Freckles & Doubt

Turns out having little to no executive function available is a bit of a drawback when trying to navigate the surprisingly complicated paths of cat-adoption. It really doesn't help that the adoptions centre of our local SPCA, while animal-friendly and clean and well designed and staffed with lovely, friendly, animal-loving people, is also deeply disorganised.

It took me several weeks to assemble the necessary paperwork - landlord permission, proof of residence (tricky, because I have no utilities bills coming to the house, eventually I used a vet bill) and a form rife with surprisingly personal questions. When I did finally submit everything and actually went out to the cattery and see the available kitties, there were only a handful of cats in the lineup, almost none of them corresponding to the website information. And I spent 20 minutes bonding with two beautiful little tortoiseshells and bounced out to say "them! I'll take them both!", and they'd been claimed by someone else the previous day. There is apparently a system there, but it really isn't administered properly: the website is nicely designed, the cages are lovely, there's a comprehensive info sheet attached to each cage, but half of it isn't filled in, and what is filled in clearly isn't updated with any regularity at all.

I am an extremely good administrator and someone who rejoices in facilitating the harmonious and effective design and implementation of systems. Our local SPCA did violence to my soul.

So in the event, when I'd eliminated the white cats (I cannot do the pink nose/cancer thing again, I honestly can't) and extricated, from three different clueless volunteers, an accurate account of which cats were actually available for adoption, there was only one actual option. The website said she was a year old, the cage sheet said 4 months, and when the SPCA people had uploaded her info to the chip database, it turns out her birthday was 21/09/2023, so she's... (counts on fingers...) nearly seven months old. She had been in the cattery since January and was clearly going stir crazy, and she was affectionate and friendly and playful and there was absolutely no way I was leaving her there.

So, once I'd waited four days for the SPCA to come and do a five-minute home inspection, I brought her home. This is Cirilla.



She has a sort of black cloak-and-hood effect, white legs and feet, black toe-beans (totes adorbs!) and that somewhat piratical white slash across one eye, which caused me to spend three days researching media characters with facial scars. Since I have obsessively played the Witcher video games and read a metric buttload of Witcher fanfic in the last year or two, and she's an amazing character (and doesn't die tragically and early, I learned the Jyn Erso lesson, at least) Ciri was the obvious choice. Bonus: when she's naughty, which is constantly, I can sternly employ the Full Name thing to maximum effect. "Princess Cirilla Fiona Elen Rhiannon, do not climb up the mosquito net!" It's ineffective, but satisfying.



Ciri has settled in very quickly, and has been cuddly and affectionate from the start; she sleeps up next to me at night and is very amenable to being picked up or to sitting on my lap. She's had some sort of mild trauma in early kittenhood because for the first few days any loud noise freaked her completely, I had to stop playing Skyrim because the first time I dragon shouted she hid under the sofa for half an hour. I am breaking her in to the video game thing slowly by playing lots of Stardew Valley, and she seems gradually to be realising that the noises in the TV or tablet are Not Actually Real. She also has a completely weird thing about tissues, or me blowing my nose, just holding a tissue in my hand made her run away at first. We are trying slow, careful introductions: tissue, kitten, kitten, tissue, and then the waiter removes the tissue. Again, she's improving, I can now make tiny elephant trumpeting noises with reasonable impunity.

As I type she's in her favourite morning position, sprawled out on the back of the armchair behind my head. She is a delight, I lucked out completely in the random cat acquisition stakes, and my house is much less empty. All praises to Bast.

Pandora (2004-2024)

All the best cats just happen to you - the universe bestows them, not so much randomly as inevitably. I inherited Pandora in 2015, courtesy of Phleep&Jo, who could only take two of their four cats when they emigrated to Scotland. Their loss was immeasurably my gain; my relatively new landlord having cheerfully agreed to up the permitted cat count in my house from one to two, I moved Pandora in with Hobbit. A year and a half later, when I lost Hobbit, I moved Jyn in with Pandora, only to lose Jyn a year or two later. While she was a feisty old thing who insisted on respect (see: massive growling sessions at the vet, including her last moments on the euthanasia table), Pandy was basically also a sweetheart; she settled down relatively quickly into more or less affectionate relationships with both other cats. When she died, Pandy was pushing twenty years old, having been with me for nearly 10: a venerable grande dame who had survived both my other two cats and Jo's other three, possibly by sheer force of personality.



Pandora was named already when I acquired her, and it suited her too well for me to want to change it. It was a good name for riffing: when I talked to her, which was continuously, she was Pandorable, Pandable, Pandorica, Pandemonium, Pandlebar Moustache. She was a smallish cat, round and solid with round eyes that tended to look a bit astonished, and her black fur actually an overlay on a very faint silver tabby you could see in sunlight. She had particularly thick fur, although it wasn't especially long, and her undercoat was very dense and fine, and shed itself in wild, enthusiastic drifts in spring, leaving kitten-sized furballs under the bed. Petting her in the shedding season created a small choking cloud, and I suspect she took a certain vindictive satisfaction in being a fur-bomb in the vet's room.

She was a Personality: vocal, demanding, highly opinionated, but affectionate and needing constant contact. If I was at my desk, gaming on my PC, or during the lockdown work-at-home days, she'd sleep on the chair in my study (on her heating pad in winter, because she was arthritic and I indulged her ridiculously), and I have more than once had to apologise for her vocal contributions to Teams meetings. She was always underfoot in the kitchen. Always. Unlike Jyn, she loved laps, and her last few months, with me more or less perpetually collapsed in an armchair, had her continually fighting the controller or keyboard for space. She always slept with me at night, curled up tight against me, and usually making a sort of hammock out of the mosquito net by sleeping against it - she's probably the most tactile cat I've ever owned. She made her demands extremely known, either by yelling (standing in front of the water bowl and mewing because it wasn't fresh enough for her exacting tastes) or head-butting me (wanting me to move over in bed so she could climb under the duvet and nest).



She was, unlike Jyn, an extremely healthy cat, and when I dug out her vetbook and worked out how old she was a couple of years ago, the vet refused to believe she was actually 18, he said she was in nearly perfect condition. She lived cheerfully for most of the last decade with a large fatty growth on her front leg, which was a lipoma, benign, until the last year or so, when its development into a slow-growing mast cell tumour seemed to make no difference to her overall health or comfort. It was also only in the last year or two that she started to become arthritic, which we managed very successfully with the prescription kibble, and a bit senile, having sudden vocal panics where she forgot where I was, or she was, or where the food or litterbox were. (I have to ascribe to the senility her acquired tendency to attempt to drink the tea out of my mug, which she was frequently catastrophically prone to in the last few months of her life). But what got her in the end was her kidneys, shrivelled to tiny sizes. In the last few months she was hardly eating, no longer round but thin, feeling small and fragile and bird-boned when I cuddled her, and the toxin levels in her body simply overwhelming the special diet.



I had not realised how close and intense my relationship with Pandy had become, although in retrospect given COVID and lockdown and my increasing ill health over the last year, it was inevitable. She and I were alone in the house together for days and months at a time over the last few years, revolving contentedly around each other in a comfortable companionship where we knew and had accommodated each other's quirks. Our space-sharing routine had all the rough edges worn smooth. While I am so glad I could give her that closeness in her declining years, it's been very hard on me to suddenly lose it. Although I had been expecting to lose her sometime in the next year or so, her deterioration was very sudden; I had an unexamined expectation that my next six months or so at home working through long COVID would be in her slightly cranky company, and it was a brutal realisation that it wouldn't.

I also didn't expect to lose her on the day I brought her in for the vet to check her over, I thought she was being picky over food rather than continuously nauseated, so I wasn't braced for his recommendation to call it, and had allowed too many lasts - last sleep on my bed, last cuddle in my lap, last time licking Laxapet off my finger - to go unmarked. It consequently feels as though she's been ripped out of my life, leaving a jagged-edged wound. I had to clear all of her stuff - beds, bowls, brushes, toys - away into a cupboard almost as soon as I got back from the vet, because finding them in the house was making me cry. It still is.

She was a dear companion, and a Personality, and a loved and joyful strand in my life, and my missing her is a hole in my chest. I can, and probably will, fill the bleak emptiness and silence of my house with another cat, but I miss Pandora for her complete and characteristic cat-self, and with love and thanks, always will.



(Subject line quote is The Amazing Devil, because they really do excessive emotion so well).

I took Pandora to the vet on Friday for a checkup, because I am concerned about her level of what the Splendid Vet calls "vocalisation", which is to say, she yells at me more or less continuously. I have been worried that this might actually be pain, probably from her ongoing arthritis problem, so wanted him to check her out (and incidentally clip her claws, which I can only do one foot at at time in rotation, since she lasts only approximately five nails before trying to bite me). So he prodded her all over and inspected her teeth, handling manfully and with some admiration the choking cloud of fur which results (she has an incredibly thick and beautiful coat, black with a very faint grey tabby, with a very fine and enthusiastic undercoat), and pronounced her, overall, ridiculously healthy for a 17-year-old cat. She's put on a bit of weight, her teeth are great, she is eating well and using the litterbox appropriately, she has slight pain in her spine from the arthritis, but didn't try to bite him when he poked it, so clearly not too bad.

He thinks it's probably age, hence slight senility, hence anxiety, hence the rise in yelling - she forgets where she is for a moment, or where I am, and panics about it. If it gets too bad we can try Prozac, but it isn't at that level yet. She is still spending the nights blissfully curled up against me, so isn't losing me and yelling about it while I'm trying to sleep. And to rule out the pain issue, he gave me a course of five mild kitty painkillers, to try over five days and see if it changes the yelling behaviour any.

So I dutifully pilled her that evening, to her indignation, but I'm actually quite good at it and she didn't spit it out. And we spent Saturday with absolutely no diminishment in the yelling (as expected), but I came dutifully to pill her on Saturday night. And... the little white pill sleeve was not on the kitchen counter where I had left it. Or on the floor. Or outside in the courtyard (because hypothetical random gusts of wind, although I don't think we had any that day). Or in the kitty-stuff drawer with the Laxapet and what have you. Or on any of the other kitchen surfaces. Or drawers. Or in the recycling, in case I'd accidentally thrown it out with something. Or in the rubbish bin, ditto. Or in my study, or next to the tv, or in my bedroom, or any of the other places I might have absent-mindedly put it down on Friday night. Or in any other drawers, cupboards or hideaways where I might have stashed it as a Logical Place. It had softly and silently vanished away, with worrying completeness.

It remained vanished throughout Sunday. And I had resigned myself to not, in fact, doing the pain test, or at least contacting the vet on Monday and somewhat shamefacedly asking for replacement meds. Until I was cooking supper on Sunday night, and cleared away after I'd finished chopping stuff, and realised, with some shock, that a white square of kitty pill sleeve was sitting innocently on the black kitchen counter, as though it had never left. I will swear blind it was not there all Sunday. It was actually mildly freaky, I have clearly been watching too much Stranger Things, because I entertained a moment's wild fear that someone had been coming in through the courtyard door and messing with me by Moving Stuff Around.

But I don't think so. I think I swept it up with Saturday night's cooking endeavours (tiny one-person roast leg of lamb because I randomly felt like it) and tidied it into the vegetable crisper in the fridge, caught up in the packaging for carrots or cauliflower or something. And then swept it back out again with Sunday's supper (lamb shawarma, with leftover roast), caught up with tzatziki ingredients, cucumber or spring onion or whatever. In both sweepings, I remained utterly oblivious to its hitch-hikery activities, hence the Mysterious Reappearance. It had a pleasant day chilling in the 'fridge, and I had a frustrated day wondering if I had, in fact, started gently going mad.

I am relieved that I am not, in fact, gently going mad, or at least not any madder than having to deal with my Cherished Institution's current fuckwitteries is otherwise driving me. So I can finish the pain test, despite being fairly confident that it'll continue to make not one iota of difference to Pandora's yell levels, but remain reassured that I am being a Good Cat Owner and Covering All Bases, although faintly guilty that I have to actually leave the house occasionally, thereby causing her anxiety. But it's weirdly helped, being able to put a cause to it, it's making me less annoyed and more sympathetic to the yelling. She is a poor old slightly demented thing, but actually, at base, very healthy and mostly happy. I'll take it.

The last two years have been cruel, but for me, personally, it's been in a weirdly distant way - a sort of backdrop of global death, disruption and economic hardship to the far more mundane challenges and exhaustions of a radically rewritten lifestyle and day-to-day functioning. COVID's depredations have been remote: I haven't known anyone who's died or even been seriously ill from the virus, and even interactions with students expose me to illness and death and family crisis at extreme second hand, cushioned by the text medium. It's a slow-motion apocalypse at arm's length.

So it's strange, and sad, and somehow a bit wrong, to be hit as hard as I have been by a loss that's, comparatively speaking, petty and small; it's just that, unlike COVID, it's right in my house. I had to have Jyn put down about ten days ago; she developed an abscess in her neck over the weekend, which blew up suddenly and seriously enough that I took her in to the emergency vet on Sunday to have it lanced. Something in the combination of infection, anaesthetic and painkillers put her into acute kidney failure; we had her on a drip for most of the following week at my amazing vet's, but to no avail, her toxin levels never came down, the kidneys were clearly too damaged to be viable. Kidneys, apparently, don't heal. We had no option but to let her go.

I should damned well have learned by now the power of naming pets, on the Todal being evil and Golux being confused principle; I named Jyn after Jyn Erso, given that I'd just seen Rogue One at the time I acquired her. Something about Jyn Erso's story, abandoned by family, taken in by strangers, but spitting and feisty despite it, seemed appropriate. I should have remembered the tragic death very young.

She was, I have been saying to everyone all week, an incredibly sweet little cat - affectionate, playful, full of character, only occasionally evil. Her defining characteristic was her Klingon forehead, that very heavy fur over her eyes which gave her a perpetual frown that was somewhat at odds with the sweetness of her character. She would climb onto my desk while I was working and headbutt me repeatedly in the chest when she wanted attention (she did it whenever I visited her at the vet), and she was always at the door to greet me when I arrived home. Her walk was a sort of flouncy mini-swagger, often accompanied by her characteristic chirrups and trills; at times she'd rocket in from the courtyard giving vent to her astonishingly baritone growl, although not for any concrete reason I could ever discover, I think it was part of the game. She loved playing with rolling toys, especially, for some reason, rolled up foil from chocolates - Codsworth has found several of them under the furniture in this last week, and then I cry.

In a weird sort of way Jyn's early death, while awful, was also on some level not surprising; she was never quite right. She had that terrible recurring tendency to abscesses, probably about one a year, which were weird and mysterious because I never caught her fighting, and for a large number of them there wasn't actually a discernible bite mark. She had the black spots on her nose which were starting to be cancerous, and I was bracing myself for the nosectomy dilemma all over again. She was never very good at jumping; she had a curious insecurity about walking, even, on any ground that was cluttered or yielding; she'd never sit on laps. The standard garden wall, which Hobbit and various other trespassers scale quite handily, kept her securely in the back courtyard as long as there wasn't anything for her to jump up in stages. She never actually learned to go out of the open windows - something about the narrow sill and minor dexterity needed to negotiate the opening, defeated her. Even Pandora, fat and lazy and elderly as she is, quite cheerfully manages these windows. Jyn somehow... did not compute. I think she may have had very minor brain damage of some sort, or a muscular development problem. Or both. I thought of her as having a somewhat buggy operating system, with several intrinsic Cat modules missing or incomplete.

It's been difficult, since losing her, to keep myself from blaming either myself (I should have caught the abscess earlier) or the emergency vet (he gave her stronger painkillers than my usual Splendid Vet does, and didn't put a drain in the wound, and I'm a bit miffed that he drained the neck abscess but didn't appear to notice the second one in her mouth). But my vet says it's just bad luck, a perfect storm of circumstances stressing the kidneys.

I am missing her terribly, and I think Pandora, despite her general grumption, is as well, she's been spending a lot of time yelling at me over the last week. They were quite good friends, they'd lie on my bed and wash each other, at least until Pandy got bored and tried to nip her, so I'm not surprised Pandy's a bit lonely now. I am too. And sorry, and sad.

Genetics are weird. My niece doesn't have her mother's hands, she has mine. Slightly scaled-down version of the same basic shape, long fingers, long palm. Also, the weird double-jointed ring fingers which bend slightly backwards when straightened. And the baby fingers which curve inward slightly too much, and used to drive my piano teachers crazy, because it's quite tricky to do scales evenly when your baby fingers hit the key slightly sideways and are perpetually ducking for cover. Also, we both have the hideous witchy ability to bend over just the top joint of our fingers (I can't do it on the right forefinger any more since the nice doctor had to move the tendon out of the way to remove the weird cartilaginous lump). She and I can witchy-finger my sister in concert, thereby grossing her out considerably. But it's very strange, to see inheritance do a sideways curtsey like that. We are all lurking in our siblings, clearly, just waiting for expression.

I am very aware of hands just now because mine are not only shredded with eczema from all this damned hand sanitizer, but also somewhat liberally nipped by evil kitty teeth. Jyn has, yet again, had to have a giant abcess under her chin surgically lanced by the Splendid Vet, as a result of, presumably, being bitten by the sneaky invisible ninja tom who occasionally beats them up, silently and without visible presence, in the back courtyard. (How?! I am here all the time at the moment, and I've never seen hair nor hide of him). I feel much less guilty about this one, because I took her to the vet solely because she was all pale and quiet, I couldn't find a lump anywhere, and nor could the vet, despite knowing it was present from her very high temperature. He did a thorough examination, causing her to emit her astonishingly baritone growl when he fiddled with her hips, but I think that's her endemic weird joint issues which make her so loathe to jump. The actual abcess popped up two days later in her neck, and when he lanced it, he said it was incredibly deep and must have been agonising. Bloody tomcat. Anyway, I have been religiously shoving antibiotics down Jyn's throat twice daily for the last week, and she is significantly recovered to the point where she fights tooth and nail and tries to bite me, with occasional success.

She and Pandora are wreaking their revenge by refusing to eat the fancy arthritis-soothing prescription food Pandy needs for her old bones, they seem to hate the taste, and are consenting to imbibe just enough for continued life if I mix it with the hairball control they were on previously. I have had to order fancy alternatives via the Splendid Vet, so hopefully that will reach their high culinary standards. Sigh.

(This photo proof that they do get along, really. Also featuring my new bedroom carpet, do you know how difficult it is to find a persian-style design in dark green? And my Burne Jones wood nymph).

An incomplete and evolving list of the typical and atypical perils of conducting meetings virtually from home via Teams, Zoom or any other catchy single-syllable-branded meeting software which is probably sending snapshots of your hard drive, conversations, breakfast menu and taste in dodgy fanfic back to the mothership at frequent intervals:

1. (high-speed falsetto gibberish)
       (apologetic note in chat) "Oops, sorry, I sound like a Minion again, I'll disconnect and reconnect".
   
2. (child's voice/screaming parrot/angle-grinder swims in and out of audio)
       (plaintively) "Please could everyone turn off their microphone when not actually speaking?"
   
3. (Cat's ears and tail amble past my face on the video feed)
   
4. (long silence in response to a direct question to a meeting member)
       "Um, X, you're still on mute..."
   
5. "Oooh, sorry, one moment, that's my grocery delivery arriving."
   
6. "Can we take this offline?"
   
7. (distracts self from pointless circular argument by answering email)
   
8. (distracts self from pointless circular argument by reading fanfic)
   
9. (my face is eclipsed momentarily by an entire cat butt)
   
10. "Oooh, sorry, one moment, the robot vaccuum is eating the carpet."
    
11. (slightly desperately) "Please can we take this offline?"
    
12. (leaves long, futile, circular argument to faint creatively in coils on mute while I wander off and make myself another cup of tea. My absence goes entirely unnoticed.)
    
13. "Oooh, sorry, one moment, the plumber has arrived to fix the geyser."
    
14. cat walks deliberately over keyboard and/or mouse, causing random effect:
    • disconnection
    • hand up
    • burst of gibberish in chat
    • unmuting at wrong psychological instant (swearing)
    • muting at wrong psychological instant (mid technical presentation)
    • sudden burst of unplanned camera revealing I haven't brushed my hair this morning and t-shirt reading "I found this, it's vibrating"
15. sudden realisation that my shared screen during tech support session is revealing not just the database browser window, but:
    • five videogame walkthrough tabs
    • eight fanfic tabs
    • Tumblr
    • Twitter
    • Dreamwidth
    • my active Witcher 3 taskbar icon
16. (sudden drop out of meeting as the geyser, yet again, trips the mains)

I have come to terms with my own faint lack of control over my own limbs, as evinced by various Incidents over the course of my existence, an incomplete and annotated list of which includes:

• that time I completely displaced my kneecap practicing waltz steps in the dorm at youth camp, and had to be driven to hospital in the back of a bakkie over really bumpy dirt roads;
  
• that time I partially displaced my kneecap dancing at a CLAW party;
  
• that time I fell down the stairs at work;
  
• that time I turned too sharply between my desk and my kettle at work, being presumably desperate for tea, fell over and dislocated my kneecap, necessitating an ambulance trip to a hospital;
  
• that time I fell over absolutely nothing in a bookshop (I still think it was an invisible iron bar, thanks Wicked Witch of the West) and had to lie on the floor gasping for a couple of minutes before the pain receded enough to sit up;
  
• that time I miss-stepped coming out of a restaurant and described a beautiful 90-degree arc to the prone position on the tarmac;
  
• that time I slipped while leaning into the fridge for the cat-food, resulting in a dislocated kneecap, torn ligament, two broken bones in the elbow and the complete disruption of a planned role-playing game for which Phleep has still not forgiven me. (These days I only give kibble to my cats, having apparently learned something from all this).

So probably I should not be surprised that I can damage myself even under lockdown - particularly, I suppose, when the most wholesale of the above injuries was achieved in the comfort and safety of my own kitchen. I stubbed my toe very badly on the basket in my study the other night, while wandering through to close the front windows for the night. I thought I'd broken it at first, it was horrendously painful for about 24 hours, resulting in excessive limping, swearing and flashbacks to the DVT experience of standing up and almost passing out from the pain as all the blood rushes to the feet. But it improved rapidly after that and is now just a bit stiff and interestingly bruised. Being a klutz doesn't, apparently, stop just because one isn't moving around much.

I also appear to have a furniture-shopping jinx, hopefully localised and temporary. My desk chair is of the elderly persuasion, having been inherited from the Evil Landlord, whose company was getting rid of a bunch of old furniture. I have sat upon it heavily for approximately a decade in pursuit of my main addictions (the internet and videogames, the Earl Grey is incidental) to the point where it's now so worn that I retain comfort only by dint of three cushions and a cunning pillowcase arrangement holding them in place.

So I ordered a spanky new office chair from Makro, who deliver and are usually pretty efficient, except... nothing happened. For a month. After which I phoned them, and they said, oops, not sure what's happening, and then a day later sent me an email to say they'd cancelled the order.

So I shrugged, and ordered an even spankier one from Waltons, and ... nothing happened. For two weeks, after which, slightly wiser to these things, I phoned them, and went through four separate people while being misdirected once and cut off twice, and they terribly apologetically discovered that the order had been accidentally sent to the stationery warehouse rather than the furniture one, and was thus languishing in a state of limbo and confusion. A nice lady phoned me yesterday and assured me my delivery will arrive on Monday, but frankly I will not be at all surprised if it turns out to be a water-cooler and is also incidentally eaten by eels en route.

The excessively watery nature of my forebodings can probably be attributed to the fact that we have had bucketing rain and cold for three days. I'm rather enjoying it, although Jyn persists in venturing into the rain and rushing back all complaining so that I can dry her with a towel. So far the house has only sprung one new leak, so hopefully the jinx configuration has shot its bolt for the nonce.

Today I discovered that Codsworth doesn't charge if you've taken his dustbin out, as his butt then sticks into the air and he can't hit the charger connections properly. HOWEVER! Should Pandora, for example, in pursuit of her ongoing campaign of Dominating Codsworth, choose to sit down firmly upon him as he reclines on the charger in a butt-in-air posture which honestly makes me think of the slightly dodgier kinds of explicit slashfic, he will make sensor contact and announce "Begin To Charge!" in his female Japanese voice, causing Pandora to leap, startled, about a foot vertically and leave in a Marked Manner. But the connection is now made, so he's charging happily. Symbiosis! it's a miracle of life!

Winter is upon us, it bucketed with rain, on and off, for most of yesterday and into this morning. It's cold and damp and the garden is full of blown-about leaves. The cats are somewhat disgruntled and evince a tendency to try and climb under my duvet, but I am very happy.

Those bloody horrible beetles are back, colonising my kettle base in droves, presumably high on contact adhesive after eating their way through the plastic barrier I'd lovingly constructed. I had to have another bash-and-horrified-yell session last night, with seething populations hyperbolically speaking in the thousands rather than millions, but still numerous enough for serious scurrying action. I am increasingly homicidal about this: I brought out the big guns last night, viz. the duct tape, and have now TAPED the plastic barrier FIRMLY to the base in an UNBROKEN LINE, through which I confidently expect the little shits will simply eat, in order to continue their dubious nesting activities in the warm, after which I shall resort to a small tactical nuke from orbit as the only way to be sure. Aargh.

Time is very weird in this crisis: the weeks are composed of pockets of glacial slowness strung together into days which whizz past very fast, probably because they are comparatively featureless. The featureless days undoubtedly owe some of their effect to my Cherished Institution's inability to resolve anything whatsoever without Yet Another Meeting, which means I've had at least one more or less interchangeable Zoom or Teams meeting daily this week. Today being notable for FOUR of the bloody things, the most recent one of which has been pleasingly enhanced by the random and erratic introduction of Jyn's ears or tail to proceedings, so clearly I have Arrived, in remote meeting terms. (No-one commented, but everyone grinned whenever she popped up on the camera feed, I feel I have contributed my bit to morale). This week has also been enlivened by a successful battery-charging episode, hooray, the nice neighbour lent me his battery charger, and I happily demonstrated to myself my continuing ability to uninstall and install a car battery without setting fire to anything, and in defiance of my complete inability to find my shifting spanner.

I have also celebrated my inadvertant money-saving by ordering a robot vaccuum cleaner, on account of my increasing inability to deal with the house's component of cat hair and tracked kitty litter, and my uneasy awareness that this is probably both my living and my working space for at least the rest of the year. Also, cute robots are consoling and will function as an extra cat for purposes of conversation and petting, both of which are keeping me sane. Taking suggestions for names.

As I expected, Jyn had to have her horrible neck abscess lanced, and I took her in today to have the drain removed. Cat healing is very odd, it's so hyper-fast that you can't leave a lanced infection to heal on its own, the likelihood is too high that it'll heal over before it's drained properly and lock the infection inside, so she has spent a few days with a horrible plastic bit protruding from her neck. This has, I have to say, discommoded her not one whit, she did that instantaneous bounce-back thing cats do when you treat an infection, and when I brought her home after the op she became almost immediately full of beans and hyper affectionate. I am still, however, torn between relief and guilt, I always feel as though I should have detected these things earlier, and spared her that trauma.

Trekking around in lockdown is bizarre. The city is not absolutely deserted, there are a few cars on the road (including, weirdly enough, a speed trap on Liesbeek this morning, wtf? really not an essential service, people, get back inside), and the grocery store yesterday was frankly a bit of a cautious, arms-length scrimmage. But the empty streets are doing very strange things to me. Too much of this new context is simply too ideal to me - it plugs right into the considerable bits of my psyche which are perpetually exhausted, drained and fretted by city living, crowds and traffic. Not leaving the house for the better part of a week is balm to my soul, and the current cityscape, grocery stores excepted, neatly embodies the way I wish things were, really. A part of me is, in defiance of attempts to lock it down and properly rub its nose in the real horror of the epidemic, trying to rejoice.

So, being at home is lovely and the city is very civilised when I have to venture out, and frequent faculty and university committee Zoom meetings are not rendering me too homicidal, mostly because I follow a simple principle of turning my camera and mic off and playing Ipad Stardew Valley on the desk in front of me by way of panacea to all the ivory tower denizens reeling and writhing and fainting in coils. But I am very tired. Partially because giant apocalyptic epidemic and crumbling academic year and stress, but partially also because of the considerable mental energy needed to impart a sense of proportion to the inner recluse who is, shamefully, lying back and enjoying this. This particular manifestion of the primitive dinosaur self should not be indulged.