Update

We are told that the boys arrived at the cattery very cool and relaxed after their journey south [edited for clarity - I'm not quite sure where they are now, but somewhere within striking distance of Heathrow. They fly to the States on Friday].

You are now please to imagine cool and relaxed boys. Thank you.

I am told it would be foolish to send sossidges.

In other news, does anybody actually remember when all I had to worry about was earning enough money to write books...? No, me neither.

What part of "Silence" do we not...?

Suppose they closed the library, and everybody came?

I had a nasty turn this morning, arriving at the Lit & Phil to find the doors closed and an ominous white notice pinned up. It was almost the last straw, after a monumentally bad night with much-afflicting dreams (about Karen's health, inter alia: I didn't enjoy that).

Fortunately, it was only a staff-training delay; they were going to open the doors an hour late, which was only ten minutes ahead. So I lingered on the steps, with a gradual accumulation of other denizens, until the nice caretaker let us in. Made me feel like a schoolboy again, all that hanging around outside waiting to be allowed through the door.

And then I came down to the Silence Room and understood it to be springtime, because amorous pigeons were belling like bulls in the lightwell beyond the windows. Really, like bulls; I've never heard louder birds. They only shut up when someone got going on the piano across the hall. I'm not sure what they're playing, but they're fabulous. And very loud. Which might be why I'm writing blogposts instead of book.

In other news, I have finished Dzur and am out of Brust. Yes, I know there are more to be had, but I am not buying any more books this side of the Atlantic; that would just be silly. Happily, I have an ocean of books to read, all those that I'm not taking with me. I wonder how far I can get in ten days, when real life is acting kind of like a bull beyond a fence, except for not being very funny at all...?*


*When I was a young man and lived on a farm, there was a bull in the field beyond the cottage garden. We had a garden party, and my folkie friends came over and played music. Soon as the fiddle started, the bull came charging up to the - extremely flimsy - fence and did his whole bull thing, bellowing and pawing the earth and everything. Soon as the fiddle stopped, so did he. Back and forth, on again off again. It was very funny and kind of scary, both at once.

Giving it all away

I have enriched the vets by one cat carrier, several varieties of fudz and half a sack of cat litter. Just the one carrier, which was the one that came with Mac four or five years ago; the other - which was bright purple, and which I've had for sixteen years, ever since I brought the girls home - broke spontaneously yesterday, as I took Barry's towel out of it to give it to the nice courier man. You'd think it was a Sign or something.

I could have taken the bus up to the vets' place - litter and tinned fudz together, that was heavy - but I walked all the way, like a penance. In the rain. It was a sort of pilgrimage, and a sort of retrodden memory. "Mark my footsteps, turn my page." When I took each of the girls for their last appointment, I did it this way, on foot. And I'll probably never go that way again. So now I'm sort of full of sad. And none of my particular vets was in, so I only got to say goodbye to the nurses.

Then I came home and bought eggses. Which I don't have to lock away, there being no egg-thieves left in the house. Likewise chocolate, and chocolate-thieves. And mushrooms, and broccoli, and and and.

I miss my boys. I keep catching sidelong glimpses of a huddled sweater and thinking it's a cat. And putting plates down for a lick-wash. And and and.

Also of course the more I mope & am gloomy, the less I have to be grown-up and do all that other shit. *nods*

Offered without comment

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2012/02/27/funny-pictures-get-better-cat-drawing/