cj

As usual I can't remember what I've posted here and what I've not, so I'm going to assume that I've not and tell you briefly about our semi-resident hedgehog.

Our garden does not have a good record with hedgehogs.  We don't use any of the things that frequently see the poor little things off, such as netting, slug pellets (should be banned outright IMHO), bonfires, ponds without steps or reckless strimming, and yet over the years we have encountered a distressing number of small corpses, one on occasion a whole litter including mum, with nary a mark on them, so clearly not an attack by badger or fox.

This is a great shame as I am (and we are) - you will probably have gathered - rather keen on animals.  The only thing I'd change about hedgehogs if I could is their fondness for eating slow-worms, whom I also like a great deal, and which we are lucky enough to encounter in our garden from time to time.  But that's nature, and dislike it as I might, I have to accept it because I cannot change it.

So, late last year - about Octoberish at a guess (although if I have told about it here you may find that is wildly inaccurate, and poor old soul that I am, I really can't remember!) I was sitting in the living room fairly late one evening when I heard a loud crunching of cat biscuits from the hall where our two boy cats' dishes are kept.  I took no notice at first.  With three cats in the house, all wont to steal each other's food, loud crunching noises are not a novelty.  It went on for quite a long time, which is more unusual.  Husband, whose chair is behind the door and who consequently (as well as being an old deafy) hears less of what's going on than I, was oblivious.

Without even thinking, I did an automatic head-count of cats.  Three.  All present and (loosely speaking) correct.  I leapt from my chair at a single bound and prepared to do battle with the feline interloper who was stealing my babies' food.  Which is to say that I picked up the tea-towel I'd previously being using as a table-mat, and prepared to throw it.  I may love cats, but I do get heartily sick of un-neutered males coming in, eating our food, terrorising my female (spayed) and pissing up the walls.  My walls.  Which I paid to have papered.  So this sucker was going to eat my tea-towel.

Except when I poked my nose around the door-frame it wasn't a cat at all.  You'd guessed, hadn't you?  It was a hedgehog.  He was standing with his front half in the bowl and stuffing his little hoggy face with Go-Cat's finest.

Our cat-flap stands ever-open, because our disabled cat can’t get through otherwise.  So to a canny wild beast scenting the cat food readily available 24 hours a day, it’s a clear invitation to the feast.  An invitation that did not need to be extended twice to this particular hedgepig.

I'll cut out a section of the story because it's very repetitive.  For the next several weeks he came in most evenings, and most evenings I picked him up in an old towel and ejected him.  He always pretended to be scared of me, although he did stop bothering to roll up after a while, so he can't have been that frightened.  Also, if I was such a big, scary monster, why did he keep coming back?

He even lived in the hall for a short while.  I discovered this when I found all his little (and in some cases, not so little) poos under the dresser one evening when I hauled him out to put him in the garden.  This did not endear him to Husband, who is not quite so enchanted by fauna as I, and who takes a dim view of excrement in his living space.  No poetry of soul, some people.

I took advice and weighed hedgehog.  He was well over the minimum bodyweight required to survive the winter without hypothermia.  I took further advice.  Apparently cat biscuits are good for them because they help to keep their teeth and gums healthy, a diet of worms and slugs and a life free of toothbrushes and fluoride not being ideal for a Pepsodent smile.

I bought a purpose-built hedgehog box from my local wildlife hospital, on the assurance that he’d not be interested in coming inside if he had such a luxury abode outside.  This proved to be utter nonsense, as I could have predicted.

Then suddenly, after one particularly firm ejection, when I had first to prise him out from under our cooker (a process that he did not seem to enjoy, but which I’m certain cannot have hurt him), he disappeared.  The hedgehog house stayed empty all through the winter, and the cat’s bowls went sadly unmolested.  I felt pretty bad about this.  Would it have killed me to let him stay half-way under the cooker until he was ready to leave? 

Weeks then months went by.  It was spring, the night was coming later each day, the garden was turning into a jungle, slugs were everywhere (mainly in our vegetable patch).  We could really have used a hedgehog.

And, miraculously, after all hope had gone, one evening when I heard crunching from the hall, there were three cats in the living room.  I scooped hog up into the old towel that had been waiting for him all winter and took him in to show Husband.  Husband was mildly pleased (although not as excited as I), hog was firmly rolled up and only relented far enough to open one resentful eye and fix it on us.  I tucked him under my arm, grabbed the box of Go-cat and took him out to his box.  He went into one side, a big heap of biscuits into the other, and I left him to it, pleased as anything that he was back.

He doesn’t come into the house very often these days.  Why would he, with all those juicy invertebrates out there ripe for the feasting?  He does sleep in his box several times a week, but he clearly has other abodes because he’s not always there.  I’m fairly sure he’s a male because he’s a good size and there’s been no sign of a litter of babies, which is a shame really because I’d have loved that.

The day before yesterday I dropped a small pile of biscuits into his ante-chamber, as a treat and a thank you for not coming in and pooing in my hall (or worse – kitchen, which was his favourite spot for a while.  That tested even my affection a bit).  Then last night I checked on him, and the biscuits were untouched.  Oh lord – was he not well?  I could clearly see him embedded in the straw of his sleeping compartment.  I jiggled the box slightly and he twitched, but not much.  So I prodded him a bit – carefully so as not to hurt him or allow him to spine me.  He had a good wriggle about at that, and turned a watery, baleful eye on me before snuggling further down under the covers.

He’s fine.  He’s just not greedy is the conclusion I have reached.  Having sated himself on his natural diet, he’s too much of a gentleman to carry on eating just because food is handed to him.  A lesson I would do well to emulate.  So if he does resume his forays into the human house, I’ll know that he needs the food otherwise he’d not be there and I’ll let him have his fill.

Bless him.  I just wish he wasn’t such a total flea-bag.

As well as a trip to the zoo (which was lovely, but almost certainly of no interest to anyone but me), my birthday brought me a Wii console and WiiFit balance board.  Now I was initially torn over this - I mean who wouldn't like to have a go on a Wii?  And to be bought something as special as this by a loved one is quite moving.  But on the other hand I have recently resolved to live more simply and this does not involve more electronic gadgets, rather the opposite.

But when faced with this fait accompli, I shrugged off the "less gadgets" reaction and went with the "oooh, I've got a Wii" one.

And I have to say that so far it's been a joy.  I should also mention at this point that I also (asked for and) received a book by an American doctor and nutritional expert by the name of Neal Barnard - "Breaking the Food Seduction".  I read it in two days flat and it is only the second book about diet ("diet" as in food intake, rather than being on a reducing diet) that I've finished and taken on board.  Usually I lose patience with them, but this one makes huge amounts of sense to me.  I doubt I'll be using the recipes, which are quite American in their measures and ingredients, but the explanations about food cravings and why I have them (and especially the parts about how I am not after all a loathsome sloth with the willpower of a teenage sex maniac) are such a relief, you can't imagine.

The book advocates a low-fat vegan diet, so I guess that if anyone actually reads this blog entry they will likely stop here, but as I am already vegan, the switch across to low-fat is as much of an effort as I am required to make.

I used to be quite careful to avoid fat and stick to whole versions of foods such as bread and pasta, but my focus has always been on slimming rather than health, and to be honest as the pounds mounted up whatever I did, the good intentions have slipped and my diet has been rather too indulgent for some time now.  Having read the book (and had my blood pressure taken a few months ago - eek) my motivation has shifted from wanting to be slimmer so I can waddle down the street without feeling like an eyesore, to wanting to be slimmer so I don't have a stroke next week, or give the doctor one the next time she sees my BP.  I want to be healthier.  I want to live a long, and above all healthy life, preferably with my Husband who is currently aiming for death by chocolate in the not too distant future (he's 56 in a couple of weeks and diabetic).

I won't bang on about the book and what it says, because you probably don't want to hear.  But I have been following its advice since Monday (it's now Thursday morning) and I've lost between 2 and 3lbs.  This is of course water and glycogen and cannot be counted, but whatever it consists of, to see the pounds disappear from the scales, and to know that I have done this without reducing the quality of my life or further endangering my health is very uplifting.

The Wii has helped in this enormously.  I've had people tell me (mainly Mike, as it happens) that exercise is self-absorbing; whatever time you spend on it, it repays by making you capable of performing day to day tasks with greater efficiency, thus creating precious time rather than draining it.  I believed him, I really did, I just wasn't convinced that I was capable of achieving this effect, being as I neither enjoy nor am very good at physical exertion.  Even at age 12 I was incapable of running (jogging, really) half a mile without collapsing in a heaving, wheezing pile of tomato-cheeked exhaustion.  Not good.

But the Wii has (so far) changed all this.  The most modest achievement is celebrated (although not nauseatingly so) and it would seem that I do after all have a talent - I'm good at jogging on the spot, apparently.  I can't see any way of making my fortune at that, sadly, but I've not given up hope yet.  I did a Wii "round the island" jog this morning, which took 13 minutes and was something of a challenge.  I imagine that it's a mile, given that the best time I've ever managed to jog/walk a mile in real life is indeed 13 minutes.  I felt very pround of myself when I'd finished, also very hot and sticky, but you definitely don't need to know that.

I'm not going to bang on about the Wii here either, because you've either got one or can look it up if you're interested.  For me the best part is that it starts you off slow, congratulates you when you've achieved something, and provides an authoritative voice as to what you should be working towards and concentrating on.  It's nothing short of inspiring.

So between the book and the Wii, I'm feeling more optimistic about my health than I have in ages.  

I expect I'll be hit by a bus any minute now.

It is my birthday today.

I am going to the Isle of Wight, for a day at the zoo and I am excited.

I am 52 today.

I know I said I was going to be posting here more frequently, but even I didn't really believe me when I wrote it.  I'm inconsistent, I have no routine, and I'm sure I should have been born in one of those countries where manana is the order of the day.  I *always* put things off until tomorrow, and I never learn from the scrapes in which this often lands me.  I think at my age I just have to accept that this is the way I am and try to turn it to my advantage in some way.  Not sure how at present.

I've not long returned from France, a trip that I did not want to make for a number of reasons, but which of course I enjoyed when it actually came to it.  Not the journeys, which seem to be getting harder (although by a near-miraculous and certainly unique fortune of timing, we managed to be coming out of a Carrefour supermarket just as a convoy of irritated French farmers with several trailers full of cow shit were going in), but the week itself.  We even had a sunny day at the beginning, almost another first, but Normandy lived up to its usual weather standard by throwing a massive storm at us the next night and it never really dried out properly until the day we came home. 

Our coming homes days are nearly always marked by glorious weather of some sort.  The only decent snow we've seen there was on a coming home day.  The heavens opened and threw down great piles of massive flakes, instantly further beautifying the already stunning landscape, and totally obscuring the valley from view.  It felt as though we were the only people in the world as we trudged through ankle-deep snow between increasingly-damp car and increasingly-muddy cottage.  How we rejoiced.  Well I did at first, because it was indescribably beautiful, but Husband did not, because it was indescribably irritating.  Had it been a staying day, we'd have lit the woodburner, broken out the vegetable soup and taken a hundred photographs before opening a good bottle of red.  As it was not, we got wet and a bit annoyed, Husband because it was cold and damp and the windscreen kept fogging up, me because I love snow and was being dragged away from it.  This time's coming home day was glorious with sun, and again I was annoyed because I was being dragged away from it.  I wish coming home days could just be decently overcast and boring, so that Normandy is not so hard to leave.

I did manage to get some writing done though.  I was determined that I should.  I set up a small table in front of an upstairs window and placed the laptop and keybpoard on it.  I can't type on a laptop keyboard, it's no good.  I find that my typing skills are not improving with age, and that any deviation from the normal desktop keyboard renders me almost incapable of typing any words that actually exist in the English language.  I also, for some reason even I cannot explain, took with me a small joss-stick holder in the shape of a dwarf in a nightshirt which usually sits on the windowsill beside my home computer.  Inexplicably, I felt it important that I should have some link between my temporary office and my office at home, where I do most of my writing (such as it is, these days).

I also took "Bird by Bird" with me, for inspiration and a bit of an arse-kicking.  There's no-one quite like Anne Lamott for making me feel that a) I *can* write (whether I can write well is another matter entirely, but for now that is unimportant) and b) I *should*, indeed *must* write.  So I *did* write.  I didn't worry about subject matter, I simply wrote, much as I have been writing this blog entry, letting it unfold as it will.  The word count is not huge, and I only managed two sessions in the week, but believe me that is a vast improvement of what I've been achieving at home.  Unfortunately, the view from the window was not as inspirational as I'd remembered, because basically all I could see was a row of damson and hazel trees twelve feet away, so basically just a bunch of leaves at this time of year.   But it was prettier than I have from my office window at home, so I should not complain.  And I've left my dwarf behind, which is a shame because I rather miss the little fellow. But I did write, and I could write, and even if I say so myself, I quite like some of it.  It's not earth-shattering, and it's not fiction (which is ideally what I'd like to aim at), but it's progress of a sort.  And best of all, I keep getting ideas of what to put in it next, which is very encouraging and almost unheard of for me.  Normally I've not a clue what I'm going to write, and even if I have I usually find that I'm wrong and that I write something else entirely when it actually comes to putting finger to keyboard.  So, overall I'm rather glad I went to France, even if the journey each way was completely knackering.

There was definitely something else I was going to say here, before I started rambling on - oh yes, a complete change of subject.  Battlestar Galactica - wow, what a series.  I have a sporadic passion for science fiction, but for some reason this programme passed me by when it aired.  I'm really glad that it did, because now I can work my way through the dvds at my own pace - I am far too impatient to wait from one week to the next to see what happens.

We've had a couple of false starts watching it, because Husband is not as enamoured of BG as I, so I started back at the beginning on my own with the miniseries and have just got to the second disk of series two.  My gods, but it's gripping.  I am not a critic and I'm not keen on analysing works of fiction so I'm not going to try to comment on it in any detail, but if you are at all sf-inclined and you are yet to encounter Battlestar Galactica, I can thoroughly recommend it for its originality (odd, considering that it's sort-of a remake), it's power to grip, and the quality of just about everything to do with it, from scripting to acting to special effects.  Although with a tip of my hat to Mike, they do make one fundametal error of physics about which he wrote beautifully in a blog post which I believe has since been lost to us.  Nothing makes a noise in the vacuum of space.  But I can certainly forgive this small case of poetic license for a series that makes me feel so brave and adventurous and as though I could take on the world or the cylons or anything.  That's what's so great about BG - it draws you in and makes you *feel* rather than just spectate.  And an added bonus (one which is actually quite important for me) it kind of makes me feel as though mankind is a species worth fighting to preserve.  Only kind of, but that is a start of sorts.

I'm in two minds whether to write this post at all, for fear of seriously pissing someone off.   But on balance I think I'm going ahead anyway, because I want to record my feelings about the effects on me and mine of the current credit crunch.  So if I come across as smug or unfeeling, I apologise in advance and would like to assure you that this is not my intention.

Apart from paying a fortune for petrol for a while, like everyone else, and a few items of shopping going up, such as bread and coffee, the credit crunch has done me nothing but good favours.

When I took out my current mortgage (not fixed rate, not tracker) to buy the French house, that very month the mortgage rate went up for the first of what was to be five successive times.  As you can imagine I did feel a bit picked on.  I'd increased my debt from £17k to over £67k in an effort to address my lack of a pension and the rising mortgage rate really screwed me.  But each month I paid off as much of the capital as I could, including birthday money, Christmas money and any bonuses that came my way.  I also paid off my credit card each month, didn't borrow anything, had no store cards and either saved for or went without anything that I could not immediately pay for.  As I have to have a car for work, I also saved three thousand pounds in a separate account and kept it there for when I need a new (to me) one.  I've had my current R reg Rover for three or four years now, but I will need to change this year because it needs welding for the MOT.

When the mortgage rate started to fall, it was a huge bonus.  My monthly interest has dropped by over a quarter in the last few months and each month the extra I put away takes a big bite out of the capital, ensuring an even smaller interest payment next month.

As I have an offset mortgage I don't get interest on my savings (ie the car money), so the falling rates on investments don't affect me and I have never had any stocks or shares other than freebies, so the drop in their value also does not make any difference to my net worth.

The desperation-level prices of goods in the January sales have not affected me because I would sooner have the cash come off my mortgage than buy any more possessions.  We did buy a new phone because Husband broke our old one just before Christmas, and a new log basket because the bottom fell out of the old one.  But that's all.  We haven't even gone to look round the sales, because we are as human as the next couple and might be tempted to buy things just because we want them and they are cheap, rather than because we need them.  So we are not feeling deprived.

The food items that have risen so alarmingly - or at least, so I gather - are meat, cheese, eggs, butter - all things that as an almost-vegan household (Husband eats Quorn, so not totally vegan) we simply never buy.  I can't say I've noticed any great increase in fruit or veg or grains, so here again we are not much affected.

My employer is in good shape to weather the recession, and Husband's line of business is unlikely to be affected, so we are very fortunate in this regard.  Prudence has dictated that cuts be made, even by my company, which has allowed me to volunteer to go onto a four day week, and this is where I feel incredibly lucky.  Although it will mean paying off the mortgage a little more slowly, losing a fifth of my gross income does not of course mean losing a fifth of my take-home, so I think with a little prudence I can continue to pay off *almost* as much as before.  The big plus is of course having a whole extra day to myself.  I cannot tell you how much that has lifted my spirits.  I have a great long list of all the things I can now do if I want to, from the prosaic of having my hair cut during the day rather than in the evening, to the previously unthought-of such as going swimming.  I'd never go swimming at weekends because the pool would be full of kids, but on a Friday during term-time there's nothing to stop me.

I also want to spend more time writing, which seems to have taken hold of me again since Nanowrimo finished.  And  declutter my house - at least a bit.  The list is getting longer by the day and I'm already starting to wonder how I'm going to fit all these activities in!

So whilst I am sympathetic towards anyone having a hard time finiancially, and sorry for those struggling to keep their lives together, for me at least the credit crunch has been very positive.  I am keeping up my charity contributions even when my salary goes down because I know that many people can't and I don't want to add to the charities' burdens.  I can't really do any more than that, and there's nothing I can do to help those who are not as fortunate as me, so I'm not going to feel guilty.  This kind of thing is largely the luck of the draw - just as it was when my mortgage payments went up five times, so I am going to appreciate the good fortune that has come my way, whilst not forgetting those for whom it has been a dreadful blow.

When I was young - say 10 upwards - and lived in my mother's house, I always wanted but was never allowed to watch the two-part Christmas Top of the Pops.  It was a "load of bloody rubbish - just noise, not music at all".  And apparently "when you are old enough to have your own house, you can say what goes on the telly, but all the time you're in my house you'll watch what I want to watch".  She evidently thought then that this was fair.

Now that it is my house, and my television, and I don't want to watch Eastenders, she doesn't think so any more.

Ho hum.