Cats sorted

Fortunately, my pal whose cats I was supposed to feed on Saturday night bumped into her neighbour and she has agreed to pop in and do it. What a relief! So now I can enjoy my cold with a clear conscience. Oh, and add toothache to the evil imp's mix - though it may be sinus, not tooth. It's often hard to tell. Oh, grizzle, sniff, groan...

Evil imp

I firmly believe that there is an evil imp whose sole job in his miserable little existence (it is definitely a 'he', no woman would be so hideously malevolent) is to visit all manner of ills on me the moment my back is turned and my guard down.

Once, when I got a migraine (and I don't get them nearly as often since the menopause), it would start during the day when I was awake. I would get a one-sided headache and often blind spots or dazzling shapes in front of my eyes, and, with luck, would be able to shovel enough painkillers and anti nausea tablets down me that the damned thing wouldn't develop. So, seeing his torture failing, the evil imp devised another tactic, which was to start the headache while I was asleep, so that when I woke it was already fully formed and too late for paracetamol.

And now to colds. Once, I would get a tickle or a sore throat and have at least a day to swallow zinc and vitamin C, or take Gelsemium or Nat. Mur., and stand a chance of killing off the virus before it developed. But the evil imp, seeing me do this once too often for his liking, learned a spell. "Have that!" he said, flicking streptococci from his luminous green fingers. With a dose this strong, the result was the Instant Cold. Out of the blue. Just like that, as Tommy Cooper used to say.

Yesterday I felt fine. I even felt well enough to go to the gym - first time in a month, lazy sod that I am - and then try on lots of clothes (but not buy anything) in Debenhams. I was sitting on the bus coming home, feeling virtuous about not having depleted my bank account, when - SHAZAM!!! I was struck by the Instant Cold. A hideous sore throat arrived out of nowhere, accompanied by a sore gland in my neck and earache. All on one side, the left. Muttering, "Bloody imp!", I hastened to throw all my usual cures down my neck, including a combination of Lysine and high dose Vitamin C which usually does the trick nicely.

Not this time, though. I awoke around 5 am with one-sided cold and migraine both doing nicely. I had to cancel an 11 am meeting with a potential new literary agent (it meant leaving the house at 9.30 when I still wasn't sure if I was going to throw up or not) and go back to bed. It has also meant letting down my friend in Camden whose cats I was meant to be feeding on Saturday night and Sunday morning, as I felt too ill to go into London and pick up her spare key. She says she is going to leave them heaps of food, but it means one of the cats missing two doses of its thyroid pill, which I'm hopeless at getting down its throat, anyway.

Mr Grumpy pointed out acidly that I'm only ever ill when I've made an arrangement to do something, and it's just me getting worked up about it. But I hardly think getting a cold can qualify for this. Bad stomach, maybe. I know that can easily be caused by tension. But I wasn't tense. I was looking forward to today, to meeting the agent and all the other things I had planned.

It's all the evil imp's fault. When I was little, my mum used to tell my sister and I one of a selection of her made-up bedtime serials every night. One of these was about an imp called Naughty Nat who created all manner of mayhem. Perhaps he is still alive in my head!

Flad's reading

Jacula has pointed out that I didn't mention how Flad's reading went. Well, the reader told me he spoke with his eyes, which is certainly true. He can't meow, he can only say "eek", but those green liquid orbs speak volumes, as do the way his face changes shape according to whether his whiskers are poking forwards, standing straight out sideways, or pulled back. When he's happy, he goes what I call 'all pointy-face'.

She told me he was very healthy - good! - and that he is an excellent mouser but the reason he's so good as that he feels the need to earn his keep. This is spot on. When he was a feral living in the garden and we had an unwelcome lodger in the attic, Mr Grumpy told Flad that if he caught the wretched squirrel that was keeping him awake, he could live indoors. Next morning I looked out and said, "What on earth's that?" 'That' was the bits of the squirrel that Flad couldn't manage, being the hind legs, the tail and the bum. All the rest was inside Flad!

The other thing she said was that Flad wished he could put me on a course so that I could learn more of his language and be a greater part of his life. Anyone know of a course in Cat?

I spoke to a retriever!

The animal communication workshop was fascinating. We spent the morning doing meditation followed by exercises in free association - you know, that game where someone says a word and you have to say the first thing the pops into your head, and if you say the first word again, you're out. In this version though, repeating the first word didn't matter as the purpose was to keep going and overcome any blockages that stopped you speaking.

After that came the free writing exercise, where Anna, our leader, gave us half a sentence and we had to carry in scribbling. My first attempt was far too controlled; I told a true story, which wasn't the idea at all. My next was a proper ramble, quite hallucinogenic - what was in that herbal tea?

After lentil soup and baked spuds, we were given our first test. Anna passed round a photo of a recently deceased cat and asked us all to write down what came into our heads as we stared at it. Most of us got that it was an indoor cat - I gave a reason, that it hated the sensation of wind blowing on it - and several, including me, also picked up that it had had an accident to its left front leg at some point, but only three people got the fact that it had died from a cancer on its nose, poor little thing. Oddly enough, the nose and mouth area were the first things that drew me, and I had a sensation of snuffling and sinus problems, but I thought I was thinking of a friend's cat who'd had a lifelong sinus problem, and dismissed it. However, I did get the fact that it hated its white bib getting messy and kept cleaning itself, which was absolutely true.

Where I really managed to score, though, was with Pilgrim the flatcoat retriever. (That isn't him in the pic, it's one I 'borrowed' from the internet.) We'd all been asked to bring a photo of a pet and we got into pairs to do our readings. I warned Pilgrim's owner that I'd never had a dog and might be hopeless at 'reading' him, but to my amazement, I scored almost 100% accuracy, picking up that he loved racing along a shingle beach (I described it and the sea wall in some detail, and then discovered Pilgrim and his owner lived in Eastbourne and went to the beach every day), that he had a touch of arthritis (true, he's on glucosamine), had had eye trouble that would recur (true, he'd had it in the past), wasa very jealous dog who wanted to be the centre of attention (true), had recently had tooth problems, and was sick in cars and hated car travel.

I was wrong about the teeth: it was Pilgrim's brother, also in the photo, who'd just had two teeth out so I was 'reading' him by mistake. And at first his owner disagreed with the car sickness, saying that he lay there very quietly when travelling. But later, she suddenly remembered that the first time he'd been in the car, he had been horribly, tremendously sick, so much so that they were worried he might choke and die. No wonder he was quiet in cars now. The poor dog is terrified of it happening again. I also picked up that he was quite nervous and highly strung and had had to have sedatives at times, which was also true.

So... do I have a career as an animal communicator? I am going to do a more advanced course, where Anna will teach us how to do a psychic body scan of an animal. She can also locate missing pets and tell the owners where to find them, even in other countries. I don't think I shall ever get that good, but someone on the course has given me a photo of her rabbits to do a reading on. I'll let you know how I get on.

If you're interested in finding out more about animal communication, here's the address of Anna's website: www.pettalk-online.com

Communicating with animals

I'm spending tomorrow at an Animal Communication workshop (see pettalk-online.com). We have to bring along a photo of the pet we wish to communicate with. That's when I realised I hadn't changed the colour cartridges in my printer for over a year. Mr Grumpy kindly consented to do it for me, as I'm so useless with printers and have already bent something trying to wrench the cartridges out in the past.





He sat there putting it through endless cleaning and nozzle-de-clogging cycles and at the end of it, I printed out a photo of a black and pink Flad. So much for cleaning your printer. I put the pics on my memory stick and he printed them out perfectly on his printer, but now I owe him some shiny photo paper. Above are the photos I'll be using, taken while he was cruising my ankles for cat bics this morning. Who needs communication? That hopeful look in his eyes says it all. "Feed me, Mummy!"

Flad v mouse

The mouse came off the worst. In fact, it is dead, defunct, late, and is no more. We came down this morning to find its gory remains spread over the kitchen floor and one very fat cat dozing smugly on the sofa. Poor little mouse!

Australian fires: report from Melbourne

I emailed a friend in Melbourne to see if he and his family were all right. This is his reply...

We are OK but we can smell the fires. When we take the dogs for a walk we can see the smoke - the smoke cloud is 60km across and sometimes fills the entire sky. Many still do not know if their friends made it or not. Many will not have.

The first pictures are coming out after the devastation. I have seen the ruins of Dresden - this is worse! You could only compare it to Hiroshima up there. In the days before the fire we were getting temperatures of 46 Celsius All the land was bone dry and the gum trees were full of resin. Once a fire started it spread a rate that people could not outrun it in cars.

The death toll is over 200 and there are still 100 people not account for - the fires were so intense that there are no remains of many people.

We have seen the best of humanity in the way that neighbours helped neighbours to the point of death. The work by the police, fire service and ambulance officers has been utterly outstanding. The way the communities have pulled together gives some hope for the human race. We have seen the worst of humanity: one man has been charged with lighting fires. Vigilantes are organising through Facebook. Sometimes you think there is no hope for the human race.