Dog problems

I've become a dog owner by mistake. I'm looking after my girlfriend's dog for two-and-a-half weeks. He is a very nice dog and very well behaved. Naturally, then, he's driving me nuts. I've never had a pet dog before, so all of this is something of a voyage of discovery for me, although I was already aware of the fact that I was nuts.

I always thought that the whole concept of there being dog people and cat people was probably an over-simplification. But actually, it isn't. The demands of a pet dog and a pet cat are such polar opposites that it's surprising that there are any similarities at all. There are, of course. Both dogs and cats are cute and loveable and like a fuss and a play. Both dogs and cats eat food that stinks out of tin cans. And both of them watch you eat your food with an intensity that makes it clear that they kind of wish they didn't. However, after a week of looking after a mutt I now believe that people who prefer dogs to cats must have a chromosome missing.

A dog, yesterday

It is a truism emblazoned on a million bumper stickers that a dog has a master while a cat has a servant, and I think this is the root cause of the difficulties that I'm experiencing. I'm tending to deal with this canine interloper as if it is some kind of firefighting operation. My key concerns are to make sure he gets out to do his excretions and therefore doesn't park anything in the house, and that he doesn't bark because people as highly-strung as I am don't take very kindly to such malarky. It's fairly easy to see why I don't feel that I'm getting very much out of this experience other than a headache. Instead of enjoying it I am largely treating him as if scientists had finally managed to graft working legs onto a piping bag filled with turds.

Although prepared for a few dog things, I'd not factored in quite how much talking in the street dog ownership entails. I spend half of the day in a dialogue with this dog, for at least an hour of which I am in public. They like it, need it and want it. I speak to cats, too, but I've never found it met with anything other than thinly-veiled contempt. I kind of miss that.

And there's the rub: ultimately, cats hate you. They want you to feed them and then leave them be, which is a mission statement not dissimilar to my own. Dogs love you unconditionally all day long, and that freaks me out. But though I am a grouchy bastard with a heart of stone, I am also a creature of logic and reason and logic and reason tell me that this unconditional love means that the dog has no intention of ruining my day. He'd not even have dreamt of it, nor could he even conceive of a way he might go about doing so (dogs are thick). Therefore, if he has ruined my day it can only because I have allowed him to. So the onus is on him to adapt to a new pace of day-to-day life, and on me to be less of a fanny.

There is no prize for guessing which of these is likely to happen first, by the way. Shut up.

These are the good times

Friday 2nd March 2012, a date which will live in infamy. It was a day that nothing changed but everything did. The weekend which followed saw me as low as I have ever been in my life. Today sees my efforts to try and restart myself in the face of the new because I have to.

My mum got ill at the end of 2009. Having never had any breathing difficulties before, suddenly she found herself out of breath at the merest physical exertion. A trip to the doctor and a chest x-ray later discovered that she had fluid on the lung. This is really never a good sign.

On Christmas Eve 2009 she had over a litre of fluid drained from her chest. Although she was back home for Christmas, by New Year she was back in hospital for a similar procedure. By this stage it was pretty clear that all was very much not well. At the beginning of January 2010, it was confirmed that she had cancer. A particularly elusive cancer, mind you: it wasn't actually discovered until the middle of April after a chest operation at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London. The diagnosis was not good, the prognosis likewise. Mesothelioma, an incurable but "treatable" condition.

Good times 
These are the good times
Leave your cares behind 
These are the good times

Almost two years have passed since then. That in itself is pretty good going. The fact that my mum has actually been, if not bouncing around with health, then pretty much entirely able to function normally even more so. But last Friday was the day that we all knew was coming, the day that the doctors at the Royal Marsden said that there was nothing more they could do, treatment wise.

Good times 
These are the good times
Our new state of mind 
These are the good times 

Given that I knew that this day had to come eventually, I am pretty stunned as to how badly it has affected me. Stunned, too, as to the sort of livable paradigm that I had gladly entered into whereby a nameless, faceless doctor would fill my mother up with snake oil, moonbeams and rat poison every week. As if that was just the new way of things, when the real new way of things has been with us since the start of 2010.

But a lot of the flamboyant black cloud of gloom is due mainly to the fact I know I have to snap out of it, for everyone's sake. So far, life is not all that different. The sun comes up and my mum wakes up and everyone does their best to make it in one piece to the end of another day. That is what we all do, ultimately, whether or not we are aware of what is killing us. No good - for anyone - can possibly come of me suddenly starting to act differently, or worse, rolling myself up tightly into a hedgehog ball and withdrawing from all family or social life, a self-defence mechanism whereby I figured if I don't speak to or see or spend any time with my mum then it will hurt me less. Which is, truthfully and completely shamefully, what I was doing yesterday.

A rumour has it that 
It's getting late
Time marches on 
Just can't wait

None of us know how much longer my mum has to live. She has very wisely steered well clear of the old TV show cliché of wanting to know how many weeks or months or years or days or hours she has to go. No good can come from getting into that mindset. No-one knows how much longer they have left. I could die today. So could you. Or we could both laugh about how I suggested we might both die today in a blog post I wrote 75 years ago one day in a pissy rest home. The important thing is just to make the best of everything. That is all anyone can do.

The worst part of this is actually knowing that I am right. Right, right here. That my deeds now need to match my sage words and thoughts. That is the hardest part. Harder than knowing that my mum probably won't be around for much longer. Because I know that I will be alright. That is credit to her. I now need to be a credit to her for however long it is she has left.

The clock keeps turning 
Why hesitate
You silly fool 
You can't change your fate

And frankly I am terrified. I've not cried yet. I've not really felt anything yet. I don't know if I've got anything left to give. I hope that I will come out of this pleasantly surprised in myself and proud. In fact, I know I will. But I'm not looking forward to it, because it is going to hurt.

Good times 
These are the good times.

On hair

As every male stand-up comedian will no doubt have informed you, men get hairier as they get older. It's unrelenting, unavoidable and completely without evolutionary justification. Unless one day in the future there comes a time when that one gossamer-thin hair which grows out from the middle of your earlobe's natural use becomes apparent.

It is starting to happen to me and it is a fascinating process. Some hairs I can cope with. I have one or two grey hairs around my temples and another couple on my chin. I don't anticipate that I'll necessarily go grey very quickly, for one thing neither of my parents have and for another I am quite fair-haired. So I approach greying with a serene equanimity.

I wish I could retain such calm for all of my hair woes. However, for as many places as there are on the body where a man can grow a rogue hair (I now believe this to be literally anywhere), there are an equal number of potential psychological reactions.

Allow me to offer an example. I have rather fair haired and thin eyebrows. But old lefty has, for about a decade now, been home to a pair of mad old man epic eyebrow hairs. They grow merrily to twice the length of their fellows and during windy weather poke me in the eye. But they are platinum blond in colour and consequently fairly invisible.

HOWEVER. Yesterday, in the same eyebrow, I noticed a similarly eccentric rogue hair but this one was dark brown. Dark brown! I immediately rended garments and howled at the moon. WHY ME, OH LORD?

I am not the hairiest man. It's something of a tradition in my family, we're not particularly hairy men. I'm probably a little bit hairier than my dad. My younger brother has much less facial hair than me but far better leg hair. He has proper man's leg hair. Fortunately, I do not have any strong desire to see either of these two immediate male relatives in the nip, so I can't speak for their other areas. And everybody carries their own burdens. But I mean honestly, do I really have to have such a hairy back of the neck? It defies belief so it does so it does.

Obviously, many people's curse is another person's dream and I am well aware that lots of people would clamber over hot coals to have as much hair as I do. I mean, I'm not having to shave my eyelids or fend off the amorous advances of Irish Wolf Hounds, I'm just a fairly standard man in their early 30s. With a man's courage.

And increasingly hairy nostrils.

On bereavement

So, bereavement then.

As a hard-hearted double-macho bastard (and, more importantly, so far a lucky one), I've not experienced much of it in my life. Curiously enough, I know a bit about it, though, as my dad runs a local church bereavement support scheme so I've sort of absorbed some of that knowledge down the years.

As regular readers will know, my cat had to be put to sleep on Friday and that made me very sad. But I'm worried I'm not being sad enough. Yes, I wept like a child as soon as I got back from being brave at the vet's. And yes, there's the standard things: was that noise him? Is that him there? I'd better not leave that out, he'll do that in it and so on. But, and it pains me to say it, at the moment every time I remember he's not about any more it's coming as a bit of a relief as much as anything else.

For the last year or so of his life he'd become a bit of an invalid, really. He'd done it in a cunningly gradual way, so as to trick us all into not seeing the obvious truth that his quality of life had gone. I don't, won't and haven't felt bad for making the decision I did, even for a single second. It was the right thing to do. However, I increasingly find myself in turmoil about whether or not I should feel sadder.

In many ways, Charlie had been a spent force for a long time. A bit of a burden, even. I can't begin to tell you how much I hate myself for thinking or writing all these things, but they ARE true. It didn't mean my feelings for the old bugger changed. I suppose that all of the pain and suffering (on both sides) in his final months makes his passing easier.

And yet this nagging bloody thought still won't leave me be. In a way, I'd like just once to walk into a room and miss him so much I just burst into tears. But I really don't think it's going to happen. I honestly don't know whether or not I'm willing to accept that.

On holidays

I'm not one of nature's holiday takers. I don't really like to travel much, or be away - although I find I enjoy it more and more as I get older. Also, I like to have everything to hand at all times, which either means absurdly OCD packing or leg twitching and anxiously staring into space.

However, I think that the real reason that I am not a holiday fan is because of Hunstanton 1995.

I think that this holiday was three weeks of the most exquisite purgatory. I think, anyway. Because as far as I can recall, the whole break lasted a thousand years. There's a chance I'm still there now. I want to stress that no names have been changed or occurrence exaggerated in the following.

August 1995 was one of the hottest and driest British summers then on record. I was 15 and my brother was 12. My parents, who I tend to call mum and dad, were 39 and 41 respectively. Yeah, I know. I've got young parents. Get used to it. As we arrived at the alarmingly named LOOK OUT holiday park in Old Hunstanton (its the bit of Norfolk which faces the east, aka The Olden Days), and I'll never forget this, my mother said "OOH, we've got the detached chalet. Well that's a bit of luck".

If it was in a cartoon, this chalet would have been up a mountain, with a jagged path, bats and a storm cloud perennially hanging over the roof. It was even more of a portal to Hades than Dana Barrett's fridge. For one thing, Dana Barrett's fridge worked. The benefits of our detachment - additional privacy and ability to make more noise - were immediately negated by the fact that the toilet window opened directly onto the main path for park dog walkers and that within hours we'd all stopped talking to each other.

There wasn't particularly much to say. Once we'd established that if you opened the windows the chalet filled with flies and wasps, that if you shut them you would boil and die, that there was an anthill in one of the bedrooms and that the microwave had just exploded, most conversation topics had been exhausted.

The reason the chalet filled with flies and wasps as soon as the windows were opened was because it was really very hot and the entire park's bins were piled up just out the back. On the first evening there was at least some respite from the insect menace, when some rogue farmers piled up all their old tractor tyres and set fire to them in a field, shrouding the entire area in a dense, choking fog.

In many ways, there were several portents of doom. The carpet was completely covered in dog hair. The bins. The flies. The eye contact with elderly strangers when you were having a shit. The fact the glasses were all so cheap and flimsy that within a week my brother had managed to break three of them by no greater expedient seemingly than using them to hold fluids. One of them, I swear to god, met its end when an ice cube went through the side of it.

The laws of physics having been temporarily suspended around us, my brother took advantage by hitting a golf ball's sweet spot so true on the pitch and putt course that the resulting anti-gravity missile nearly killed our father. Who was, by this point, covered in beef curry after a pub mishap.

Everything that could have gone wrong did. For three whole weeks. At least twice we attempted a trip to Norwich only to abort out of sheer boredom, frustration or our increasingly strong desire to disband and join other families. The wretched misery of the whole thing, exacerbated by the oppressive and relentlessly cheerful hot weather, drained our will to live every bit as much as the painting awaiting our return to the chalet each evening, which depicted a crying child. After two weeks I snapped, drew a smiling face on a bit of paper and blu-tacked it on, in a brief respite from killing wasps. It didn't help. It only reminded me of the bloke who walked his dog, seemingly in sync with the movement of my bowels.

Come the end of the trip, the wordless car journey home was enlivened by my dad ploughing off the road. Had he died? Had he given up and decided it would be best for humanity if we all went out with him? No, he needed a wee, and an emergency lay-by pit stop was the only way. What was interesting was that although we've all spoken of the incident since, no-one batted an eyelid at the moment it actually happened. As if we all knew the coup de grâce was all that could save us.

The catharsis of telling my uncle and aunt about our woes that Christmas was so total, so explosive, that not one of us wasn't left weeping with laughter. It was the strongest indication to me yet that life in a sitcom isn't necessarily funny for the people involved. Terry and June were in fact enduring a desperate existential crisis which threatened to engulf their sense of self. Frank Spencer had probably become entwined in a Faustian pact.

There isn't even an overarching moral to this tale, that's the worst thing. None of us came away any wiser. Nor did the release of telling the story (which before we'd all agreed must never be uttered again) bring us closer together or help us to a greater realisation of the importance of family in our lives. None of us were made by it. None of us were broken, but it definitely didn't make anyone stronger for the experience, either. It was just a shit holiday. A really really shit holiday.

On eels

This is likely to be the vaguest blog post I've written in a while. But it deals with a number of family things that I don't particularly want to write about yet. And besides, as I have already found out, I couldn't do it nearly as well as Mark Oliver Everett.

This week I've been reading his autobiographical book, Things The Grandchildren Should Know. I first encountered Eels in January 1997 and the reason was simply because I thought that Novocaine for the Soul was a great song. I was right. It was and it still is. It was my brother who really got into Eels, though. When their second album came out Electro-Shock Blues came out in autumn 1998 he was right on top of it.

"The songs are all about how everyone in his family died", he explained with a customary bluntness. 'What a pisser', thought I, with likewise. 'No wonder all the songs are so MISERABLE'. I was 18 years old.

After reading E's book, though, and finding out about these things in rather more context and depth, I felt a strong need to revisit a record I'd probably not listened to in 12 years. If you've not done it in a similar amount of time, or never have, I recommend that you do. Over the last 24 hours I've barely listened to anything else. It's a quite extraordinarily beautiful and powerful piece of work.

A lot has happened since 1999. 31 year old me has difficulty getting through the whole thing without crying or feeling like they've just swallowed a whole Cornetto, wide end first. This is partially due to the subject matter: death, illness, depression, suicide and lung cancer (which is as far as I'll be going this time) but no doubt also due to the quality of the songs themselves and the enormous human character they convey.

Its most extraordinary characteristic is how it remains an uplifting experience whilst never denying the darkness. The final line of the final song, P.S. You Rock My World is "and maybe it's time to live". Art, music, literature. Its greatness for me is its shapeshifting ability, its scope for changing in meaning depending on the observer, the time or the situation. It's what makes it so endlessly fascinating and exciting. And maybe it IS time to live.

Who knows where the time goes?

My niece is five (5!) years old today. This is as good a time as any to reflect on the speed of life and on how you've been wasting yours. But I'm not going to.

I am very proud of my niece in so many ways. I admire her imagination, her spirit and her willingness to do stuff. She has an instinct for performance and exhibitionism that I should be jealous of, but luckily I am a very charming person and am not. I am just pleased. Above everything else, she is a respectful, thoughtful and loving person.

Before she was born I was thinking about learning how to do uncle stuff. I spent some time in the bath practicing blowing soap bubbles and in the garden pinging the heads off of bindweed flowers. Of course, five years down the line, I'm still rubbish at both. That's not really who I am.

But it's alright, because the person I actually am is equally good uncle material. I'm unlikely ever to be able to shower her with riches or let her use my beach house in Malibu for a weekend, but that's just life. Life takes all manner of unexpected turns, so who knows? Six weeks before she was born I broke my neck and so nearly never got to meet her at all.

What I have been taught by having children - I now also have a nephew - in my life is that retrospection or thinking about the future are very much for later. Children teach you to live in the now and for the moment. It's something which it's been important to regain sight of. This new carpe diem attitude is surely proven by the very existence of this blog post. My niece can't read, thinks I, so I can say what I like. The fact she starts school on Wednesday and the fact that she'll be reading us all under the table in a trice barely even registers.

So this is why I'm not beating myself up today about five years whizzing by or any time wasted. I was 26 when she was born and am 31 now. You can't even talk about the person I was back then on the same day. Becoming a better person is a realistic ambition to have for the future, I think, so I reckon I should feel happy today. So I will.