A Cat Story

I thought I'd bring an old story out of the archives to entertain one and all...

So, my grandmother is now in a nursing home, but prior to this, I used to see her fairly often, taking her shopping and having lunch together, doing the odd chore, that sort of thing.

Now, my gran always had pets, for as long as I can remember.  In the her last years at home she had a cat and a dog, Lucy the cat, and B-For the dog (full name would be "B-For Beautiful").  As you can see in the image below, of five different flavours of cat food, my gran was very considerate of the desires of her pets - as long as they didn't want to be out of her sight for any length of time, if Lucy tried to go out for more than a few minutes my gran would be out in the garden, doing her best to round up the errant feline.  I remember my gran had a gate at the side of the house which was generously tied up with string and old dog leads in an attempt to stop the cat from going through it, which would have been more effective if the gate hadn't had cat-sized gaps in it.

But I digress.

Sadly, pets do become ill over time, and Lucy was getting on in years.  For a couple of weeks when I had been visiting my gran was telling me that Lucy was acting out of character more and more.  This went on for about two weeks, and things came to a head one Sunday when I walked in the door and my gran told me, weeping, that Lucy would have to go to the vets, and be put down - Lucy just wasn't herself any more.

Now, allow me to enlighten you with some detail of Lucy's personality.

All Lucy wanted in life was to be left alone, and if she couldn't be left alone, then she would settle for killing me.

Lucy liked to hide under the Welsh dresser in the corner of the living room, or behind the sofa at the other side of the room.  If you wanted to get Lucy out of these places, you couldn't call her out.  You couldn't encourage her out with snacks.  You couldn't gently stroke her and draw her out.

You had to grab her and pull her out, while she employed her claws to try to keep her in her hiding place.  I recall on more than one occasion donning a coat and leather gardening gloves in order to pull the Welsh dresser away from the wall, then throwing a towel over the cat so that hopefully enough its claws would be hooked into the fluffy towel instead of being locked in a death grip around the bones in my wrists.  Whatever I tried, nothing ever worked, Lucy would always somehow find a bit of unprotected skin to shred.

So, I wasn't looking forward to getting Lucy out and taking her to the vets, although I will admit that a small part of me wasn't entirely unhappy that this potentially could be the last time that my arms would be oozing blood out of a variety of claw tears.  It seemed a bit extreme however to have a cat put down just because it was acting a bit strange, so I planned to take Lucy to the vet, find out what (if anything) was wrong, and take her back.

I cleared the various bits of furniture away from the sofa, where Lucy was hiding, and bent down to take a look.

Four glittering cats eyes looked back at me.

 "There's another bloody cat behind there!" I said. My grandmother expressed the view that I must be mistaken, until I got both cats out and she was forced to accept that there were indeed two cats.  Whilst they did look similar, I could easily work out which wasn't Lucy, because that was the one that wasn't trying to rip my face off.
 I concluded that the other cat must have wandered in at some time (possibly when I had the front door open to bring in shopping or something), attracted by the large and interesting variety of cat food on offer, been shut inside, and because my gran tightly controlled animal access and egress to the property, was unable to escape again.  It was entirely possible that Lucy was acting strange because there was another cat in the house, or perhaps my gran, who doesn't have the best eyesight, was encountering the captured cat around the house and thought it was Lucy.

 You'll be pleased to know that after the rogue extra cat was released Lucy lived on for some time, back in her normal character, slicing me periodically.

Having Lunch in Waitrose

I've talked in the past about taking my gran shopping, but I wanted to write a little more about lunch.

We generally go to Waitrose for lunch - actually, skip the word generally - we always go to Waitrose for lunch, except for perhaps once or twice a year when Waitrose has so annoyed my gran (probably by not giving her a receipt) that we go to McDonalds one week.

So, we go round Waitrose and buy some cat food, and then we separate - I, to pay for the cat food (2 boxes of Gourmet Ocean Delicacies), and my gran to locate a table in the cafe.

Ideally, we get one of the tables alongside the tills, because there's lots of space to get to them and my gran doesn't have to worry about her mobility scooter getting in anyones way.

Once I've got her seated (as mentioned before, seated means sat right on the very edge of her chair) and equipped with a selection of two newspapers/magazines - ideally one of which will be the Express for her, and the other the Independent for me - I'll go to tackle the most dangerous part of the shop.

The Waitrose Cafe Queue.

No one gives an inch in the queue to get served at the cafe.  I've had older ladies nudging me in the back because I've not moved to take up an millimetre of space that opened up in front of me a second ago.

And everyone has their My Waitrose cards on their tray.

Everyone.

I don't know why, because all you do with the My Waitrose card(s), to claim your free drinks, is when you get to the till, you hand them to the till operator.  There's no need to display them on their tray, and yet we all do.

Perhaps it's to prove that we belong.  Yes, I am an overweight gentleman adorned with a pair of jeans and a Space Invaders T-Shirt, but I have a My Waitrose card, therefore I may stay.

They do a damn fine panini though, I must admit.

The use of attempting to pay for things as a resuscitation device

I am completely unable to pay for anything when in the vicinity of my grandmother.  This eighty-one year old kindly looking person uses some kind of interrogation practice probably outlawed by most countries to make you tell her how much anything cost that you bought, and then uses further evil techniques to make you take money from her.

A typical conversation goes like this:

 I'll walk into her living room. "Hi gran."
 She'll smile, and say "Hello. How much do I owe you."
 "Nothing, I've not brought you anything." I'll respond.  She'll use some kind of X-Ray vision at this point.
 "What about the bird seed you hid in the other room?"
 I'll shrug. "That wasn't a lot, forget about it."
 "No! You need your money!"
 "You need yours - you're on a pension." I'll attempt.  This will be batted away with a waved hand.
 "I haven't got anything to spend it on. How much was it?"
 "Um, five pounds."
 "Oh - I haven't got a fiver. Here's ten. Then you've got a little bit for going to the shop for me." she'll say, handing me a ten pound note.
 "Oh... thank you gran." I'll say, trying to think of a reason to say no but failing. She'll then rake through her purse, thinking.
 "I forgot! Here's five pounds for you to get a sandwich at work tomorrow." she'll then say, thrusting more money at me.
 "Didn't you say that you didn't have a fiver?"
 "Don't argue with your grandmother!"

Should she ever require the services of the emergency services and resuscitation is required, I shall merely call out from the doorway of the hospital "Gran I've paid for lunch okay, don't worry about it".  Within the next four seconds she'll be up and demanding her purse to recompense me.

Today can I recommend checking out web series My Gimpy Life - its lead character is (and played by) Teal Sherer, a disabled actress in Hollywood.  Teal played Venom in Series 2 of the Guild, but is overall much nicer a person in this show, which is well worth a watch.  The episodes can also be viewed on YouTube here.  They are looking for donations to let them make more episodes - visit the website to take part if you'd like to see more of the series.

The other thing I've been doing is getting more RAM installed in my PC.  When new the PC came with 2Gb, which at the time was more than adequate, but since I've been getting involved in video editing this has been badly shown to be in need of upgrade - more than once I've shut Adobe After Effects down due to lack of RAM.  And also more than once Windows seems to grind to a halt - I suspect my virus scanner for this though!  At any rate a RAM upgrade is a cheap, simple and effective way to get some more speed out of a PC.

The Crucial website has a handy system scanner which will tell you what RAM you've got in your PC, and what is compatible, and if you buy the RAM from them they even guarantee its compatibility.  You can of course use the scanner and then take its findings to another RAM seller, but Crucial prices are generally pretty competitive and for those that don't want to mess around opening the case up to check the motherboard it's a great time saver.

As it happens I had a couple of gift cards for PC World so I've just installed an additional 2Gb of RAM into my system, due to various reasons it says 4Gb installed (3.12Gb usable) which is annoying but at least the amount usable for actual problems is still a lot higher than it used to be, and the system is definitely more responsive.  I'm looking forward to giving the system a good test with some gaming and video editing to see what happens.