It´s spring here, which is different from england, it is very changeable, but can leap from 28c and very hot, back to 11c and bloody cold and then hover in the middle being warm but with torrential rain and lightning storms that last for a couple of hours. And yet this is not a tropical climate, it´s something very different. What we don´t get, is the endless drizzly days of home.
What we also get, is dogs everywhere. Behind their ,not so secure, fences warning you off, roaming the streets in packs chasing car wheels and winding up the dogs behind the fences, goading them with their freedom. Cats are here in their numbers, however due to the dogs, they keep their heads down. When we arrived, borisita(after yeltsin) was within days of giving birth, enormous.
After a week or so, she left and was not seen for long parts of the day and it became obvious that she had a litter hidden somewhere. Over the next couple of weeks, we searched in vain but found nothing. We gave up, believing that they must have died or been snatched.
Six weeks later, we have a day clearing out the shed and hire a skip to clear away all the garden waste and accumulated crap on the land. Hidden in insulation foam, right at the back of the shed under loads of wood, tiles and equipment, are two tiny bundles of fur. The shed is bang in the middle of the dogs garden and the door was not always open. How she got them in there, and the gauntlet of fear she would have to run, to reach them, I don´t know. So now we have two babies, carlito (tevez) and borisita (mum now plain old boris). Katherine and I have fostered them and their mother for the next 2 weeks, after that, they will have to make their own way in the world. Hopefully they, like their mum, will keep on returning to us and become semi-domesticated cats. We will be leaving at the end of the summer, so they can´t get used to a home and then have it taken away from them.
a travelogue in the time of the information superhighway
1994
My story starts in drizzly, dreary, grey England. I worked as a nurse in a specialist cancer hospital in Manchester. One day, I suddenly entered her world, there she was. At once beautiful, but decaying visibly. Eyes that melt you, fumbled for reasons. High on morphine, she slumped on the chair. Her legs, previously long and graceful, were now fat and full of fluid. She was loosing her hair, something that upset her most. We all witnessed her struggling with the remains of her dignity and modesty, but she carried on fighting. Her mother applied facial cream like a corner man at ringside, her father just looked lost. She was a twenty seven year old woman, right before us, dying in her prime. She seemed to hold up a mirror to the thoughts sailing across my mind, a metaphor for what we've all become and what will become of us. So much potential, so much waste. It is at moments like this that we can take the looking glass to our own fragile existence, and ask questions of it. Cancer had infiltrated her womb, the very giver of life. I became aware of a feeling that her death had released something else, a thirst for living itself. She haunted me. Four months later, I set out on an adventure to view the world that she would no longer see.
Posted by don quixote
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