We’ve had some spring sunshine! Yay! We’re moving towards the light at the end of a dark winter-lockdown tunnel. As I drove to the vaccination centre the other day, a rainbow hung over the place I was heading to! A sign? Surely it was a reassurance, and somehow more meaningful to me than the Queen’s assurance to us that the jab doesn’t hurt. But, in any case I’ve now ‘done my duty’ and with no apparent weird after-effect; not yet at any rate. My family are checking on me knowing that I’m weird enough already.
Today we said goodbye to one of our pups. He’s not gone far and we know it’s to a happy home where he’ll have a wonderful life with his dad. It was so hard parting with him though; his chubby little frame and his sweet, engaging little face - Reggie.
It may not have been the best plan to turn our petite and bijou property into a kennel but at least with it being lockdown we haven’t had to worry about entertaining visitors. The amount of pee and poo that four pups can produce seems way out of proportion to the amount of food they consume. It’s a four handed operation dealing with this litter of, now very lively, springer spaniel puppies, and each grown to the extent of being more than one handful anyway. Recently we’ve been trying to detach them from their mother in readiness for leaving us. The sadness of it occupies my dreams and I’ve had to prepare myself, too, having fallen in love with all of them as I shouldn’t have done. I won’t miss the mess and the backache though; it’s a bit like the ambivalence of feelings as ones own offspring leave home.
There is an allegorical feel about our puppy-raising experience. This pandemic has entailed separations that are completely unnatural. The pups have provided the cuddles and snuggles that I should be having with my grandchildren. They have filled the emotional vacuum created by this strange moment in human history and I am grateful. I will miss them.
I’m not in the business of creating conspiracy theories, like the one Gareth was presented with the other day - a theory that Bill Gates is a eugenicist and that his plan is to create infertility in the human population via vaccination and thereby save the planet. You surely have to ask, ‘why then start with the very elderly, many of whom have had their 100th birthday card from the Queen?’ But........
This pandemic has created a much greater dependence on digital communication and the ‘internet of things’ is growing apace (ref Jeremy Rifkin and his “Third Industrial Revolution”). That certainly seems to be the way evolution is going, with everything and everyone digitally connected. Even our pets, it seems, given the business racquet surrounding micro-chipping. (Oh-oh - shades of a sinister future if it’s true, as believed by some, that these vaccines contain micro-chips. Too late now.) I’m Libran, so for me there needs to be a balanced view on things. There is good and bad in everything. “You can’t stop progress” is a well used slogan and it remains to be seen where we end up after all of this. As I write, the air is blue around Gareth as he grapples with the paperwork to do with handing over these pups, and also dealing with the ridiculous bureaucratic processes concerned with redress for our purchase of a faulty washing machine. It’s no joy having to hand wash everything in the bath, spending hours on the phone to Curry’s PC World going through recorded option after option and ultimately ending nowhere while at the same time the hounds are baying for attention. Surely we can find better ways to employ people than getting them to build more and more complex snakes-and-ladders-type retail after-sales-service platforms aimed at making life difficult and annoying for customers. My nephew, Russ, once proclaimed that the exponential growth in bureaucracy is because its purpose is to provide work for those who’ve done courses and degrees in business studies. So it would seem. It’s the same in every sector - our very existence makes us simply a bundle of data that can harvested for many purposes. The Kennel club is at it too, with its dubious marketing attached to puppy registration.
As my wise friend Jinny said, having these pups is proving to be a life experience for us. And this pandemic with its lockdowns and multitude of attempts to make sense of “what’s going on” is a life experience that we have shared across the globe, all of us trying to stay afloat (I hope that metaphor won’t materialise given the Climate Emergency).
After my vaccination the other day I couldn’t resist a hug with my son. Yes, I know I’m still not supposed to take such a risk, for his sake or mine, but, Boy, did it feel right! It was like being given a float cushion (don’t take that the wrong way, Owen - it’s a metaphorical float cushion).
This morning I opened the curtains and was presented with a light sea mist, drifting across this housing estate. My mind wandered back to a time, not too long ago, when travel was our new lifestyle choice and I was gazing out from Hymer at a Spanish sea mist. As I looked at the red-brick landscape, somewhere from the back of my mind came the song “Everything is beautiful in its own way”. Whether that can be said for a fast mutating virus or a theory of dastardly plots to enslave us I’m not sure, but whatever life throws at us we must embrace it. Hugs all round......just make sure you’re wearing a mask
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| Reggie |
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| The fourth is elsewhere still tearing the place apart! |
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| Boxing match over |
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