Heart Attack And Vine

First of all, the heart attack.

My sister and I are having one of our rare conversations. Our mother (natural for my sister and adoptive for me) is in hospital after a suspected heart attack at her day centre. She’s been living with my sister for about six years and Sister is showing the strain.

It turns out that it isn’t so much a heart attack as a consequence of the extreme levels of calcification of her already battered heart valves. They can put in stents or replacements but there may be side effects for someone of her age (89 next week – as usual, I’ve forgotten her imminent birthday) and poor health.

“What kind of side effects?” I ask.

“Oh, you know. A stroke. Death. That kind of side effect.”

From anyone else, that would be a joke. It’s possible Sister’s developing a black sense of humour. She once answered the door to a man who asked her what her crutches were for (no longer needed, thankfully). He had a broad Liverpool accent so the conversation went something like this.

“Are you alright, love? What are the crutches for, la?”

“I have chronic continuous pain syndrome.”

“That’s too bad, chick – what does that mean, then?”

My sister fixes the man with a dead-eyed glare worthy of Charles Bronson in his prime.

“It means I’m in continuous pain.”

(Two beat pause.)

“That sounds really bad, love – can you sign here?”

“That was funny,” I said when the man had departed, quite quickly. She looked at me blankly.

“But I am in chronic continuous pain?”

Anyway. She isn’t now. She is, however, an Anglican deacon studying for the priesthood and is professionally determined that our mother is going to a better place. We agree that I’ll take a day trip up North and see our mother with Sister as an escort. For my sake, not our mother’s.

Our mother is upright and perky.

“There was a lovely chaplain. He came in during rest time and sat with me for ages.”

“That’s nice.,” says Sister.

“The heart man was very good. He says they could give me an operation that’ll give me years more life.”

Sister rolls her eyes.

“But the other two consultants both say that the risks are two high and that your quality of life afterwards wouldn’t be very good.”

“But why shouldn’t I live a little longer if I can?”

“But aren’t you going to heaven?”

“Well, yes. I hope so.

“So does it matter when you go, then?”

“But if I could have a bit more…?”

It’s uncomfortably like a patient mother remonstrating with a young child about the dangers of too much cake. Mum changes the subject.

“There was a lovely chaplain. He came in during rest time and sat with me for ages…”

“Yes, mum,” my sister says. “You’ve told us that.”

“”The heart man was very nice. But I think he’s too old to do the operation.”

Unwisely, I try and explain that there’s a whole team that makes the decision. It gets complicated. We hear about the chaplain again. A nurse provides us with a fistful of booklets about the particular technique this consultant has been trying to sell our mother.

“I suspect an enthusiast,” I tell my sister, and she agrees. The stats suggest an 80% survival rate after one year. They don’t tell us a) how ancient or otherwise these survivors are and b) how likely they were to carry on living anyway. We aren’t encouraged. We try to explain the stats and procedures we’ve just learned about to our mother and decide to leave it till the full patient conference next week which Sister will make sure she attends.

Then I prattle bravely about my children (whom mum barely remembers) and my job for an hour. At one point, she points behind us.

“Do you think those things on that trolley are for sale? They look very nice.”

We both swivel in our seats. She’s pointing at the coronary emergency ward crash wagon. It does have quite an attractive set of little IKEA-style red drawers.

Later, I reach St Pancras and buy a bottle of moderately posh red wine. That would be the ‘vine’ bit.

Snowday 2012…

…Was pretty ace, actually. Perfect snowman snow. So we rolled large balls (which were a bit filthy because there were only two or three inches of actual snow and we ended up with a lot of grass and mud attached) and made snowmen. The following day, I felt like I’d been running for the first time in years and my arms seemed to be dislocated which is what exactly going from a lie-in to three hours of physical labour without a warm-up will do to you.

Show is heavy. And so are sledges. But I decided that I love both.

Afterwards, humongous crowds of people trooped through our house for tea, coffee, GameCube and intense Barbie play-sessions. Grown-ups filled the kitchen, we ran out of cake and milk and all the left-overs clogging up most of the shelves in the fridge came in immensely useful. We aren’t used to being that social at the moment, being as we usually spend most of our free time wringing our hands about the ongoing real-estate car-crash, the Crack In The Front (not anything the the Doctor could save us from, I fear) and the Woman Downstairs. Silly us.

And then everyone went to bed beautifully and supermum and I watched something from Buffy Season 6. And not even that could bring us down.

There are times when we don’t appreciate what’s right under our noses. But not on a Snowday – we had us a good time and we all slept wrapped up in the sleep of a house that had been filled with love and good times. We must do it again soon.

You want a picture, don’t you?

Little elf accessorises a snowman

Southport Seafront, clichéd decay, weird paddle boats

The fact is, Southport isn’t anywhere near as bad as I remembered. Every toilet in every chain restaurant seems papered over in posters warning about meow-meow and suggesting one ‘asks Frank’ but the expected gangs of feral tweens wandering the seaside wastelands seem to keep themselves voluntarily confined to a large skatepark. Tottenham and Hackney could learn a thing or two there.

We’ve been here for three days, visiting my elderly relatives and taking a ride round ‘my old haunts’, as a obscure track by The Dream Syndicate might put it. There’s a decaying Victorian park sandwiched between an immense Travel Lodge and an even larger Best Western that offers a pleasantly melancholy tour of Southport’s former grandeur.

I had my iPhone so I took a picture of a decaying and pleasantly melancholy park gazebo (or meow-meow house).

In the distance, there’s the deserted coils of the giant rollercoaster in Pleasureland. I’ve no idea if it opens in winter. Probably not. It looks like the council decided to put a lot of money into it at some point and sort of…stopped. But not before they built a heritage centre. I walked around it (it was closed) and couldn’t really work out what it was for. It was surrounded by truncated lampost pillars, like a Greek ruin.

There’s a circular chamber at the back. Perhaps its the airconditioning for a vast underground system of tunnels and bombshelters. Perhaps not.

Dudelet and I took a walk while we waited for the arcades to open. There are rituals associated with seaside towns which must be observed at all costs and the exchange of money for noise, coloured lights and unreliable hits of serotonin is one of them. Dudelet, though he didn’t know it at the time, was about to win a jackpot amount of tickets* and acquire a memory which will remain with him for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, we passed a building with a sign proclaiming it to be the Smallest Pub In Britain.

Next to the Smallest Pub In Britain was an equally small sternwheel paddle steamer. I have no idea how they acquired it.

Back in the park, we found a deserted miniature railway station. It was a forlorn sight.

Elsewhere, the Most Gothic Hotel In Southport stood waiting R-PAT’s wedding party.

Then I discovered Hipstamatic and turned everything into the 1960s.

And here’s a picture of my family. They’re the cold looking little group trudging wearily towards Fun.

Later this week, I’ll do the happy post about the joyous, uplifting things. But today is all about the cliché and the decay. I suppose I’m listening to too many Cure reissues.

*If you don’t already know, it’s far too complicated to explain.

Caspar was a good cat

A few months ago, Tilly, our 18 year old female cat, vanished. She’d just had a successful operation on her thyroid and had once again begun ranging far and wide around the gardens out the back of our flat. She was also stone deaf. We waited – her disappearing for one or even two nights hadn’t been unusual in her prime – but eventually it became clear she wasn’t returning. We suspected a fox, or a car, or that she’d simply got lost and adopted by someone. Either way, she was clearly gone. I grieved but she’d always been an independent little soul and somehow I let her go relatively easily.

But Caspar, just as old but suffering from arthritis and borderline dementia, missed her a lot. He began to roam around the hall outside our bedrooms miaowing plaintively at all and any hours of the night but refused to leave the kitchen during the day. He started to go downhill fast. Up to the age of about 15, he’d savagely fought off all comers and as long as Tilly was lurking in the background, he’d still hissed and made it clear he wasn’t to be messed with. Now, he hid from other cats and sometimes spent hours in his litter tray. He slept more and more. His fur fell out along his backbone and he walked more and more slowly, getting himself tangled up in everyone’s feet.

“Poor Caspar,” Little Elf would say. She’d stroke him then try and wrap him in a towel or blanket and he’d be too dazed and tired to run away.

Finally, I got up one morning and noticed a wound in his shoulder with something white sticking through. Bone. I cleaned up the wound as best I could and supermum took him to the vet. The vet called me and told me what I was expecting.

“The muscle over his shoulder blade has completely wasted away and it’s literally worn through the skin. I can stitch him up, but it’ll happen again. And I think there’s something more going on.”

“Do you think…?”

Pause.

“If it was my cat I’d wonder if I wanted to put him through another operation with all the stress and trauma it would involve.”

I booked the afternoon off and came home. Caspar was sleeping on his favourite rug in his corner of the kitchen. Normally, he’d wake up with a kitchen full of people moving around him but he slept on. I confirmed the appointment and carried him there. In the vet’s (thankfully empty) waiting room, I lifted him out of his catbox and he unloaded a full bladder over my lap before settling into my arms. The nurse provided a lot of sympathy and paper towels and then we went in to to see the vet, another cat lover.

I signed the paperwork and they left us for ten or fifteen minutes. Caspar would normally be struggling to escape from the table or get back into his box but he lay comfortably on the soft cloth they’d provided with his head resting on my hand. I thought of the the first time we’d met him, half-grown and eight months old in a cat rescue home in Norfolk. We’d put him in the box they’d provided and he’d shredded it, horrified at being locked in. When we’d got him home, he’d hidden under a bed and cried, only coming out for food. It was three days before he emerged to explore and meet our other cat. Tilly had immediately swatted him on the nose and hissed, then run away but Caspar followed her around patiently until eventually she let him share a sofa and even an armchair. After a few weeks, we’d see her lurking a safe distance behind him whilst he faced off against the local gangsters.

He grew into a big, classic black British moggie, solid and muscular. He’d never kill mice – just catch them and look puzzled until we rescued them. Or until Tilly got to them – Tilly had no truck with vermin.

Caspar was already asleep again. He’d had enough and really just wanted to check out, Tilly was gone, he couldn’t fight, the house was full of children and he could hardly walk. Enough, I imagined him saying, then reminded myself that two hours earlier I’d been telling supermum not to project rational human thoughts and regrets onto a cat.

The vet came back and gave him the injection. Almost immediately, he stopped breathing. There was a little tremor and I suddenly became aware that Caspar was gone and that the thin bundle of fur and bones beneath my hands was just a reminder. The vet left me there for another half hour and I thought some more and counted the notches in his ears. The nurse brought me some tea. Then I said goodbye and went home.

I’m still seeing him in the corners of our house and I keep seeing Tilly at the far end of alleys and disappearing over walls. I suppose I always will.

Camping and rowing

I lied (as I’ve often quoted) when I said I was the outdoors type. Supermum, however, would probably live in a yurt, given the chance, and loves to camp. So periodically I submit to this, with greater or lesser good will. Dudelet and little elf also love camping and I want them to enjoy it and I’m delighted it’s something they share with their mother, especially dudelet. Still, the weekends when supermum gets the urge to pack up her gigantic bell tent, fill the roof-rack with rugs and throws and a hardcore panoply of portable gas stoves, pans, cunningly nested place-settings and inflatable beds and sleeping bags fill me with creeping anxiety and dread. It isn’t the actual camping so much as the preparation. Attics have to be explored. Cupboards emptied. Cars filled to bursting point. Over-excited children corralled into other unsupervised activities whilst we pack everything up.

Normally, the three of them will head off on a Friday and frequently meet up with Favourite Aunt (who is a thoroughly Outdoor Type with positively hemulic tendencies). Work often requires me to arrive the following day to find supermum exhausted after a late bedtime, a sleepless night, an early (5:30 am) start and the children still hyper beyond belief.

But.

There are points, generally at about eleven or twelve pm, after dudelet and little elf have finally fallen asleep out of sheer exhaustion, when we’re in bed and aren’t far behind them and when the racket surrounding us (transistor radios, trains, geese, canal boats motoring after dark, families bumbling to and from the shower block without torches finding their way by high pitch squeals like bats) when I understand what a tent, if not camping, is good for.

Supermum’s bell tent is about seven feet high at the top and wide enough to sleep all four of us comfortably. She’s kept every embroidered bedspread or cast-off rug from her student days onwards and they all come out when she camps. They layer the floor like a history of our lives together written in textiles. The tent is canvas with a separate ground sheet and it breathes. It is one of the few times we all share the same space and find it comforting as opposed to irritating. Outside, the plains and forests could roll on for infinity or buildings and people close in on all fronts. We care not. There is, for a few hours, only our own little microcosm.

The next day we hired a boat for an hour – a bona fide skiff. I rowed, Supermum sat in state in the stern (a tiny down-payment on the twenty years of driving I can never reciprocate), dudelet shouted instructions (“Port!” “Starboard!’ No, PORT!” Bump) and little elf finally agreed to put on her life jacket and trailed her hand in the water, marvelling at how warm it was and wondering whether the ducks would come and talk to her. Rowing a skiff puts you down at duck level. It is surprizingly quiet, apart from the splash of the oars and the occasional thump of the bows against the canal-side brickwork (“I said PORT, daddy!”). Birds ignore you and continue about their business and other navigators, seeing your tendency to progress in wildly tangential arcs and dashes interspersed with outright collisions with banks overgrown with holly bushes and nettles, do their best to avoid you.

I like rowing. I should do it more often. Basingstoke Canal glided by attractively and an hour gently sped by. I discovered that a rowing boat full of my family on a sunny day skimming across a quiet stretch of water is as much a microcosm as a tent at midnight. I remembered Swallows and Amazons and other books of my childhood full of oars and dingys and adventurous gangs of children. I felt like the Water Rat. There was no Badger, however. Little elf had earlier banished badgers whilst we were on a hunt for bunnies along the towpath.

“Badgers are bad,” she had declared. “Bad, bad, bad.”

I never discovered why. We can tackle that later.