{Cheese and Beans}

Over the past few weeks we have been keeping a brave face on a rather sad story at home. Simpson, our many adventured cat, has run out of lives. What we thought was a cold didn’t get better – and taking him to the vet turned into a week’s stay in hospital.

He has a tumor in his head – causing breathing difficulties – or rather in his case the ability to breath through his nose. No nose means no sense of smell, and no sense of smell means he won’t eat (it turns out cats need to smell what they are about to eat). You might think hunger might defeat that base instinct, but no – he’s literally wasting away in front of our eyes.

The result of his hospital stay is a pipe stitched into his stomach to allow him to be force fed by syringe. Not exactly the quality of life you might wish for any animal – let alone one who was rescued fifteen years ago from an animal shelter.

While it’s easy for me to see this weekend as perhaps his last with us, it’s not my decision. He’s not my cat. He lets me know he’s not my cat (cats have staff, don’t they). As much as I might joke about wishing him away from time to time, in reality I can’t imagine what the house might be like without him.

He’s had a fantastic life with first Wendy, then myself and Wendy, and latterly being forcably adored by three little girls. Now we approach his final days, and need perhaps to all be brave, and know when the time has come.

I’m guessing there’s going to be rather a lot of hugs and tears in this house in the coming days.

It’s all change again for my personal blog – gone with the minimalist theme, and in with the loud, in your face theme. I would like to say this was all planned, but of course it wasn’t. During a fit of “what can I do next” last night, I ended up looking at the free themes over at WooThemes, and came away with this one – it’s called “Mainstream” if you are insterested in slapping it on your wordpress install.

I’m not sure that it’s any easier or more difficult to read than previous incarnations of “Cheese and Beans”, but at least it mixes things up a little. I guess I got bored with the blog being mundane.

Better to be “something” rather than “something of nothing”. Feel free to tear into me, and accuse me of being a serial tinkerer (I’ll freely admit to it).

At some point over the coming weekend I promise to begin writing “real, proper” posts again – instead of these self interested sidenotes about all manner of geekery.

It’s about time I caught my few remaining readers (thankyou for your perseverence, by the way) up on happenings in our menagerie.

Today marks both the end of something, and the beginning of something new.

Today marks the beginning of a real, proper blog. The beginning of an effort to regularly expound words of interest to the passing crowd from a platform built of the best virtual boxwood (in reality it’s built on Apache, PHP, MySQL and Wordpress, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it).

With a little luck, and a little effort, “Cheese and Beans” will become a regular literary performance charged with humility, honesty, wit, intelligence, eccentricity, annoyance, aggravation, hilarity, and perhaps an occasional spoon of levity.

I will screw my courage to the sticking place, and set about deconstructing the walls I have built over recent years; walls that conceal the real story. The interesting story. The story never told. The dark thoughts, the idiotic opinions, the damn fool escapades, and the inappropriate situations.

I’m not saying I’ll be leaving to fight in a foreign civil war, contract syphilis in Venice, or wooing statesmen’s wives (as a certain famous literary figure did a few hundred years ago), but I might at least have very pointed things to say about the school run, idiot car drivers, old people, religious zealots, and the remarkably interesting statistical relationship between the size of the hole in the o-zone layer, and the number of Pirates in the world.

I will encourage you, my audience, as you accompany me on this journey of discovery – we will come to know each other, you and I, to laugh, to commiserate, and to share confidences.

It’s going to be fun. It’s also going to be difficult, but mostly fun, on the whole, I think…

If you’re wondering what on earth is going on with my WordPress blog, you’re not wondering in vain. I’m experimenting with the “P2″ template from Automattic (the guys that make WordPress). The main thing about P2 is that all comments are visible – so (as a reader) you can see any conversation. P2 also appeals because it’s stripped of anything that’s (probably) not needed.

This morning my better half had a meeting with our youngest’s school teacher. It’s worth mentioning that this teacher has the best name I have ever heard for an infant teacher – I’m not going to share it directly here because this is a public forum, but trust me – it’s good. It’s akin to calling a male teacher “Mr Fantastic”.

I’m already wandering off the story, aren’t I.

I had to take the kids to school. In the rain. This didn’t pose too much of a problem; each child was suitably attired in a big coat with a hood, and the younger ones had scooters (this was a crafty trick apparently – they get to school twice as fast if distracted with their own scooter). I was just explaining this crafty trick to our eldest while walking along a particularly puddle populated and muddy path when I heard a crash far off in front of us.

You’re way ahead of me.

Little Miss 6 was led in the puddles and leaf mulch on one side of the path, with her scooter jettisoned into the undergrowth on the other side of the path. For a few moments she led on the ground, horrified at her own predicament, without making a sound. She looked back at me as I approached, shouting “up you get then”, and finally let rip.

How do you tell a small child they are fine when they have mud streaked up their coat, soaking wet tights, and bits of leaf stuck in the hood of their coat? It just goes to prove that children really don’t care that much about how they look, because 50 yards further on (after a very noisy, very slow, very tearful trudge) she re-mounted the scooter and charged after her little sister. They got about 50 yards before nearly being run over by a car backing out of it’s drive. We really need to impress on them the idea of LOOKING WHERE THEY ARE GOING. I ripped the scooters from their hands and carried them (and pushed my bike) the remainder of the way to school.

Arriving at school brought “Hellos” with lots of parents I vaguely know, and I somehow ended up taking various young friends to the school door too.

Handing over the final child to the awaiting teachers on the doors of the primary school, I marched off up the road; time to get my hair cut! (it has been slowly turning from vaguely smart, into full-on village idiot over the last couple of weeks). I sat down in the hair dressers and was about to be called to a chair when a little voice in the back of my head told me “you’ve got no money”. Seeing the bizarre spectacle of a customer preparing to leave before even talking to anybody, the head hairdresser looked at me quizically.

“I just realised I need money – I remembered I haven’t got any on me”

“You can get it afterwards if you want – you just need to leave something here”

Seeing that the guy who would have cut my hair had only just arrived anyway, I offered him time to go and make coffee, and wandered to the cashpoint and back. It’s weird how the ten minutes leading to 9 o’clock in the morning are manic – with cars seemingly hell bent on crashing into each other, and yet ten minutes later the town becomes deserted.

While getting my hair cut a quiz played out on the radio – with the station playing various songs from a given year with listeners invited to guess which year it was. There are no prizes (it’s just something to do for people with boring jobs – like cutting hair, and trying to make conversation with strangers). I seem to remember “Ordinary World” played, by Duran Duran. I’ve not looked it up yet, but we guessed 1996.

Leaving the hair dressers, the heavens predictably opened, and I realised I hadn’t picked waterproofs up on my way out of the house. Three miles on a mountain bike in fine drizzly rain.

Wonderful.