|
October 2002 |
|
|
Back to
|
Tuesday 1 October I went for my usual swim on Sunday afternoon. Except that it isn't really "usual" at all any more. In fact this was the first time I have been there for several months. I suppose I have been reluctant to go there since my car was broken into there in February. It only took a few lengths of the pool before I was out of breath and feeling that I had had enough exercise for one day. That's obviously a sign that I should start going there more often. I should probably have pushed myself a bit harder, but I was glad enough to leave the pool and head for the sauna. The sauna at the leisure centre is small, poorly maintained and not very popular. There are a few regular customers, but none of them were there on Sunday. For a while I thought I was going to have the place to myself. But after a while a man and a boy came in together. The man was fairly elderly, probably in his 70s, the boy looked to be about 18. From the way they talked, it was clear that the man was English but the boy, although he spoke excellent English, had a slight foreign accent. It struck me as slightly odd that an older man and a teenager, obviously not related, should be spending their Sunday afternoon together in a sauna. The sauna is for men only on Sundays (with alternating sessions for men and women on other days), and clothing is optional. I have noticed that older men usually strip off completely but the younger ones are generally a bit more modest and keep their shorts on. But this boy seemed quite uninhibited and took everything off. And I have to say that he was exceptionally attractive. I asked him where he came from, and it turned out that he is from eastern Europe. He has been in England for a year studying at a local college and is about to start at university. After we talked for a bit more, we discovered that he is going to be in one of the classes that I am teaching this term. I wondered how the man had got to know the boy, and he said that he had met him while on holiday in Poland, where (as he put it) the boy had been "singing for his supper". I didn't like to ask what he meant by this. Maybe he meant it literally. But I got the feeling that maybe he had picked him up as a rent boy. In any case, he appears to be acting as the boy's sponsor for his studies in England. And they spend their Sunday afternoons naked in a public sauna. Go figure. Term started yesterday, and I gave my first lecture to the class that the boy is in. I didn't see him in the lecture theatre. But it is a large class (about 160 students) so I can't be sure whether he was there or not. I'll keep an eye out for him and hope to see him again (preferably in the sauna). For the past couple of nights I have found myself lying awake thinking of him. This is very stupid. I must not let myself get emotionally involved with a student.
Steve phoned, to say that Jo is expecting another baby. Of course, Mary and I are very pleased about this, but I can't help contrasting our reaction with the excitement that we felt when we heard that they were expecting their first child. That felt like a significant milestone in our lives, but this is just another pleasant piece of news that we pretty much take in our stride. Part of the reason for being so casual about it is that it didn't come as a total surprise. When we visited them last month, Steve said something that made me think they were perhaps trying for another child. I looked back to my Geocities journal for January 1999, to remind myself how I felt then. Strangely enough, what came back to me as I read some of the early journal entries was not so much the excitement that I felt about the prospect of becoming a grandfather for the first time, but the enjoyment that I gained from having an online journal, the relief that I felt through being able to share the side of my nature that I had always previously kept to myself, and the pleasure of making friends through the internet. This is still something that means a lot to me, but (as with the idea of being a grandfather) I tend to take it for granted these days. Something else happened earlier this week to remind of those happy early days of the Lobo Solo journal. I had an email from my first and best online friend, Scott. It was in an email to Scott that I first wrote down the potted biography that later developed into the bio section of this site. At the time, I found parts of it it very painful to write, but I also found it a big relief to be able to share my story with Scott, and it was his journal (long since discontinued) that inspired me to start my own. We used to exchange emails all the time, and chat on ICQ. The eight hour time difference between us meant that I could chat to him when I arrived at work early in the morning, as he arrived home from his evening work shift at midnight the previous evening. Scott doesn't currently have internet access at home, and I hadn't heard from him for a long time. It was great to get his latest email. I'm not a very good correspondent, but I must make more of an effort to stay in touch. Online friendships are so fragile, it's all too easy to lose contact altogether. I seem to have drifted away from the topic of grandchildren. Tom's new brother or sister is expected to arrive some time around next June, all being well. This doesn't fit in too well with our pattern of visits to Spain. We'll probably go out to see them at Easter, when Jo will still be pregnant, and then again in September. It would be nice to be able to be there around the time of the birth, but I'm not sure whether we'll be able to arrange this. June is a fairly busy month in the university year, what with all the exams that take place then, and it could be hard for me to get away at that time. But I have just discovered that there is a maths conference in Seville next June that I might possibly get myself invited to. Now isn't that a convenient coincidence? I'll be missing most the January exam period, because of course we have to have our annual winter break in Gran Canaria. I'm not sure how pleased my colleagues would be if I tell them that I'll be away for the June exam period too, because urgent academic business is taking me to Seville. We'll have to see how this works out.
Another horrific terrorist atrocity, this time in the tropical paradise island of Bali, is a reminder that the fight against terrorism is nowhere near finished yet. All the signs are that this outrage was committed by an Al Qaeda cell. I suppose that should come as no surprise. Anyone who follows the news knows that Al Qaeda is still strong in Indonesia, as also in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. You would think that the struggle to root out terrorism would be focused on these countries. Yet George W Bush and his sidekick Tony Blair seem to be concentrating all their energies on engineering a war against Iraq and Saddam Hussain. Now I wouldn't want to be seen to be defending Saddam, who is clearly an evil dictator. But there is no evidence that his regime is engaged in international terrorism, and not the slightest indication that it is in any way connected with Al Qaeda. So one has to wonder why our leaders have so blatantly taken their eye off the ball in the fight against terrorism in order to pursue this irrelevant sideshow. (Could it have something to do with oil supplies?) And how many more innocent young tourists and others will be murdered before politicians begin to get their act together? Personally, I would like to see a regime change in Washington DC. That can't be achieved by foreign intervention, so we'll have to wait for the American voters to achieve it. I hope they make a start in the mid-term elections next month.
Sunday 20 October Lela-yang, 1984–2002 We acquired Lela when she was fifteen months old, in 1985. Our previous cat, Suki, had disappeared. Suki just went out one night and didn't come back again. We never found out what happened to her. Mary wanted a replacement cat, and she came across a breeder of Angora cats who wanted to find a home for one of her cats. Our kids were both teenagers then, still living at home, and we all drove over to the breeder's home to inspect the cat and see if we wanted to take her. The breeder was an unusual woman (to put it mildly), who kept 30 cats in her home, as well as a few dogs and a long-suffering husband. She had intended to keep Lela to breed from her, but she had realised that Lela was a sensitive and affectionate cat who needed a home where she would get more care and attention than the breeder could give her. As soon as she was brought into the room where we were sitting, Lela jumped onto 16-year-old Steve's lap and nuzzled him affectionately. That did it, of course. After that, there was no way that Mary and I would have been allowed to say No to taking her. From the start, she was completely devoted to Mary. She was quiet and shy but very affectionate, and very patient with the kids, even though Steve used to tease and mistreat her sometimes. She was small, but extremely agile and athletic. Her pedigree name was Lela-yang, which apparently means "climbing rose" in some oriental language. We soon discovered the reason for this when she started climbing the curtains, a habit which we did our best to discourage. When she had a litter of four beautiful kittens, we kept one of them and continued the Rose theme by naming the kitten Rosa-mundi. The pedigree names are too long for everyday use, so we always call the cats Lela and Rosie. When Mary became ill with M.E. and was too tired to do anything but sit on the sofa and watch TV, Lela used to sit on her lap and keep her company all day. In some ways her nature was more like a dog's than a cat's: very simple and devoted, loyal and trusting. Her only fault was that she had no sense of humour. To a non-pet owner, that might sound like an odd thing to say. But animals have their own very strong ingrained personalities, just like humans. Lela was a simple but serious cat, without any of the sense of fun that Rosie has. In the 17 years that she was with us, Lela had her fair share of illness and adventure. As she grew older, she found it hard to eat solid food. The vet said that this was because of a virus seated in the gums, and that the best remedy was to remove all the teeth. So Lela had all her teeth extracted (as did Rosie, who had the same trouble). This seemed to cure the problem, and both cats have been happily toothless for several years. Then there was the time that she disappeared. Angoras have a fairly low life expectancy, about 12 years, and Lela was already 13 when this happened. She had been unwell for a few days, and when she failed to come home one evening, we assumed that she had gone away to die in some quiet corner. After a week had passed, we had given up any hope of seeing her again. Then one morning Mary looked out of the kitchen window and stared as though she had seen a ghost. "That's my little Lela out there," she said in a strangled voice. Sure enough, there was Lela staggering along the patio, looking dishevelled, thin and confused, but otherwise unharmed. Probably she had been locked in some neighbour's garden shed for the week, and only escaped when the neighbour opened the shed at the weekend. Lela has survived another five years since she "came back from the dead". This time last year, she had an attack of pancreatitis, and our excellent vet Stuart nursed her through it. He warned us at the time that there was no way Lela could live very much longer, that her kidneys were failing (as usually happens with elderly cats) and that the illness would probably recur within a few months. But Lela has been in pretty good health for the past year. She has been low on energy, and sleeping most of the time, but that's only to be expected at her age. Last week, we began to notice that she was not eating, and seemed to be in discomfort all the time. We took her to Stuart on Friday, and he confirmed that Lela was having pancreas trouble again. He warned us that this time he might not be able to keep her going any longer, and that we should begin to expect the worst. He said that he would keep her overnight for some blood tests, and explained that the key indicator would be the creatinine level, which had gone up to 400 when she was ill last year. Anything over 500 is considered fatal. [Technical note: Creatinine levels are measured in micromoles per litre, except in the USA, which as usual is out of step with the rest of the world. There, it is measured in much larger units (millgrams per decilitre). See here for details.] Lela has survived for so long, and Stuart has been so good at curing all her illnesses, that we were beginning to think she would last forever. But when he phoned us yesterday morning he told us that the creatinine level was over 1100 and that all the other indicators were just as bad. His advice was that she could not possibly recover, and that the time had come to put her out of her pain. We drove over to his office and he brought her in, with a drip feed attached to one leg. She was doped up with painkillers and hadn't the energy even to raise her head, but she quietly purred when Mary stroked her. Stuart explained the various options to us, but it was clear to us that it was time for the end to come. Stuart asked if we wanted to be there when he administered the fatal injection, and whether we wanted his office to cremate her and send us the ashes. We said that we wanted to be with her at the end, and that we would take her body back home to bury it in the garden. For one thing, we wanted Rosie to be able to smell her mother's body so that she would understand what had happened. The end came very quickly indeed. Mary held Lela as Stuart administered the injection into the drip feed. Within a couple of seconds, she twitched slightly and her eyes glazed over, and then she was still. Stuart was his usual considerate and thoughtful self, and left us alone in the office with Lela for a couple of minutes before coming back to wrap her in a plastic sheet to take home in the cat basket. Mary wanted Lela to be buried under the cherry tree at the bottom of the garden, and I dug a small grave there while we left Lela's body in the utility room for Rosie to see. (In fact, she sniffed at it cursorily for a moment and strolled away quite casually.) We laid Lela in her grave, and after filling it in I marked the spot with a few old bricks. Mary laid some flowers there, and we stood there with our arms round each other for a few tearful moments. Mary suggested that we should go out yesterday evening, to take our minds off the day's events. We went to Harrogate Theatre to see Of Mice and Men (not a bad title, if you want something to remember a cat by). It was a very good production. The stage version of the novel was written by Steinbeck himself, and is a very powerful script. But the plot was not ideally suited to the day when we had had to take the decision to end our pet's life. At one point in the play, an old man has to decide to have his faithful old dog shot to put it out of its misery. Then at the end of the play the hero, George, has to make the same decision about his human companion, Lenny. But even without these reminders, I think that our thoughts would have been turning to Lela.
Goodbye little Lela. You were a sweet, affectionate, gentle cat.
You won't get a lot of sense out of me at the moment, not while the World Series is still taking place.
I have no interest in either of the two teams, both of them from California, and I started out watching as a totally impartial observer. But it took less than one inning for me to form a strong allegiance to the Angels. The reason: David Eckstein (pictured right). Baseball is not a sport that is well suited to showing off the male physique. But even under all that uniform and helmet you can see that young Eckstein is a hunk. Also, he is a superb athlete. To see him turn in a perfectly timed double play is ample reward for having to fast-forward through all the breaks between innings. The only thing that jars about this year's World Series is the intrusion of a militaristic theme. A fly-past of fighter planes doesn't seem at all appropriate to me as an introduction to a sporting occasion. And I don't like the way that Irving Berlin's beautiful song 'God bless America' has been hijacked as a sort of battle hymn. I haven't finished watching game six of the Series yet. But it's clear that the Angels must have won, because I know that there is to be a seventh game tonight. I'll set the timer to start recording soon after 1 a.m., and hope that I won't miss any of the excitement.
|
As