Family, Part Two

And I would post 100 posts, and I would post 100 more

Yup - just noticed it was a mini-milestone of a post.

I pity you all for reading 100 posts of me.

Ahahaha.

Hurray, I found my camera cable

Puppies and snow, eh?

In Memoriam II

Debbie wandered into our life in 1987, a month or so after we moved from Brighton up to Scotland. We took her in as a wandering stray, although technically she was the kitten of Tibby, the cat from the farm across the road (the other kitten, pure white, got adopted by the postman) so she wasn’t as wandering as either of the other two other kittens that later claimed us.

And ironically, she outlasted them both (well, we don’t know with Squeak – he just left shortly after we moved house. May still be alive out there somewhere…who knows). But Debbie was put down last week – old age finally got too much for her, and by the time my mother took her to the vets she said nothing but the final three inches of tail was still paying attention to the world (that was vibrating back and forth in a pissed-off way – Debbie to the end). She had been deaf for the past few years (and it’s really amusing just how surprised a deaf cat can be when you creep up on it), and spent her days curled up under radiators (instead of bringing in all sorts of dead rodents, which she used to utterly excel at).

But Debbie…well, she was the cat of my childhood. She was named Debbie by 4-yr-old me after the human girl in the Mog books (because Mog was Mog, so we couldn’t call her that), and that expanded to Deborah whenever we felt like being formal (shouting her in from snowy fields for dinner, for example)…or Debdebs if we didn’t. She was very much your archetypal cat – aloof and unsociable but, if you caught her at the right moments, still a total silly kitten deep inside. She and Squeak had nothing in common, but were fairly friendly with each other – for a couple of years they shared the cat bed that eventually got appropriated by puppy Gigha, in front of the Aga. She and Geoff were sworn enemies but had neat little tricks (eg getting the other to leave food by being overly affectionate).

She was the cat I loved to torment as a child (because she was just so easy to annoy, and who doesn’t like those hot red welts that claw scratches give you?), but also the cat I ran to in tears when I couldn’t deal with people (she didn’t always appreciate that, but she was chubby and furry and comforting).

This photo was taken one Christmas (hence the decorations) at our current house. I lifted her up there, but it was just such a perfect position for her. Queen of the castle.

She would sit on the sofa next to you and watch every movement of your fork as it conveyed food from the plate to your mouth. She could be completely asleep and yet still twitch that tail-end to notify you of her annoyance that you’d just sat down in her sunshine. She would occasionally deign to curl up on laps. She loved to sit or sleep on stairs, where she could survey everything. She could be driven totally insane by running something along banister railings she was sat on the other side of. She totally disdained toys, catnip, purpose-made scratching posts and all other such things. She never, ever, talked to the cats next door. She had a little ‘mrrp!’ to say hello, a loud ‘mrrooww’ to express displeasure, a fearsome hiss and a wonderful purr. She liked to bump foreheads as a greeting (this got odd in her later life, when she developed a weird wart-blister thing on her forehead). She was proper tortoiseshell/tabby, with her white bib, wonderfully asymmetric face fur and mixed-y coloured skin on her paw pads which I always thought was cute. She enjoyed exploring dark musty spaces, and as a result got trapped in the garage and the loft several times. She always went in a huff for several days after a trip to the cattery or vet. She liked a saucer of milk in the mornings, and refused to eat any cat food of lower class than Whiskas or Felix. When asleep, she could end up in the weirdest positions, feet sprawled everywhere, looking utterly silly. She once entirely destroyed a wooden seat we bought from the Glasgow Garden Festival because it was too much fun to scratch it. Whenever my dad visited our old house, she left muddy pawprints all over his car. If you stroked her head and she was in a sufficiently good mood, she’d sit up meerkat-like.

She was Debbie.

I've got my spine, I've got my tv crush

And so I give in. Jes scares me. Also I couldn't resist...but at least I'll have the decency to hide it under another post by the end of today. Okay, so I don't actually have ten tv crushes, and therefore four of the ones below are...gasp...non-tv. There might be a clue in the title to that effect, in fact...right. In no particular order:

1. I worship you without quite knowing why. You are undoubtedly beautiful, worldly-wise and deeply honest, but I tend to admire you from afar. You are not mine, you never can be, because that’s not who I am, but who you are is perfect and I hope you stay that way so I can watch and learn.

2. You seemed a light flirtation – beautiful, no strings, easy company to keep. But after a while it was so easy that you became a little part of me – there is nothing about you that I dislike and you will live in my heart forever.

3. I think I have to describe you as easy, because you’re so popular and you sell yourself out in so many different ways. You’re immature and rather annoying at times, and yet I really hate people disdaining you because of it. You have struggles they don’t even deign to notice, and darkness and pain have become your constant companions. And you know I’m a sucker for that. You could still wreck it all, though…be brave. And un-cheesy.

4. Did I ever mention that I didn’t want to get to know you? You didn’t seem my sort of thing at all. But I felt obliged to try, and once I’d got the hang of you I discovered a whole new world. Literally - you changed my whole outlook in a scarily short space of time, and I’ll always owe you for that.

5. You’re less of a crush and more of an old, old friend. I forget about you rather easily, but without you there is a little hole in my life. When you’re around, the world seems simultaneously both crazier and better. I love you for your humour, your cleverness and your off-the-cuff idiocy.

6. I came so close to disliking you on first sight. You seemed far too highly-strung, and I couldn’t connect to you. But with a few honest smiles you charmed me, and soon I was head-over-heels in love as I realised just how much you hid under that smart-alec exterior. It’s not always been plain sailing, but I consider you mine in a way that few others are.

7. True love, self-sacrificing and humbling and horribly painful – this is the closest I get to it. You are whole and good and I forgive you anything. Yes, even that. Your story goes on, out there, somewhere, and I just wish I could see it.

8. You’re different to my other crushes. You’re hard to talk about, and people who really understand my obsession are few and far between. But you’re an undercurrent to my life, and if I neglect you for too long, coming back to you always feels like coming home. You are pretentious and unassuming all at once, and you have proved yourself to me so many times over that no matter what you do in the future (I fail to understand some of your recent choices, I must admit), I will always love you without question.

9. You…oh, you. Where do I start? I’ve even forgotten quite why I loved you so much in the first place. Your bravery, your cleverness, your wholeness and your sly wit, I think. But you led me to such new places that I kind of forgot about you as a person. Someday soon, I should put aside some time and remember why we were such a good match.

10. Were you my first crush? I think you were. Introduced to you totally by chance, you caused me to compare myself to you and feel ashamed. I’m not so obsessed with you any more – you’re stodgy and you can be very pretentious, but your ideals are the purest, your outlook the saddest, and for that I will probably always return to you in times of trouble.

And everywhere...

...that Hobblings went...

...the jes journal...

...was sure...

...to...

...follow!

Although it kind of looks like only Q and Em wrote in it. Which wasn't true. Right?

Belonging

The lack of my camera cable has forced me to remember those days when I blogged about…you know, opinions and stuff, rather than just What I Did Last Weekend. It was, after all, the main reason I started a blog in the first place (yeah, ‘cause I need more places in which to unload my opinion onto the world). But somehow lately I have become lazy. Any thoughts I have are fleeting things, either kept to myself or shared in emails in between tv-related ramblings.

And the other day I was linked to a new blog of a friend from university, and it shamed me. She writes regularly of her opinion on current affairs, friends, things that happen in her day-to-day life, tv adverts…everything, really. And while I don’t agree with everything she says, I feel small in my little picture-book blog by comparison.

Also, nothing very interesting has happened recently. Although I have a photo of my father to share when (if) I find my cable.

So…in reading said friend’s blog, anyway, I came across this line:

“I do wonder how I can hold these beliefs, how I can be in favour of killing foetuses and the seriously ill or the elderly, and how I can oppose killing murderers and rapists. Those are the contradictions in being a liberal....I just have to believe that somehow I'm right.”

And it made me think. Out of context, that perhaps seems more imbalanced than it is, and I don’t disagree with anything she’s saying, but it raised the question of ‘belonging’ (notice how I jumped at the chance to use that title…) to any labelled division of people.

Now, I do believe we need labels. To make life easier for all of us, for a start. When describing a person, it is so much better to be able to say of me ‘she’s a liberal Christian fantasy reader’ than to have to list every single opinion I have individually. Approximations through a combination of labelled stereotypes will do, in the majority of cases – there simply isn’t world enough or time for us all to know each other perfectly.

But when it comes to your own view of yourself, I don’t believe anyone should base themselves on a label. I don’t believe anyone should ever think it is sufficient to say ‘because I am a Y, I believe X’ and think no further. (I am uncomfortable enough with ‘I believe X, therefore I am a Y.’) In the case above – yes, those opinions appear contradictory. So why should it be alright to shrug and say ‘apparently I have contradictory opinions, but plenty of other people have them too, so that’s okay’? I don’t think it is. I think if there is one thing that we should never cease doing, it is questioning our own view of the world, understanding exactly why we believe what we do and, if necessary, changing those beliefs – but changing them based on personal experience and a separate appraisal every time, not en masse because you’ve decided to vote for a different political party this week.

What am I trying to say? I share my friend’s beliefs in the above case. And maybe I haven’t thought them through thoroughly myself yet either – but it doesn’t mean I don’t think I ought to (some day, when I get a respite from trying to work out if I believe in a soul). Her apparent decision to trust that other people have thought those beliefs through and that therefore they are fine just sticks in my throat. I am a fierce believer in independent thought – never believe anything just because other people do, however comfortable it may be. In the end, abdicating responsibility for your own beliefs can lead to you following causes that you wouldn’t be following of your own accord, because the lure of belonging to a community is too strong.

Again – what am I saying? On a small, everyday scale, I suppose it’s that I hope I am strong enough to be different to my friends, even those whose approval I most want. Let the schoolgirl response of attempting to chameleon myself into what I think will be an acceptable form be left years behind me.

I seem...

...to have mislaid my camera cable. This is making my usual blogging habits somewhat difficult to maintain.

I must remember how to write without pictoral aids.

A Tale of Two Climates

Last weekend I went on my fourth excursion to the Ffestiniog Railway in Wales with work colleagues (I can’t believe I’ve had this blog for under a year, as only one of the previous trips has been mentioned on here). It was, as ever, good fun. I always feel slightly out of place with this bunch of people, as I don’t actually work with any of them any more, and I was once again the only girl this time, but I still go because it is great fun, and this time I did feel I was fitting in more. Probably because there were three completely new people this time and that made me feel like an oldbie who knew people – it didn’t matter who I ended up working with or sat next to at meals, a conversation could be had. Which is always good.

Now, west Wales in late October is a thrilling idea all round. Luckily I did put in the extra bit of effort to find all my waterproofs before leaving. Here are some photos from the Saturday…you know how normally you can’t really see rain in photos? Well, that should give you some idea how heavy this was.

Seriously torrential, all day, and nobody escaped – even with full waterproofs my (steel-toecapped) boots were squelching within the first hour, and my jacket hood gave up the ghost before it was time to give up and head back to the hostel for hot showers. Cold, cold and wet and miserable, but yet still good fun. The actual task for the weekend was to install two new gates for walkers into the fence on either side of the track in this location, but on Saturday we made almost no progress. Partly because the other group (there were two teams working on the two gates and obviously a little competition developed there) spent the whole day trying to get a concrete breaker to do anything at all on the foundations of the old stile

and on our side we spent the entirety of the day digging drainage channels to try to keep the water pouring down the hillside from filling up any holes we tried to dig for posts.

Oh – we had a post-holer. That gave me an immense amount of quiet satisfaction and I tried to say it whenever I could. Nobody tried to burn me alive though…which is probably a good thing. As I’m not psychic and do not have a spaceship full of crewmates to turn up and rescue me.

The best memories from that day of rain come from the amusement of being absolutely soaked through and knowing you can get no wetter – Rob (who had only overalls, no waterproofs) jumping in huge puddles because it simply wasn’t going to make any difference, and Rob and Stu and I taking every opportunity to chuck slightly muddy water-impregnated-in-our-gloves into each other’s faces. Oh, and the tea. The two trains that came by on their way up to Blaenau Ffestiniog (full of tourists who looked pityingly and/or astoundedly at us all stood there in the rain) brought a box of teas and coffees. I had tea (moderate amounts – never a full cup. PG Tips, for those who care. And I took the teabag out in time). Okay, I added milk and sugar, but with the tiredness and the cold and the everything else I think I should be allowed to get away with that.

It was good work digging those drainage channels though. Satisfying when little torrents started careering down them.

The evenings were oddly less drunken than they usually are – although on the Friday night I simply crashed out early (ie midnight) due to being utterly exhausted. I think other people stayed up and drank crème de menthe from a teapot (apparently that strips the tannin off the inside rather effectively. And disgustingly). But on Saturday I think the soaking just got to us and everybody gave up and went to bed by about 1 – bar the newbie graduate who started to really get on my nerves by the end of the weekend byt trying too hard – and with the clocks going back that night, we actually got a full night’s sleep. On a Wales weekend. Unheard of.

On Saturday, we’d been told the weather was forecast to be good on Sunday. We wouldn’t believe it until we saw it. And see it we did – unbelievably lovely weather given the day before. There were even moments where I thought I could feel a little heat from the sun…by the end of the day most of us were even working in t-shirts. Amazing. This is a photo taken from up the still-pretty-soggy hillside, looking over the lake towards what I assume to be slate quarries.

I mentioned before the guy who always brings a Pinzgauer truck...

...it was in its element this time. We were in open countryside with tracks (having had to go through the yard of the hydro-electric power station at Tan-Y-Grisiau, which was always fun – sit around while someone deep in the bowels of the building presses a button to open the gates for us), and frequent breaks were taken for a few people at a time to go on a hell of a run up and down the tracks (without people sat on the top at the time). I went once and eeee. Good fun.

With the new weather and the reinstalled cheeriness - look at this happy tea break

- we got a hell of a lot more done this day, and by 2.30pm we had two shiny (and hopefully sheep-proof) new gates installed and semi-concreted in - the other group used up far too much of the concrete and left us with almost none, which is why the base of their gate looks a bit more professional than ours…we’ve gone for the English country garden look though and turfed it.

Where ‘turf’ is essentially sodden mud with a thistle or two in, but still.

(how did Kev manage to get in both of those photos?)

And that was the weekend, basically. And then I came back with aching shoulders and arms (I love using mattocks and crowbars but use them a little too infrequently really) and told people at work where I’d been and got accused of being a spotter. Sigh.

I didn’t even take that many photos of trains…