Booty

I made the decision yesterday to clear my front garden of potential missiles, including windowboxes, potted plants and recycling odds and ends just in case the destruction carried on a further half mile from South Ealing down to my street. We are blessed with a truly crap high street, so far not deemed worthy of looting, and long may it continue.

Of course my neighbours didn't worry about clearing their front gardens, so I guess it was all kind of pointless, but how stupid would you feel the moment your terra cotta plant pot came sailing through the window followed by wine bottles and the entire cast of Lord of the Flies? Pretty stupid I guess. Like, I wish I'd come out during the adverts and removed the temptation instead of turning over to Road Wars and eating the rest of the prawn crackers.

Are these looters "disaffected youth" or are they very avid participants in their own culture? I think we're witnessing the ultimate triumph of consumerism on the streets of London. It has worked so well at stirring people into a frenzy of aspiration and acquisitiveness that they've gone out and jolly well acquired all the real branded goods they can get their hands on. No more market knock-offs! No more Korean Uggs off eBay! The real deal, carried with one's own fair hand through the window of J D Sports and ready to wear once the broken glass is dusted off. And a sense of achievement to boot.  

I really should try to learn.

Despite having grown up in the States during the Just Say No era*, it turns out I am not very good at saying no, and despite my best efforts (jimjams wardrobe, general dishevelment, allowing my communication skills to atrophy until social intercourse is prohibitively trying for all involved), I seem to have a social life and friends and a fair amount of interaction which involves alcohol. Apparently I cannot refuse alcohol.

I belong to a group of Ladies in my neighbourhood who sing together. Yes. I have finally achieved the status of suburban singing matron, which, if I am honest, has been my life's goal along with eating in nice restaurants and antiquing. Ah middle age, where have you been all my life?

The singing Ladies drink wine. I love wine, but I am not very good at it. My increasingly elderly metabolism is easily bedrunkified and I can't be counted on to maintain any decorum at all. Don't even get me started on spirits. I can drink a little real ale with some dignity, if I can get past the feeling of looking like a hod carrier in a dress.

I'm feeling a bit fat and exhausted, which I put down to regular alcohol consumption. It must stop. I have no confidence that I can Just Say No and am searching for a passive way to get people to stop offering it to me. It seems mean to just stop bringing wine to rehearsals. Maybe bring a bottle of soda water instead? Hang a sign around my neck? Antabuse?

I'd like to join a book club as well, but it could kill me.

*...or perhaps because of it. I am contrary.

How stuff is going around here.

Phew. Turns out what I really needed to make me feel whole again was a shakeup of my blog banner. That's better.

Hmm, it's been a bit of a mixed bag here at the Ingrate Homestead. I am mostly not leaving the house. That happens sometimes. In the wake of a spectacular griefy meltdown last week, I decided that it was time to visit the doctor, and came home with some magic beans, 20mg of which will be planted daily until the vine of good mental health shall burst forth (in approximately two weeks, though your mileage may vary).

I was pleased that the lovely man was able to accompany me to my appointment, to act as a witness. The doctor was chatty and nice but also laughed at odd times and then, at what I felt was the world's most inappropriate moment (you know, having just asked about suicidal thoughts), told a lengthy and completely irrelevant anecdote about his young daughter. I mean, sure, I have no doubt that she's snowflake-like in her perfect uniqueness, but context is everything. Also, that unexpected 45 minutes we spent in the waiting room while you presumably regaled each patient with similar anecdotes maybe put us in the wrong mood for your gentle humour.

In the meantime, I've kept the expectations low. I was required to cater a small dinner party for neighbours, on account of having invited them a long time ago but cancelling when my grandmother died and I had to fly to New Jersey for the funeral. Yes, it has taken almost two years to get the date back in the diary and, although my dog recently died, I couldn't bring myself to reschedule the dinner party because you know, damn, if I have to reschedule this thing again, who knows when my neighbours are going to stop causing the deaths of people I love? Their supernatural invitation-related wrath knows no bounds. Allegedly.

About three hours before they were due to arrive, the lovely man and I swept through the supermarket in less than half an hour, rushed home and while he raged though the house cleaning and moving clutter and mess up the stairs, I made chicken with lemon and olives. I forgot to add the olives, mostly everyone got quite drunk, and no one was hurt. My remaining loved ones can sleep soundly in their beds.

I don't know about you, but when I am feeling off-colour, I like to hunker down with something that is absolutely guaranteed to divert my attention from whatever is ailing me. This time I'm going for the entire 9 seasons of Seinfeld, plus a few choice weblogs. I open a blog to a random page in the morning, and read my way through a chunk of the archive throughout the day. Undoubtedly, stats will reveal my hours of lurking so let the record show that my intentions are entirely benign. If you find I've parked myself on your blog, it is likely that you are cheerful and soothing. Thanks for that.

Feeling sorry. For myself, that is.

For obvious reasons, you will never medal in the grief olympics when your dog dies. You won't even make the team. Possibly no one outside your immediate circle will notice, and not two weeks after the event, a friend will ask if you still feel bad.

But from inside, it feels different. I am lonely for my friend, who I loved and cared for daily for more than thirteen years. I miss the smell of her head, and the sound of her breathing and the way she was always there. The house is very quiet.

I expected to feel sad, but I am kind of taken by surprise by the existential turn of my thoughts. Ashes to ashes stuff. It's like I'm in a hole where nothing makes any difference and what does any of it matter and it's all lost in the end anyway and there's no god and I can hear the emptiness of space, etc.

That's why I'm not doing much here, because I'm aware of, on one hand, hello hyper-melodrama and on the other, oh my word my heart is broken and oh look my guts are all hanging out and I'm sure that isn't good.

I must admit, I did find this bizarrely comforting as well as fucking funny, so maybe read that instead.

(And now this my most recent post and not that last one. Thank fuck for that.)

We had to put my lovely girl to sleep tonight. She had a restless night last night, and despite having had a strong painkiller earlier today, she was in a lot of discomfort and I guessed that we'd reached the end of the road. I feel dead guilty, and also like I might wake up and find I've just dreamed it.

Bye little sausage. I hope that where you are you're sleeping in the sun and you can eat all the chicken bones you want.

Maybe I should try rubbing it on my face.

So go on and call me a bore but I just came home from another vet appointment. Stuff was achieved - steroid injection, antibiotics, er, rectal exam (sorry dog) - and before I left I asked about the eye infection which wasn't yet completely cleared up.

(If I'm honest, I was trying to squeeze some extra value out of the, what, fourth? appointment in six weeks, cause in my mind's eye, I could see myself rocking up there in a couple of days to deal with the eye thing again. Even the lovely man, who doesn't have a stingy bone in his body, said after the last appointment "Every time I leave that place I feel like I've been mugged." I wouldn't like to sound disrespectful/inappropriate/cheap - delete as appropriate - but we have poured an awful lot of money down this particular hole and still we have a speculative non-diagnosis, a rubbish speculative prognosis and thus a probably-dying dog, so it's not the expenditure I mind as much as the fact that we don't seem to have anything to show for it. Not that I'm bitter, etc.)

Anyways, the vet does this test which involve sticking what look like strips of paper in her eyes for exactly a minute each, which, you know, after a rectal exam brings to mind the words 'insult' and 'injury.'  Then he fetches a small box of ointment and tells me "it is very expensive, so you only need to use a tiny bit."

Now, hang on a minute pardner. This is an expensive corrective treatment for my imminently dying dog's eye which has had a little infection because it is not as moist as it should be? I mean, I will do anything for my dog, but having recently been given the news that she probably has an untreatable cancer - so untreatable that it is considered unnecessary to find a specific diagnosis - this eye ointment gave me pause for thought. Why be stingy? What am I saving it for? Why not just bung it all in there like we're havin' a party?

It turns out that you can just use ordinary moisturising eye drops. The kind that you can buy at Boots for £3. But he advised me that if I do that, I need to do it eight to ten times a day, and my dog diary is all full up what with the antibiotics, fresh food, cleaning (oh the cleaning), managing the effluvia, not to mention yay! vet visits! And worrying.

I bought the damn ointment. Cha-ching!

*Insert swearing here.*

My beloved girl dog was, up to her thirteenth year, an absolute cracker; she ran and jumped and I was regularly asked if she was a puppy. She has been in decline for almost a year. First, she began to drag her front left paw. When I got home from New York last October, she had a disconnected look in her eye and wouldn't be held, preferring to pace and wander. Her gait became increasingly wobbly and crabbed, and she fell over. She began to sleep on the floor to the side of the cushion in her bed, with just her head resting on it, and no matter how much floor space I filled with her cushions and blankets, she lay to the side of them.  She lost an alarming amount of weight and we fed her up and she put some of it back on again, but remained wizened and shrunken-looking.  She failed to respond to commands she had known and followed all her life. She stopped grooming herself, which meant I had to have a surprising discussion with the male vet about gynecological hygiene.* She developed a series of opportunistic ailments which meant she was pretty much always on a bland** diet.


Despite having been in and out of the vet's office over and over again, nothing out of the ordinary was found and pretty much everything has been chalked up to age. I've seen three different vets (from the same practice) for three different reasons over the last six weeks, and the last was the only one to tell me that my dog probably had a lesion on the brain and I needed to think about my "options" sooner rather than later.


On Good Friday I had a total and complete meltdown saying we'd have to have her put down on Saturday. The next day. What if she were suffering out of office hours and we were forced to ring the emergency cover veterinary service while our usual vets were enjoying their Easter holidays? Hi, you don't know me but can I come over so you can kill my dog? Will you take a cheque? Then, taking advantage of a brief gap in my wailing and rending of garments, we took her for a long walk in the park and she seemed perfectly fine, so who knows. By perfectly fine, I mean no worse than normal. Does that mean I've acclimatised to her being this fucked up and I'm prolonging her discomfort? She seems to enjoy eating and going for walks still. Is that not a good enough reason to let her carry on? That, and the fact that I am a gibbering, blubbering wreck at the prospect of life without her?


I've adopted the totally mature adult emotional response of eating stuff I don't really want and compulsively wandering about the intertubes, reading, browsing, shopping and lurking. I exhibit the demeanour of someone who reasons that averting their eyes and whistling means it isn't really happening. Lalalalalalalalalalalala can't hear you lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala. So that's working then.


You?





*Not mine. Ha ha she laughed cheerlessly.
**Read "homecooked." She's probably doing it on purpose for the good grub, the wily minx. As if I want another three fresh meals to prepare daily.