Moving On

The friend of a friend from Kuala Lumpur who was mentioned in January bid an affectionate farewell this morning. He’s been a great asset, on the one hand, a round, jolly little bloke who takes life as he finds it, so not domestically hard work, on the other, very intelligent and a good conversationalist, so not boring either. It is, though, a different world; having landed here from KL in order to work in Oldmeldrum, he’s been living with us for a couple of months; but he’s now going to take switch roles to being a kind of troubleshooter moving between several sites between Yorkshire and the Clyde Basin. He obviously enjoys what he does, enjoys being good at it, and finds it all very interesting, but it’s very alien from our perspective. Admittedly, once there are 4,000 books and 100 paintings in your life, living out of a suitcase ceases to be an option, but even if the practical difficulties didn’t loom so large,  I think I’d find living like that terribly stressful. Anyway, good for him, and we’ll hope to see him again once in a while.

On another tack, we had a Historic Moment this morning. Twenty-four years ago, the Professor and I got married. His Spanish aunt sent a message which caused, at the time and subsequently, a certain amount of hilarity: ‘I will give you the family silver coffee pot. But you must understand, the postage is ruinous, and I am very poor now. Imagine, when I last went to the bank, I was forced to fly economy class to Geneva. So you must pick it up when you are next in Malaga’. Well, strange as it may seem, twenty-four years have gone by without any sort of pressing reason to visit Malaga. But the silly old thing died last year, and the Professor’s saintlike cousins have been sorting out the orts and leavings, and it turned out the coffee pot did still actually exist, and they brought it back with them … so after three days of getting it clean, he made coffee in it this morning. I don’t suppose it had been used in decades. So there’s a sort of small satisfaction about it all – nobody really needs a silver coffee pot but there is such an element of waste, loss and futility in the story of the Spanish aunt, sitting behind shut shutters decade after decade, feeling sorry for herself, it’s quite nice to have salvaged the thing as a memorial of the more dynamic phase of the family history.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Fur

Once Miss Kit became unwell, she stopped being able to manage grooming her back, because she lost flexibility. I've been combing her top side and tail for months. But it's only in the last few days I realised that she has pretty well given up on grooming altogether - that the soft fur on her flanks, where the underlying skin is also soft and sensitive, was going into little lumps from neglect. I bought a new brush from the pet shop, and put it to use. There were offers to bite, tantrums, outbreaks of lying flat on my lap purring blissfully, more offers to bite and so forth. But now, after several sessions and the production of a hatful of orange fluff, Miss Kit's beautiful silky fur is beautiful, flat, and silky all over, and we have both conceded that it is now my business.

Parituriunt montes

The Duchess of Newcastle allegedly used to sit up in bed in the small hours, yelling ‘I Conceive!’ At which point a rabble of amenuenses who were curled up like dogs under her four-poster would crawl out and reach wearily for their pen and ink. We are not thus blessed. Both the Professor and I are wrestling with books so long in the gestation that they are in danger of turning in to wind-eggs, if not plain old sulphuretted hydrogen. Both books were perfectly lovely ideas, but both have been interrupted by this, that and the other thing over the last few years, and the problem with that is that one gets to a sort of gloomy ‘surely everyone knows that so it can’t be worth writing about’, based not on what might be called out-there published knowledge, but merely on having outlined the idea to umpteen people. We are both having a trying time, and since most of our waking hours are thus employed, there is not much to blog about.

One interesting thing in the course of the last week -  by a circuitous chain of coincidence, I discovered that a seam of opal had turned up in Ethiopia, about 3,000 feet above sea level. The Mountains of the Moon was the classical geographers’ name for the source of the Nile, and some nineteenth century explorers identified this with the mountains of Ethiopia (the Nile has several sources, in fact). But I liked the idea of being able to say to someone, here is something which was fetched from the Mountains of the Moon. It was my mother’s birthday, so I did.