Oral Descent

I don't believe in fate or bad luck but it's not easy to shrug off those cultural bonds that tie most of us to our superstitious caveman souls. I am sat here feeling lower than a millipede's ankles trying to think of a reason to get activated. I guess blogging will have to do. I woke up to a dull ache from the general area of a tooth that probably needs root canal work but, frankly, too much knowledge is as dangerous as a little. Root treatment is an art that few dentists are actually capable of, and that sweeping generalisation demands explanation. This isn't a dentistry lecture however and suffice it to say that root canal treatement is soundly based in theory but the practise is so thoroughly hit and miss that if it were heart transpantlation there would be laws against it. If this were not true there would not be such legendary fear among the laity when the words root and canl are uttered in close conjunction. In short the pain would have to become a lot more frequent and a lot more severe and a lot less amenable to aspirin for me seriously to consider having the wretched thing's nerves extirpated. Meanwhile I am perfectly content, if not exactly happy, to wallow in self pity.

In spite of the dull ache in my jaw I woke with pleasant feelings of optimism after enjoying a seriously good night's sleep that had run from midnight to almost 8am without a break. That is so unusual for me that it's worth a note. I almost leaped out of bed and pulled the curtains aside to reveal a lovely pale-lit suburban vista. I don't keep much of a close track on the calender — I knew it was Monday and that seemed sufficient &mdash but I was aware that we are already in the neighbourhood of August. Opening the curtains and casement window showed me that the year is already getting late, that fat old sun in the sky is falling, past his zenith, and the morning light is noticeably thinner. In case that sounds like a reason to be sad it isn't. I love the passage of the seasons. The waxing and waning of the moon, the strenghtening and weakening of the sun's light, the changing patterns of life. I love it all.

The bright sky was also welcome because the weather here has been mostly cyclonic since I moved in &mdash my old student neighbourhood a few miles east of here was actually struck by an unusually powerful (T3-T4) tornado a few days ago leaving hundreds to face devastation and rebuilding. Today Britain sits under a ridge between two weak highs and the skies are bright and optimistic and so I flung open my bedroom door, feeling all froody, to see how Little Mad felt about the day.

After my first night here I took to shutting her into the kitchen overnight. It is where her food is and it's far enough from the bedroom that her plaintiff cries wouldn't disturb me — there's little one can do other than ignore such mewlings, if only to get my own rest. The kitchen was unoccupied. It was catless. It is a very small kitchen, but that did not stop me from performing an almost comic double-take. I guess we will never really move far enough from our monkey ancestry to be able to fool the putative visitor from Mars observing us from afar. We rely on our senses to tell us about the world around us but when we fail to see what we expected we go against reason and look again, in the same places, with utterly stupid optimism. I confess that I actually looked under the wool throw that I had folded into a pad for her to sit on.

It was obvious that she had managed to escape and I quickly checked the other rooms but I had already noticed that the little casement window in the kitchen was ajar. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of animal ingenuity. How much of so-called intelligence is merely persistence anyway? She started out as an untamable free spirit and it looks like she may finish up that way. She very much belonged to the old house anyway, it was the only place she had ever known after leaving her birthplace. And she had lived there as long as I had, bar a month or so.

At the time I moved into the old house with EP I was doing a little courier work, the sort that mostly involved collecting and delivering parcels. I spent a lot of time in the rural counties to the west of here and Mirelly found me while I waiting at a farmhouse door for someone to answer my knock. She was about three months old, black with white socks, white whiskers and white markings on her ventral surfaces ... there was one smeary looking mark on her chin that looked like she had just been caught at the cream jug. Her chest was well marked with a fairly standard tuxedo style bib, but her belly was the cutest. It was a ragged mixture of narrow, white, meandering bands that I soon took to referring to as her frilly underwear.

I have lived with a good number of cats and never found two that were alike. The little black and white fuzzball that came home with me a few weeks after we'd moved in was so full of attitude I quickly decided that she needed a big and dignified name. Big to go with her personality and dignified because she behaved so madly that it was even harder than usual not to laugh at her kittenish antics. Even the way she walked seemed contrived to arouse a chuckle. I chose Mirelly — a name I took from the scary female creation of Larry Niven: Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthra, a character in the novel A World Out Of Time whose overweening arrogance and vaulting ambition and irresistible charms probably say more about the author's unconscious misogyny than anything else ... but it's a great name and I always loved it! Mirelly the cat was well suited to the name. Vociferous and always around for mealtimes she kept the house well stocked with dead rodents and at least one pigeon that had been ringed. (She had neatly eaten one whole breast down to the keel bone before staggering off to leave the rest for the flies. I am ashamed to admit that I disposed of the evidence ... what if it had been a champion racing pigeon? Though I don't suppose that champion anythings are the sort who stop off for a rest halfway through a race.)

Mostly she was a free spirit. I had another cat at the time and they never made friends; a truce, yes, but fraternity isn't really in the feline psyche. Within days she had figured out the cat door and left the building. It took her more than three months to work the same magic in reverse so she was more often out than in and that never seemed to bother her. I guess she was born to open skies on the farm and being shut in never appealed to her. All the same I have moved several cats from one home to another and, in spite of the protests and fuss, keeping the cat in for a couple of weeks is the only sure way I know to get them fully imprinted on the new territory. I haven't lost one yet. On the other hand I never had one go AWOL within days of moving ....

So my day has started on a high only to fall so quickly off its perch that it took my incautious slurp of tea to reawaken the slumbering but not entirely quiet beast that is my right upper second bicuspid. Yow! It hasn't stopped hurting yet and since I used up all the aspirin yesterday it looks like I shall have sortie forth in search of fresh supplies. (Wonders if I could swap ibuprofen for aspirin somewhere ... I have tons of Adil and Neurofen but ibuprofen is contra-indicated by Atenolol. I don't use paracetamol because I consider it a relatively useless analgesic with serious toxicity. Besides, aspirin is more effective than heroine for dental pain.

Anyway losing Mirelly is strike two and my neanderthal roots are showing because I am sat here waiting for the third kick in the arse.

I really have plenty to be getting on with and maybe the cat will show up later. I will call my old neighbors later and ask them keep an eye open for her. I am thankful that I removed her collar that doubled as a key to let her come and go through the cat door. I had locked the door to allow her to get in but not out the day before the move and as far as I know it remains that way. The old house is only a couple of miles away and the possibility that she might find her way back there is strong. It would be awful if she succeeded and got inside only to starve because she couldn't get out again. Whatever her future I feel confident that she can feed herself, I also feel that she will show up again.

If I hadn't left that flipping kitchen window unlatched I would not have this anxiety and shame and misery. But that's my cross and I'll bear it with all my other woes. Maybe it is just true that I am never really happy unless I am miserable ... except that I know that isn't true, exactly. It's also true that my sunny outer shell isn't the real me either. Inside I am a turmoil of worries and doubts and fears and I don't suppose that makes me a lot different from anyone else either! I's just that I have spent so much of my life not absorbing the obvious that I have an awful lot of catching up to do. I still hope that I can do some of that catching up with Little Mad whom I am already missing more than I want to dwell upon right now.