Swelter and Going Slightly Crazy

As I write this a cooling rivulet of sweat is running down the centre of my back.  It soaks into the top of my shorts, which are in turn clung to me with humidity.  It has been an exceptionally long hot summer and shows no sign yet of cooling down.  Though there are levels of hot and last night in bed I actually managed to sleep while a cool breeze wafted across me.  The night before I had to throw even the sheet off me as I could not bear for it to touch me and then I tossed and turned in an ocean of sweat the whole night through.  The bed is drenched every morning, but is dry as a bone again by the time night falls once more. The Westies have not slept in the bed with me for weeks. Preferring cooler corners of the room.

I have just said goodbye to my summer visitors, my son and his girlfriend, who are travelling around Spain.  They stayed with me for a week.  We had a really good holiday together and I was sad to see them go.  As in all families we have had our ups and downs and unfortunately the last down with them lasted for about a year and a half.  At first there was silence, then the odd stilted message and finally conversations on Messenger where we tried to air our grievances and at the same time build bridges again.  We must have succeeded for finally we spoke about a visit.  That must have been around May I think.  Plans went ahead, but I was not nervous, I knew it was going to be fine.

We have all grown up a bit in the past year.  A process which never stops.  I am always trying to be better and strive to be wise especially now that I am an old lady.  Before you say anything!  I must be an old lady now as I have finally given in and joined the shopping-trolley brigade.  The heat has been a factor, but the grooves in my shoulders where they get weighed down by shopping bags was also key to my decision.  Mere days before the kids arrived I took the plunge, went onto Amazon and ordered a rather smart Rolser shopping trolley in grey and red.  It arrived while the kids were here and it was rather nice to take it out for its first walk with them.  We all took turns and figured out the best system of rolling, whether it be pushing it in front like a true granny, or pulling it behind.  Pushing works better for me, so its official.  I am an old lady.

a rather smart shopping-trolley

On the upside though all my tests for arthritis returned negative and in addition my cholesterol is perfect as is my liver function (go figure!).  So the aches and pains have no explanation, except old age, so I have re-embarked upon a programme of exercise, something I have neglected over the last year or so.  I can no longer blame any exterior force, only my own sedentary lifestyle.

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A few days have passed since writing those first paragraphs.  The weather has cooled…a tad, though watching the weather this evening I fear we may be in for another wave of heat to hit us over the next few days.  Anyway I do not have time to worry about the weather, I have far too much to do.  Already it is the 7^th of August and my lovely long summer holidays are slipping past me, what with castrations (yes, poor old Looki finally met the knife), visitors, watering of plants, moving rocks and now another design competition.  It is early days and this part is merely an expression of interest with only a hope of being shortlisted. This time the competition is being run by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for a research medal.  I am nervous because I do not know exactly what they want from me at this stage and I have no previous history with them, so it is a bit like shooting in the dark.  Still I will have to shoot and pretty soon as the deadline is fast approaching.  It always takes ages to get these things together, what with CVs and examples of previous work.  And then you have to work out how they want all this information transmitted to them, whether it be by snail mail or email or Dropbox.  They are also asking for an idea of what I would propose should I get shortlisted.  So I will have to do a bit of drawing too.

Still handsome, my lovely boy took the whole castration thing in his stride....and he still loves me

I had a terrible nightmare the other night.  One of the other teachers posted up pictures of prep she is already doing for September.  I have not even given it a thought yet and she has games and cute little bits and pieces accumulating for the start of term.  I woke up in a cold sweat.  In my dream it was quarter to three on the first day of term and I had to be in school at three and I had absolutely nothing done, nothing!  What a panic.  How happy I was when I realised it was just a dream and that there is still a month to go.

I don’t really notice them approaching anymore.  I go into the kitchen to wash the dishes or prepare a meal and slowly become aware that there is a Westie under the cupboard, another sprawled on the floor close behind me and a third one is snoring gently behind the toilet in the downstairs loo. 

I go into the living room with my sandwich/drink/salad and a silent stream of dogs follows me, but I do not realize until I find that I am mindlessly rubbing a little fat belly with one hand, while a gentle head is resting on my foot and the boy snores loudly from under the fireplace, just in case I should forget about him.  I am getting very good at eating, wiping my mouth and slurping from a glass with one hand.

The stealth Westies creep up on you like small woolly ghosts

Lunch over I ascend the stairs to the office.  All clear, or so I think.  Soundlessly they infiltrate the office area, so that I can no longer move my toes under the desk as there is a Westie there and I can no longer push back as there is another perilously close behind the wheels of my smart office chair.  I only realise that they are there when Kerry, who is still downstairs, starts complaining that she is all alone, so I actually have to invite her to join us in the office by calling her name and telling her where we are.  She then becomes a third obstacle on my way to the printer.

...and suddenly you realise that they are right there in your face!

Today when I went down to the garden to bag some of the really vile rubbish that I still dig up from time to time I first had to coax the ever-present dogs off the tangled mess of rusty wire and broken crockery before I could shovel it manfully into a large plastic bag. 

I picked a fig – though they are rather dry this year – from our wild fig tree.  I ate half and gave the rest to Looki.  He chewed it and swallowed it and then asked for more.  He ate two more.  The last one though he foraged for himself.  I thought he had had enough and now I dread the poo run in the morning.  Literally.

They are just there really, all the time.  Our lives are interconnected and of course I only have to murmur the word “bedtime” and we all troop up together, they wait while I brush my teeth and then arrange themselves, separately, for the time being, around the room to sleep.  “Goodnight Looki.  Goodnight Kerry.  Goodnight Candy” I always say after I have turned the light out. They are the fabric of my life.  They are the river that runs through it.  I would be lost without them now.

Dirty or clean they are the fabric of my life

I had another dream last night.  It was the end of the world as we know it.  Everything had just frazzled up in the global warming and me and the Westies were the last ‘people’ alive.  I think I may have to stop watching so many Sci-fi movies.