don't worry

 ...I'm still here, just been extra busy lately. More soon

sunshine yesterday

 

Various things seen. Last picture is my first meeting with my 9th or 11th niecephew, Hetty, b. late April. 

meander - 2

How nice are these junior cats in the garden of a house between the Lions Club and the Helping Hands shop? Rhetorical question.  

cats in the council yards

Pretty much every day Perry and I do the same walk. I never thought of myself as someone who could tolerate doing the same walk every day but for some reason it's bearable, in fact, sometimes I even look forward to it. I mean Perry is a good friend and I enjoy his company, so that might be part of it. There are deviations we can do to get to the same end point. 

One of the things that interests (but also concerns) me is the cats in the council yards we pass through at the end of the journey. I assume they are feral and they are also apparently being fed. But it can't be a nice life and indeed it might be brutal and short, I'm not sure. There are a lot of cats apparently being born right now (I'm getting emails from the Lost Dogs Home telling me that they need money to desex cats) and I think every responsible person should take a couple more in. Personally I would take any of these monsters home and nurture them until they became adorable on the inside as well as the outside, but catching them is the hard part. 

more james freud

 

From the Age, 27 July 1999 p. 25. 

The really interesting thing about this is the way that the Age journalist here is so uneasily snide about pop from 14-15 years earlier as an Age journalist now would never (?) be. Also, the Kylie jibe is unexpected, it's kind of the way they used to talk about Nick Cave in the early 1980s before they decided he was the most extraordinarily brilliant being of the 20th-21st century. 

The thing with putting band names in italics is also odd but whatever, they were obviously working shit out, or not. 

That Gary Numan album he mentions was so legendary, until people actually heard some of the tracks (if I recall correctly some of them were released on the reissue of Breaking Silence). Whew! By the way I literally despise Gary Numan. Throw him on the XTC pile, though I never loved GN the way I loved XTC forty years ago.  

my time to shine

...not really. But I have done eleven or so pages of my second graphic novel and I am not unhappy with it so far, and having written the entire thing (with expectation of some elements being altered as I go) I know the best is yet to come. 

This is how it starts, anyway, in 1959. I probably made an error by not drawing anything on the newspaper (and really, if I was to be accurate it would be a broadsheet not a tabloid... I can't do everything) (or perhaps I just can't do anything). This particular character doesn't need any more backstory than this image gives us, though I have plenty of ideas. The main thing that worries me but doesn't worry me that much is that the orange cat who's sleeping in the doorway possibly looks like it is either a tiny, tiny cat leaping from the back of the chair, or that it is not lying but kind of arched in a weird prone position in the doorway - I don't know. I mean to the first possibility I have no problems with that, I like weird juxtaposition, but the second, well, that might be my problem with perspective although I used a google image search for reference and that, more or less, is what a sleeping cat looks like, I think. 

Well, anyway, I am getting somewhere though not as fast as I should I suppose. I keep changing my mind about bits, I am not sure if that's a good sign but ultimately I am happy with what I've decided (I have one more page of this first 'prologue' section to do, and I think then I'll draw the 2-3 other pages where the same 1959 characters appear (we also see them very briefly in the early C21). 

I think it's quite a decent story, particularly since I have never shown any capacity to write fiction before, so I'm starting from a low base. The main problem - unfixable and I have no desire to fix it - is that the first part of the story is a long, rambling party scene which has much more in it than is required for a setup, but which I am just relishing drawing, so why should I deny myself something so nice? You're right, I shouldn't. 

trip to europe last month - goodbye kuopio (again), hello helsinki

16 February - so - this is an odd thing I saw yesterday:

I don't know what it was, but I'll tell you what it looked like - a bunch of police, some with guns, at a door to a home in Kuopio. No voices were raised, they all went inside. 

This is nothing, just an interesting looking asian cafe. It was open. 

Laura had noted how few cats we had seen on our journey - like, about four. None of them outside. Until this one, which I saw and she didn't. It was a happy story because I got to see a cat but also its owner was just arriving home when I photographed him/her. 

Kuopio apartments. 

Intriguing graffiti at Kuopio station. 

We had a four and a half hour journey Kuopio-Helsinki then got a taxi to our accommodation, not much has happened since then, maybe tomorrow huh. 
 

early helmi

So just for interest's sake (mine) I went searching for evidence of early Helmi on the Cat People of Melbourne site. Helmi was presumably born in 2017, and by the time this ad was put online she'd weaned her litter and was ready to move on (I'm only guessing that she was a very young mother, and might be confused by her smallness). But even the way she is sitting in this picture is confusing to me, she seems atypically very confident, once again, I'm probably projecting. 

These are two of her kittens, in a series of photos and a video put online a month earlier (February 2018). In the video we are told that 'Mittens' had put her kittens in this basket and then hidden behind the couch - that last part certainly sounds like the Helmi I know.  Also the Helmi I know would, very considerately, put newspaper down first. 

And screenshots from *that* video wherein Helmi (as she was to become) is happily washing herself and not giving much of a shit about her surroundings while in the room with her kittens and...

this little dog, who's playing with one of them. The dog-in-the-room bit blows me away. 

Anyway that's just how it was. By the way, sherlock, the 2018 date on the top image does not indicate that I have no idea of time, but apparently she was adopted somewhere and the person who took her on ultimately had to find another home for her because they were unable to stay in the country - that at least was how I remember the story. Point being she had another home between 2018 and 2019/20. There might be clues the mystery of her strangeness in that episode but I don't really know. She is in any case very highly-strung and I have a strong suspicion that, were I to put her in a room with a small white dog, she would not be like 'whatever, dude'. 

grudging respect

 

The story so far: I have had Nancy since 2013, probably the year she was born. Like any good hollywood heartwarmer she was an obligation who burrowed her way into my affections (heartwormer, I suppose) and we have been solid since, I guess, around the time in either late 2013 or early 2014 when she disappeared for a week and then came back for good. It really was a modern day folk tale. As idiotic as it sounds (possibly even to some cat owners/lovers) I feel like she is not an animal presence but just someone I live with. We have our routines, we hang out, we don't always communicate but I suppose I project onto her a kind of cohabitant personality. When I write it down it looks stupid but that's how it feels. She does hassle me for food at certain times of the day but in her defence I bet she wouldn't if she could open the sachets of cat food herself. Also I mean she does grovel to me for affection at times, mainly when other people are here or on zoom (!) which gives a weird impression of things in the outside world but trust me most times she's nearby but not demanding.

So Nancy and I lived a full life at Clifton Hole, then we moved to Albion and for some (the beginning) of that time we had Joni and her cat living with us while Joni got on her feet or whatever the phrase is, found her feet, in Melbourne. I had never seen Nancy with another cat up till that point except her uncle Monty (who she hated and feared, and the feeling was mutual). But in this instance Nancy seemed to have found a genuine friend. Joni was of the opinion beforehand that this would work because her cat was low-status and would just hide, and I thought at the time 'what on earth does Joni know about cats, they don't work like that' but she was completely correct. That didn't last long but it was a good arrangement for the cats, they got on really well - they would play a lot (sometimes it looked like fighting but no-one got upset) and even just sit together. 

So in um I can't remember, I guess it was 2020, we were living in Parkville and I decided Nancy needed a friend (particularly because she would not be able to go outside anymore) and like a fool I decided to force it and find a timid, small, pushover friend. I got Helmi just in time for the pandemic (I specifically remember that the Cat People of Melbourne person Gina insisted we not shake hands but bump elbows - I am pretty sure this was the first time that had actually been enforced on me, though I knew of the concept). Helmi has slowly come round to me and we are very close, I find her completely ridiculous but I adore her and I admire her loyalty. But she and Nancy, nuh-uh. They have tended to attack each other whenever they are near each other, which is usually only when I'm there too (so there is a bit of 'girls, girls, don't fight over me' which of course is flattering) but they also sometimes I just hear them do it in another room. 

In the last let's say month, though, there has been a slight thaw. This is Nancy's doing primarily because she is refusing to retreat (though it is also me taking Laura's wise counsel that the cats should eat in the same place, which they now do, Helmi creeping downstairs in the middle of the night to eat whatever scraps there are left the kitchen). So almost every morning, I wake up with both of them on the bed, not near each other exactly and never in vulnerable positions. You know what it's like being a cat. You have to sometimes look like you're asleep so it's clear you're not in a panic. But a cat is always a hair trigger away from leaping into action. 

So I think the ball is basically in Helmi's court now. I probably told  you about the insane video I saw of Helmi when she had kittens, washing herself blithely in a room of people while her kittens played with a dog, which is just like - I would never have believed it possible but I saw it (writing it down now I am not sure I believe it still). The only connection between that cat in that video and the cat I now know is that it's the same cat. So of course I know that whatever ails Helmi, well, it might be permanent now, but this is not the cat she's always been. 

They did play together once, in my memory, when they briefly investigated a battery-operated toy together. That was a communing moment (at Parkville). I guess maybe I should invest in more things like that but it does seem like an expense because Nancy only ever plays with a toy once. 

It doesn't obsess me or anything, I am fine with it all, I am just watching what happens and observing change and hoping it goes the way I want it to. 

nearly 8

It probably is something close to Nancy's 8th birthday. She was pretty certainly born in 2014, maybe around this time, going by the fact that she seemed to be a kitten around mid-year but the vet who desexed her said she was almost certainly older, just malnourished and stunted. We will never know anything about her birth, but on the plus side, who wants to know anything about a cat's birth? 

There are a few things that remind me sometimes that Nancy is a cat. One is that she often cleans herself on the couch on this nice crocheted rug, and then she forgets where she ends and the rug begins, and she gets the rug caught in her tooth (or something). If she is really full-on doing that I usually pick her up and put her on part of the couch without the rug, an action she accepts entirely as her due and she just goes on washing herself. But it is a little depressing to me that she apparently has no volition when it comes to rearranging her circumstances: everything that is, is, unless someone or something changes it. 

The other thing is that even though I tell her and Helmi that they have to become friends, they refuse to do so. It pisses me off. Though I was reminded (by a grody photo exhibition my phone made for me) that at one point they did bond over a toy where something that looked a bit like a mouse tail popped out of a unit. I suppose I should resurrect that and keep it going, though Nancy generally has a short attention span for new things.  

23 October 2019

I know, I know you wanted to know what happened on 22 October 2019. I think it might have been some of the things I said happened on 21 October. Does it matter a lot to you? If so, I apologise. I guess you could just count yourself lucky I'm being so generous as to share all this with you, my last few days in glorious Stockholm. This big skyscraper is where the conference was being held, and a key argument. The rest of the pictures are Java Whiskers, the cat cafe I went to. 

 

cat dream

I dreamt I was in the lobby of a European (? international anyway) hotel just letting Nancy and Helmi have a wander around when other cats and at least one dog descended on us. The dog, which was a big grey hound, literally jumped down - or more like deliberately dropped - from the floor above. The cats came in more cautiously. I picked Nancy up but of course there's no way you can pick Helmi up so I just had to hope she'd find her way back to the hotel room, remembering that she had a collar with her name and my number on it (which by the way she doesn't).

This is the second dream I've had about picking Nancy up in a location of turmoil, joining my dream last week about carrying her down Flinders St. towards the station. I am glad to say that in both dreams she is reasonably controllable. 

only good news

So much to my surprise absolutely everything went smoothly with getting to the vets and getting the injection and the claws clipped and so on. I did get there early, also to my surprise, and was therefore 'compelled' to park in a clearway (like, at 8:47 when the clearway ended at 9) but didn't even get punished for that. Nancy did not peep, let alone howl (as she has been prone to do in the past) at the indignity/horror of being stuck in a cage and more to the point she was, according to the vet (I wasn't allowed into the room) perfectly behaved. And she has had her claws clipped which is the best thing ever. 

Rumour has it she is slightly overweight and should reduce a little, but on the whole, consensus is that she is the perfect cat in basically every way imaginable. 

bother

Waking up at 4:30 with something you have to do firmly embedded in your mind only you can't do it as it is 4:30 in the morning is a big hassle (why do I always check myself to wonder whether hassle is spelt 'hastle'?). That was an hour ago and I have since:

patted both cats
patted both dogs (they were sleeping nestled, it must be cold out there)
checked to see if the paper's come
put stuff in a pile to take to work
read some random sections from part 3 of Plan for Melbourne (1972)
figured out how to delete a file that had been on my desktop for some months now - I didn't put it there and it was undeletable because 'locked'

Last night I watched the last episode of Timeslip. I don't know if you've seen this show it was a scifi show from 1970 made by ITV in the UK. I am surprised it seems to have a sizeable cult following. If you saw the program and then read the discussion boards on the official site you would wonder, like I have, about the people participating. They appear on the one hand to accept that the show is completely thrown together, and on the other, revel in pointing out discrepancies. Someone has made a documentary.



I have watched a lot of it over the last 2 months. I suppose it's quite comforting.

NB Denis Quilley (above) was in an Australian police show called Contrabandits in 1967. Who remembers this?

cats past

In my illness I had a long conversation with Asha about previous cats I have owned or part-owned. There have been about twelve. Almost none of them lived to old age under my custodianship, though since about half of them disappeared (I got used to this as a child) I can't say for sure that they did not live long lives. I have had about 12 cats, starting with Patch who was my mother's cat when I was born, up till the present Bela and Asha, yan and yin or more like, Satan and a nice cat. I was a cat person until I became a dog person about 15 years ago. Sorry cats. No wonder Asha wanted to escape my blabbing.

i can talk to the animals

You know, the first feature film I ever saw was the Rex Harrison Doctor Dolittle, which plainly dates me... no it doesn't I could have seen it yesterday and be one week old. Anyway, I enjoyed some of the books, too (I can't remember anything about the film except a giant snail shell, which I may have made up) and I always liked the idea of a pushmi-pullyu, perhaps because I knew it would never have to go to the toilet. Which is fine as long as it didn't need to.

But what I was really thinking about was the fact that I can talk to animals, just like Doctor Dolittle. I really can! I wonder what they think it's about. Of course there's that funny Gary Larson cartoon where the dog can only hear its name, I think dogs are a little more sensitive to intonation etc than that, but what do they think is going on? Do they think it's communication they can't understand, like I would if someone talked to me in friesian, or do they just think I'm chattering away meaningless, like I would if a monkey or a dog made noises to me? I suppose it doesn't matter and there's no way of knowing.

I just talk to those animals all the time. When I am walking the dogs I say nonsense to them, using intonation (it would be mildly embarrassing if someone overheard me, though it's not like I'm saying anything private... just saying things without thinking about them, so actually, if the dogs think I'm chattering like a monkey they wouldn't be far off the mark). I do it to the cats, too, I think a lot of the time just having something with eyes around allows me to say whatever nonsense words are in my head.

It's relevant that this is a blog posting, too, because it is pretty meaningless.

lake and reserve

I wish I had pics to show you but don't. Too lazy. That's the thing with new technologies - all the potential but then laziness nips it in the bud. Anyway, Mia saw a native water rat at our local pond/creek isthmus a few days ago, which is hot news for everybody, really. In other sightings someone has dumped a car on the hill there (possibly waywardly looking for native water rats) and then somebody else has totally smashed the shit out of it, at least, there was no shit in it when I saw it.

The fauna domestically is kind of the same old story, Bela still bashes Asha, Charlie and Millie carry on their usual dance of destiny, although incidentally two nights ago they had a very atypical contretemps at 3 am when Millie had a bone she'd dug up and she was freaking out about Charlie wanting it, which she may or may not have, but Charlie being Charlie wouldn't leave the issue be.

Also, we have some spiders and last night there was a fly in the bathroom.

i can haz life of turgid monotony? And pancake?

Cu-ute! Asha has a hardline routine these days. She hides in the back part of the house most of the time, of course, and does not even necessarily emerge from wherever it is she is cowering when Mia or I show up. Presumably she meditates in the way cats do (they seemingly find it easy to completely empty their minds). She sleeps most of the daytime and then in the evening when the dogs come in, she's hiding from the dogs. However like me the morning is her best time. She particularly likes being hand fed scraps eg bits of breakfast pancake as seen here (she won't eat this stuff off the floor for some reason). She also lists as her likes: climbing the curtains, grabbing things off the walls, and being bitten on the lower back by that shit Bela.