here yesterday, to see what she was like in a normal state and not stressed out of her wits. This was, unfortunately, not reassuring. It’s possible that she has toxoplasmosis, about which something might possibly be done (though a long, long, course of antibiotics had no effect other than upsetting her). It’s also possible that she has fallen victim to what journalists are calling Robotic Cat Syndrome, which sounds like a highly hilarious YouTube lolcat post, and isn’t. It’s an utterly mysterious cat disease which popped up in north-east Scotland around the turn of the millennium: its victims are rural cats, mature to elderly, living between Inverness and Aberdeen, and its official description is ‘slowly progressive lymphohistiocytic meningoencephalomyelitis’. In other words, a slowly degenerative disease of the brain and nervous system. It’s highly unusual because by and large, diseases of cat’s brain and nervous system are rapidly degenerative, viz. about a fortnight from something apparently wrong to the sad phone call, and Miss Kit hasn’t been right in herself for a year; the problem with her spine and lower back seems now to be taking a more ominous form. She shows one of the most characteristic symptoms, which is carrying her tail rather stiffly straight out, which I put down to damage to her lower back, but also has the stiff, toddling walk, which is what gives the syndrome its popular (or unpopular) name, though not currently in an acute form, ears pricked forward anxiously, and an increased affectionateness of a reassurance-seeking kind. ‘Mild behavioural changes and the rigid extension of the tail were the most consistent early signs of the disease’, say the researchers. I have wondered for a while if she was going blind because of the way she bumps into twigs and things in the garden, but the vet thinks this is more probably a degree of mental confusion – i.e. she can see the twig or whatever it is, but can’t think what to do about it. The important thing is that it was only clinically described a couple of years ago, and nobody is anywhere near a cure since it's not clear what is causing it (it seems to be viral but that helps only up to a point). Basically we all live with it till it gets worse, and she keeps falling over or stops being able to swallow – there’s nothing wrong with her ability to eat at the moment, but it’s a feature of the late stages. The common ground between the various victims is that they have all been cats free to roam outside and hunt, so best guess is that this is something they have caught from rodents – though of course that simply shifts the mystery from NE Scottish cats, who are being well observed by concerned owners, to NE Scottish wild rodents, who aren’t.