Absolutely Animals

One or two days a week Ellie goes to a dogminder. Nikki, who runs her business Absolutely Animals (www.absolutelyanimalspets.co.uk) from just outside Exeter in Devon, is tiny, looks about sixteen (in a good way) and controls her charges without ever raising her voice (at least, as far as I have heard). What’s more, she has managed to get nine of them to sit quietly all at once and have their photograph taken. We can’t even get one to do that. (Ellie is in the front on the left.)

Roselle Angwin in her thought-provoking blog about ‘poetry, holism, the imaginal life, Zen and the natural world. Ish’ (www.roselle-angwin.blogspot.com) talks about the importance of relationships. However much we might long to disappear into wilderness and solitude (big sigh of agreement), it’s through relationships that we learn and change. Relationship may be the biggest challenge of our current age.

Absolutely. And my relationship with Ellie is probably my most challenging relationship at the moment. She is super-intelligent, calculating and determined. In order to stop her creating havoc I have to be so tough with her and toughness does not come naturally to me. As I have said in a previous post, the dogtrainer called her a ‘control freak’. Frog calls her a brat. I call her my karma, my reward for being weak in the past.

Nikki on the other hand always delivers her back at the end of the day saying how good she’s been.

Red-letter day

Here is my Mini back home where it belongs with a new panel to hold the driver’s door on. We fetched it this morning from T & T Coachworks of Feniton, Devon – real craftsmen. (In the background you can probably see a dead white Mini. Frog keeps this for spares. Very useful but it does make the place look like a scrapyard.)

Today is Ellie’s first birthday. We are waiting for her miraculous transformation into a grown-up well-behaved dog.

And do you know what a ‘red-letter day’ is? No, I didn’t either. I had to look it up. It comes from ecclesiastical calendars where saints’ days and church festivals were (are?) printed in red ink. Now isn’t that interesting. And there was me imagining an envelope with red writing on it, like an old-fashioned telegram, or something related to ‘French letters’.



Rosebay willowherb and foxgloves,
seeing who can grow tallest and pinkest



Toad

Because of the good response (thank you Nina) to two poems I posted earlier, I’m inflicting another one on you.

    Thirty-six years ago I ran away to Australia. Six months after I’d arrived I found my way to an island off the Great Barrier Reef. Yes, it was paradise.



A very old, much-yellowed picture of sunrise from my island bedroom window



A few years later, however, back in England, I wrote this poem about something that happened there.

    Toads squatted all along the paths around the hotel where I was working. They were huge and you had to dodge them like un-stepping stones. I think now that they were probably cane toads, native to Hawaii but introduced to Queensland in the 1930s to control pests in the sugar cane fields. They spread rapidly and started to eat their way through the indigenous wildlife. They became – and still are, I believe - an enormous problem.

    Even paradise has its troubles.

Toad

One day you wandered into a fishing net

left lying at the back of the beach.

Your crusty fingers and toes

soon wound themselves

into the mesh

and trapped you.

I never thought to free you then,

while there was still a chance

that you might live.

Instead I watched you struggle

day after day

for a week.

I shrank from your ugliness and your pain,

while your dinnerplate body

shrank in the tropical sun

and hung there like a trophy.

‘One of the men will deal with it.’

‘Let nature take its course.’

‘What’s one toad more or less?’

But, while I dithered,
you died.



A young cane toad

                                               

What I'm reading 2

On the floor by the bed at the moment is Dissolution by C J Sansom. This is a whodunnit set in the reign of Henry VIII during the Dissolution of the monasteries. Normally I hate historical novels but my mother lent me this and I’ve nothing else to read so I’ve persevered with it by dint of pretending that it’s science fiction, in that the cold, dirt and general primitiveness remind me of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series which I read twenty or so years ago and loved. (Phew, that was a long sentence.) And in fact it’s not too bad at all now I’ve got into it.

    I enjoy crime novels so long as there’s humanity to offset the nastiness. For that reason I’m a big fan of Val McDermid, in particular the series about the police detective Carol Jordan and the psychologist Tony Hill as I find their relationship so poignant. (Do not be put off by the fact that the television series ‘Wire in the Blood’ is based on these books. There is little resemblance.)

   I also like a series no one else seems to have heard about by Jill Paton Walsh set in an Oxford college and featuring a nurse/amateur detective called Isobel Quy (pronounced ‘kie’ to rhyme with ‘why’). The novels are so beautifully crafted you hardly notice you are reading them. You may have heard of the author as a children’s writer.

   I tend to favour books by female writers because I find them less dry and factual but, having said that, I was gripped like everybody else by the Stieg Larsson ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ series in spite of the weighty subject matter (such as political journalism, closet Nazis, lengthy court battles). It is shot through with moral fervour, has a wonderful heroine and gives the impression that the author really knows what he’s writing about.

    Unfortunately The Snowman by Joe Nesbo, touted on the front cover as ‘the next Stieg Larsson’, fails both of my criteria. I found it both dry and thoroughly unpleasant. I know a lot of people have enjoyed it however, so don’t let my opinion put you off (as if it would).

      While I’m on the subject of crime novels, I have to mention the glorious Donna Leon, who I think is American but lives in Italy and writes about a Venetian detective. She doesn’t shirk darkness – delving into organized crime, the dumping of toxic waste, people trafficking and political corruption to name but a few of her subjects – but this is counterbalanced by her detailed descriptions of food and drink (and of course Venice). What English policeman (fictional or otherwise) would start his day at a civilized hour with an espresso or two in a café, move on with a subordinate to a restaurant for lunch – a salad, some pasta, a bit of fish, a bottle of wine – and then arrive home in time for a delicious dinner cooked by his (superwoman) wife? Ravishing. As is her writing style: sparse, incisive and funny – the exchanges between Brunetti (the detective) and his appalling boss are masterpieces.

Red and dead

Yes, it finally happened. My computer croaked. I now have a new one, or at least a new second-hand one, thanks to Frog who scurried around putting together other people's cast-off bits (as he does). I have decided however that changing computers is like moving house. Your furniture's the same but it's all in different places and nothing in the new house works in quite the same way as it did in the old one. At the moment I'm camping in the hall.

    I've also been car-less for two weeks because the driver's door fell off my aged (red) Mini due to rust.

    And I'm coming to the end of my last assignment (apart from the bits that I've got to do again because they were lost when the computer croaked) for the on-line novel-writing course (http://www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk/) that I've been doing for the last six months.

    Strange times.

    I feel like I haven't written a proper serious blog post (ie one that isn't just about me but that might be of wider interest) for ages. Bear with me. I might get back into doing them.

I said I'd get back to you about the poppies, Well, they've turned out splendidly – but never quite as splendid as the first year we all saw them, which was the first year we'd seen poppies like that other than in Impressionist paintings.