Wednesday May 7th – The Curious Case of the Constipated Cat

Yesterday I was feeling a bit lonely. Today I’ve had two visitors already and it’s only eleven o’clock! It’s madness.  My mum is coming over later and we’re going out to Borders for lunch as well.  Three at once.  It’s rather like buses.  You should be careful what you wish for.  Not that I mind a bit to be honest.  The girls’ dad came over this morning to bring their things back from his place and to steal some breakfast.  He finished the marmite, downed half a cafetiere and told me all about his crazy new plans for world domination.  He’s always in a rush and he’s always going to be late for a meeting, so it was a kind of drive by breakfast which only took fifteen minutes from start to finish.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone eat toast that quickly before.

My friend Caron came round for a cup of tea shortly thereafter.  Her baby was due yesterday.  As she was round at my house with a fairly significant bump the baby clearly reneged on the agreement, and is steadfastly refusing to come out.  She’s a bit fed up.  I don’t blame her.  The weather has been absolutely gorgeous for the last couple of days, but this is not ideal weather to be rather large, out of breath and ungainly.  This is my advice to those of you planning to conceive.  Make sure that you are going to be carrying most of your weight through the winter months when you need that extra bit of padding.  Then you won’t have to spend your summer glued to a small fan, wilting like a piece of particularly unattractive lettuce on a Berni Inn side salad.

Having said that, Caron is not particularly hefty in my opinion.  She is one of those fortunate people who look like women in magazines who are maternity models.  Her skin and hair are beautiful, her bump is neat and all in one place.  She looks fabulous in her maternity clothes and frankly I wouldn’t mind looking like her now and I’m not pregnant.  I can however, sympathise with the fact that she’s now fairly fed up and just wants it all over and done with.  Nine months sharing your body with a total stranger is far too long in my opinion.  Still, thank the lord we’re not elephants or there would be another fifteen months to go.  No wonder elephants always look slightly sad.  I’d be more than sad.  I’d probably have to be locked away for my own safety.

Oh, Oscar’s rash is no more rashy by the way.  He hasn’t developed points or anything else, although my mother pessimistically predicted an onslaught of chicken pox.  He has also got even more of his appetite back than yesterday.  He’s eaten two helpings of toast, two bananas and a large bowl of pineapple before demanding his bed at eleven o’clock due to the fact that his jaws are rather tired from all the chewing. He has also learned to say ‘bugger’, which means the day hasn’t been a total washout after all.  Hoorah!

Well, I should be working instead of writing this, but I’ve decided that randomly blogging is much more fruitful and that I will work tonight instead.  I did manage to sort out all my OU paperwork last night and do the first chapter’s worth of work, which means that I am now up to date, having read the course text yesterday afternoon.  When I set my mind to it I can be a little ninja, work wise.  The only problem is that the more I read the more I think that this could be my first big failure course wise.  I flicked through the book to look at the sections on geometry, engineering and science and wept quietly into the biscuit barrel.  I am numerically illiterate.  What the hell am I doing?  Ah well. It’s good to challenge your preconceptions every now and again, or life would be really boring.  Nope, positive thinking is not working at all.  Bloody, bloody hell.

I have also read a hundred pages of my next offering for Amazon Vine, Blood Brother by J. A. Kerley.  It’s not quite as horrible as I thought in terms of blood letting and descriptions of serial killers, which is good.  It’s more of a straightforward police procedural with serial killers and the whole profiling twist.  It’s actually the sort of thing that would appeal to me if it were written well.  Sadly it isn’t, and there are gaping plot holes, which if this were a film would be causing me to dig gouges into the arm rests and chew the popcorn box by now.  It is however, an easy read, and I am very grateful for it.

Apart from that I have been monitoring my thinking again, as I am finding this process of teasing out what I actually think about while I’m randomly doing stuff quite illuminating.  Last night I was sitting in the bottom of the shower tray (too much effort to stand up.  I like it down there) and thinking about the fact that I’d just had a cup of coffee, to keep me awake to study, and whether that would keep me awake all night (it didn’t).  This then lead me to think about the fact that when I was little my mum would give my brother and I coffee as a pre-bed time treat, albeit made with milk, but still, y’know, coffee, and how that was insane and how I would never give my children coffee, even at breakfast (unless they were then going to stay with someone else for at least fifteen hours).

From there I got to the whole, I wonder what else my parents did that I now consider strange, but which at the time was totally normal for someone growing up in the Seventies:

1. To wean us off of baby milk my grandmother used to fill our baby bottles with sweet, milky tea as a treat.  I have a phobia of sweet, milky tea, or indeed any kind of real ‘tea’, due to the fact that it was also adminstered as a kind of herbal remedy whenever we were ill, had fallen over or if it looked like rain.
2. We were allowed to take bottles of cider to parties from a very young age, like seven or something, because it was made from apples and was considered ‘harmless’!!
3. My mother was absolutely convinced of the benefits of hot milk as a treatment for any kind of ailment, particularly if you felt sick or had an upset stomach.  She would invariably force hot milk and weetabix upon me, whereupon I would vomit copiously and she would be amazed.
4. My brother and I were considered abnormal because we wouldn’t eat bread and dripping.  We were clearly wrong in the head, and would never grow up to be fit and strong.  We were also actively encouraged to eat black pudding as a part of a regular, healthy diet.
5. We drank fizzy pop and various hideous types of squash all day every day until it came out of our eyeballs.  The more artificial e numbers and colourants the better as far as we were concerned.  I spent at least five years of my life with a ‘Vimto’ moustache.
6. We had far too many nylon clothes.  It’s a wonder we didn’t spontaneously combust what with all that running around and cycling we did.  I thank my lucky stars that my mother drew the line at nylon bed sheets, or I probably wouldn’t be around to tell the tale today.

So, there you have it.  I dread to think what my children will be listing as freakish incidents from their childhood when they grow up.  I expect the random application of chicken nuggets will be one of them.  My kids are allowed chicken nuggets in restaurants, but not at home.  I make my own version occasionally.  Other than that they are allowed fish fingers, and potato waffles which is processed, but not much else.  When I look back to things which were normal fare in the Seventies it makes me wonder why everyone is making so much fuss about turkey twizzlers.  Here is a list of some of the most heinous things (still feeling listy), although, as I’ve said before, my parents were rather like The Good Life and we didn’t get this stuff very often.  We wished we had, but apart from the fixation with lard, offal and weird beverages my mother was a staunch believer in growing, making and eating your own food, much to our utter disgust at the time.  We dreamed of having things like:

1. Arctic Roll (I still like it)
2. Angel Delight (I developed a fetish for it in my teens and used to spend valuable pocket money on it.  Still have a hankering for Butterscotch every now and again)
3. Ice Magic ( my gran used to have it and I would sneak into the pantry and squirt it into my mouth from the bottle when nobody was looking)
4. Findus Crispy Pancakes (I thought these would be marvellous. I had them at a friend’s house for tea once.  They tasted like old shoe soles dipped in batter, unbelievably disgusting)
5. Crinkle Cut Oven Chips (why, why, why did my mum have to make her chips properly?  She wouldn’t even make them look crinkly.  Spoil sport)
6. Dream Topping (I would have killed to eat nothing but dream topping. I loved it more than anything else in the world.)
7. Frozen Pizza (I never had a real pizza until I was in my late teens. I was desperate to try them and had them round a friend of mine’s house when I was six.  Again, tasted much like Findus Crispy Pancakes. Didn’t know what all the fuss was about until I had a real one).
8. Brains Faggots (A girl I worshipped at school loved them. I had no idea what they were but thought I would love them.  Given the fact that I loathed all things offal, I suspect not.  Since finding out what they were made of I have never had one, ever.  Have no intention of starting now).
9. Supernoodles (I loved these.  Still do in moments of deepest despair.  Chicken flavour only mind you. None of that fancy rubbish)
10. Pot Noodles (We thought they were the height of sophistication.  I badgered my mother to death about these.  Then ate them for an entire term at Uni to save money.  Now can’t even look one in the eye)

I am probably going to be preserved for hundreds of years after death due to the fact that I have so many artificial colourings and preservatives swilling round my system.  I really ought to go with cremation, hadn’t I?

Other things that have randomly flitted through my brain today include these gems:

Why do carrots go off three seconds after you’ve bought them?  I bought some lovely organic carrots at the weekend.  I went to get them out of the vegetable rack yesterday and they look like dead men’s fingers.  They must be the weediest vegetables known to man.  Now before you write in to find out how to tell if a carrot is off, here’s a few clues: it will be ten times smaller than it was when you bought it, it will be incredibly wrinkly, It will be slightly bouncy (I don’t know why this happens.  Perhaps they’re part latex), it may be increasingly hairy, It may change colour.  It might be slimy.  Slime is usually a bit of a giveaway in the how to tell if something is off stakes, although with snails it would be hard to tell.

I also spent some time last night before drifting off pondering why, even though I always have an emergency wee before getting into bed, and even though I might only read five pages of my book before turning the light out, I then need to have another wee before I can go to sleep.  It’s so very annoying.  I just get settled down with the pillow in the right place and my bladder starts complaining.  I try to rationalise it.  I explain to my bladder that I only just went, and surely I don’t need to go again because I’m a grown up now and I can hold my wee in for hours if necessary.  It doesn’t listen.  If I then ignore it and try to get to sleep, I will last a maximum of twenty minutes before I am absolutely overwhelmed by the desire to wee.  Invariably on those days when I finally do give in and go later rather than sooner, I will wee like a bloody horse.  Where does it all come from?  I am developing a theory that I may actually have a second bladder, probably in my big toe.

My other big grumble/thought at the moment is with regards to the televison.  I want to know why when I actually think: ‘I’ll have a nice sit down now and just watch some random television to unwind,’ that there is never, ever anything on that I want to watch.  All the things that I’ve sky plussed will automatically look crap as well and I will wonder why I bothered to record them.  Conversely the only things I do want to watch will be on at either 2.00 a.m. and I will only find out retrospectively, or be on when I’m out?  I think it might be the grounds for an excellent conspiracy theory.

I’m also very curious about something someone searched my blog on at the weekend.  They wrote: ‘constipated cat, eats moles’. I’m presuming that they are worried that the cat is constipated because they suspect, or indeed know, that the cat is eating far too many moles, and that they want to know what to do about it.  Although on further thought it could be that the cat is constipated but has chosen to eat moles to cure itself, much like cats who need to vomit on your best rug choose to eat grass.  It’s a possibility.

Now, again with the googling?  Why do people google in these emergency style situations?  If my cat was chowing down on multiple mole carcasses and then got bunged up, I would not be hanging around my house casually googling.  I would be finding the mop bucket, investing in plastic sheeting of an industrial strength and then planning my next move very carefully.  I would probably at this stage move to donning gauntlets, catching them very cautiously with the minimum of squeezing involved and then thrusting them bottom first into a cat box and whisking them to the vet with all the windows open.  What happens if the cat a) explodes due to a plethora of backed up moles with nowhere to go, or b) suddenly becomes unconstipated very quickly due to the same thing?  You just don’t want to be around a cat when these things are happening.  Being pebbledashed by cat faeces and bits of rotting mole is not a thing many people dream about, in my opinion. 

I mean I know vet bills are high, but surely this is not something you want to deal with yourself, even if you do find someone with a home style cure out there.  Administering any kind of medical treatment to cats is always unpleasant and should be handled by professionals.  Christ, giving them a worming tablet is more than your life is worth, stopping constipation by mole is going to be much more fraught than that.  Also, do you really, really want to be around when your treatment works?  No. I don’t think so.  Anyway, cat/mole person.  If you’re out there in the ether, please get in touch and let me know how you got on.