Today, for the first time in eight months...

... I loaded the dishwasher and swept and mopped the kitchen floor without the assistance of a labrador's head in my way at all times.

... Linus used the back door to get in and out of the house, and was able to hang out in the back garden with Milo.

... I drove somewhere with quiet dogs in the back of the car.

... I left a bowl of food on the arm of the sofa while I fetched a drink of water.

... I got to sit on the back step with Cody under one arm and Milo under the other and everyone was quiet and peaceful.

Even so, it's a sad day.

OMG WTF Corner

Srsly, OMGWTF.

Bye Bye Woody

Woody is off to Sweden in the morning to his new family. Yes, he's been up on the Swedish rescue website for two weeks and they've managed to find him a nice, homechecked home where he'll be wanted. Good old Swedes.

I took him for his final walk up the dunes today, and met some people who gave the whole walk an air of unwanted symmetry. As I approached the car with the three dogs in tow and threw them in the boot, this young couple walked up, with a tiny black labrador puppy on a lead. The thing was really, really small - far too small to be out for a walk in the dunes, and probably not vaccinated. They had got it from a "rescue" centre in our vicinity (which also sells puppies. Way to be part of the problem, guys), and the bloke was already sick of it because they'd had it for a week and it cries at night and he wants it to shut up.

Oh yeah, and they were shocked, really shocked, when I told them there was a possibility that their dog could grow to be as big as Woody. "Oh no," the girl said, "they told us in C****n that he'd be miniature!"

So I imagine I'll be seeing their dog again in about eight months time when they accidentally on purpose fail to take it with them when they move house. Circle of life, eh? At least I'll know a little something about labradors next time.

Hey, here's a great plan!

Why don't I order in Chinese food, eat too much of it, get all grumpy from the additives, get a headache, then feel bloated from the salt, then sit up late watching a film I've seen a load of times before, and then go to bed and write about zombies attacking my housing estate!

A good night's sleep guaranteed, I'm sure you'll agree. What could possibly go wrong with this excellent plan?

All the animals are home

This is the best part of coming home from being abroad. All the animals are home safe. Except that Marvin Berry got sick in the kennels and had to go to the vet and get an antibiotic and they think he caught cat flu. We have no idea where he could have got such a thing from, given that he never goes outside, and none of our other cats are ill. Weird.

(Kev-lol has offered to nurse the kitten, but he is barely a kitten anymore. More like a gangly teenager now.)

I am in love with Barack Obama

From the NY Times:

As for the dog, he recognizes it’s a major issue, saying it has generated more interest on our Web site than anything. He says he has two criteria that may not be reconcilable: His older daughter, Malia, is allergic to dogs, so the dog has to be hypoallergenic; at the same time, “our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but obviously a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.”

Have you seen the new king of Bhutan?

Tell you what, I wouldn't mind having his face on my money, eh? Or something.

Is it just me?

Or did anyone else think this Onion article was a bit much?

Stealth Cat

I know you've already seen it, but seriously, I cried when I saw this. (From the laughing.)

One more favour to ask Murricanes

Please do not kill President Barack Obama. Please. That would be a bad thing to do.

Please remember to vote, Murricanes!

That's just a wee reminder in case I don't get a chance to remind you on the day, because I will be in PARIS, FRANCE.

You heard me.

Dog fostering is hard

Yesterday we had some people out to look at Woody. Bless him, he was on his absolute best behaviour, and their own labrador, who had accompanied them, seemed to like him enormously. Certainly the two of them tore around the garden like maniacs. The people themselves seemed really nice too, and mrmonkey and I were kind of hopeful that they might take him, and upset that this would mean he would leave.

So of course we spent the last 24 hours simultaneously looking forward to the easy walks we would have when he was gone, and how much easier our lives would be without him, and missing him like mad already because he is so funny and so affectionate and such a sweetheart.

Then we got a phone call to say that the couple had decided to go another way. Relief! But also worry. Will anyone ever take this dog from us? Will we have him for ever? On the other hand, the longer we have him, the closer he gets to some sort of maturity and, hopefully, more settled behaviour.

Then our foster coordinator said that he might have a good chance of being homed through a rescue in Sweden. This would be slightly traumatic for him because he will have to be locked in a box and go on a plane (which I can't see him liking AT ALL), but he will have a much better chance of a much better home in Sweden than he could possibly have in Ireland.

But I will miss him. I have to keep reminding myself of the days when I could cheerfully kill him, the days when he runs away and doesn't come back, when he knocks over the kids who come to pet him, when he steals cartons of butter off the counter and eats them, when he's just too much. I also have to keep reminding myself that I have two dogs of my own who've been pushed into the background by him, and who will be much happier when he's gone because he will no longer be stepping on them, sitting on them, squashing them against the wall, or crashing into them on the beach.

Mind you, this plan could easily fall through as well, and we could still have him for ever. I think that would be okay. Except when I don't.

With thanks to Chocolate Socialist

Whose livejournal I got this from.

I'm putting it here in case you're one of the three people who checks here and not there.

Happy Days (or, The One Where the Woman is Buried in Sand)

Here's what's great about the Internet. You can go and see a play that is layered with many meanings, and then come home and look up and see what everyone else thought the play was about. Although I often find the programme helpful, it usually only tells you what the playwright, director, and artistically contributing cast members think the play is about. And sure, what would they know?

On the face of it, Happy Days is a Samuel Beckett play in which a woman is buried up to her waist in sand, and her husband crawls about somewhere behind where she is buried. Then, in the second half SPOILER ALERT! she is buried up to her neck, and we are not sure, and she is not sure, if her husband is still alive or if he has died some time while we were off having drinks at the bar during the interval and talking about how nice the seats are in the Abbey nowadays. The woman, Winnie, reminisces about her life and tries to keep herself occupied and cheerful as her life moves from one day to the next, punctuated by startlingly loud bells that tell her when to wake and when to sleep. Although we couldn't figure out whether the bell was ringing more often in the second part because she was falling asleep more often, or whether she was falling asleep more often because the bell was ringing to tell her to, or because several days were passing in a brief period, or what. We then decided that this was how it is when you are reaching the end of your life and you live in an institution, and you can't tell where one day ends and one begins except for the bell, but which bell was it that you heard?

Happy days indeed.

And, of course, there is no great reason for Winnie to be at the end of her days, because she is only 50. So what is happening to her? Luckily for us, Sinead's mam was at the play with her that night, and she said that the play is about dementia. She recognized this for herself immediately, because it had occurred in her family. And, of course, such a reading makes total sense. Clinging on to routines and vague memories, trying to keep herself above the rubble when, all the time, she is increasingly immobilized by the disintegration of her own mind. I haven't seen anyone else give it this reading. The Irish Independent's reviewer suggested it was about love and marriage. I scoffed at the very notion. The Tribune review is more interesting, because it tells you about the controversy that surrounds Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw's interpretations of Beckett (indeed, in this production, Warner has replaced the sand in which Winnie is normally buried with a blasted, rubble-filled landscape, so that Winnie looks a little as though she has gone on holiday to Marbella but her hotel has fallen on her), but even his suggestion that Fiona Shaw "just about" pulls off what is essentially quite a boring play seems all wrong to me.

I was completely riveted by this play from the minute it started. I felt like I got it. I could empathise with the feeling, the fragments and stories that Winnie tried to communicate to her husband, herself, her audience, felt more real to me than anything else by Beckett I've ever seen. Maybe it's just Fiona Shaw. She is absolutely amazing. How she can give such a totally naturalistic performance in such an unnatural play is beyond me, but she does. But more than that, the structure of the play is familiar and understandable, even as it is horrible and unnerving. And by the end, I wanted to run down onto the stage and dig her out with my own bare hands.

And that's all without even mentioning the gun, Brownie, which deserves a whole essay all on its own (and no doubt has many devoted to it, perched on the edge of some English lecturer's desk somewhere), and which Winnie pulls out of her big, black, handbag along with her other ordinary totems, including her nail file and her compact mirror. She addresses the gun (but does not call it Sweetness), then decides she will leave it out. Just right here.

She's just going to leave it right here.

And right here it stays.

And you can't put it out of your mind, and somehow can't believe that she has ever put it out of her mind. She occasionally wanders back to it, suggesting it as a kind of fallback option if all else fails, but there's no real feeling that she's going to use it, at least not while she has the use of her arms. After that, of course, it will be too late.

Unless there was someone around who understood her and love her and knew what she would want.

So maybe it is a play about love after all.

Less is almost always more in television

The BBC has made Strictly Come Dancing ever so slightly worse AGAIN this year. Last year they brought in the extra Sunday night results show, which the fans (me) didn't ask for and don't really want, for several reasons.

1) It involves the bottom two couples from the leader board performing again. I don't understand this aspect of television vote-out shows; it means, in theory, that you have to watch the worst two performances from the previous night again. In Strictly, however, it means you have to watch two of the people who were least popular with the public (usually some no-mark from the middle of the board) perform again, and the judges get to bitch about not wanting to throw out either of them, before they throw out the one I liked better.

2) It is filmed on a Saturday night. Last year they tried to keep this a secret and pretend it was live again on Sunday night, but really, who are they kidding? Also the fact that it's filmed on a Saturday means you can just go and read the leaked results on Digital Spy and not bother watching the show on Sunday if you want. License-payers' money down the drain, if you ask me (hauls up bosom in a haughty manner).

3) You don't get the exciting live Strictly experience of having it all on Saturday night. The fun of the show is dissipated. It's no good.

This year, they've gone one worse. They've added extra couples (fine) and extra group dances (also fine), but instead of having boys week one and girls week two and everyone in together week three, it's boys week one, girls week two, boys week three and girls week four. Last night it was the girls dancing the quick step or the rhumba, and either Jessie Wallace or Jodie Kidd is going home.

This is completely unfair, and not just because I like Jessie Wallace and have a colossal girl-crush on Jodie Kidd, but because both of them are WAAAAYYY better than the four worst boys (John Sergeant, Mark Foster, Andrew Castle, and Don Warrington). Don't get me wrong, neither of them is brilliant, but they are both passable, and they could both easily get a lot better as the weeks go on. Only Don Warrington, of these four, has any hope; John Sergeant is currently at the very top of his game, and Andrew Castle and Mark Foster are both lumbering, gigantic eejits who don't even seem to understand what dancing is, never mind how to do it properly, and yet one of these nice women will be going home tonight.

Or went home last night, rather.

I do love how my other blog pals are writing long, impassioned posts about the credit crunch and international politics, while I rant about the unfairness of the rule changes on Strictly Come Dancing and post videos of my cats.

I know it seems as though my brain has fallen out of my ear, but it hasn't, honest. Think of my blog as like Ronan Collins's radio programme: a brief oasis of sanity in a troubled, economics-obsessed world.

Phear Teh Cuetness!

Good news for niños everywhere

Genetic freakery to end!

All your cats are belong to us!

Jane lives here now.

She is super disoriented at the moment, a state of mind which is probably not helped by the three other cats sniffing at her and making themselves big in her presence while she tries to find a cosy space near a human where she can sit and wait for the world to normalise itself.

I'm sure that if I was a more capable writer with less of a cold or flu, I would have something profound to say about circles and things coming home and remnants of a previous life and so forth.

But my head hurts and I'm tired and I just want to go to sleep and wake up normal.

A bit like Jane.

Oh Paddington, how could you?

Marmite? Really? You've given up marmalade for Marmite?

You treacherous little darling, you.

Chuck? It's your cousin Marvin. Marvin Berry!

The Smidge was starting to look a bit tubby in the tum area, and since that unfortunate incident with the door, and that other unfortunate incident with the futon (when I actually thought she had broken her leg), she is afraid of her toys. So what I reckoned she really needed was a new litle pal to run around with.

We wanted a kitten/cat who was dog friendly, cat friendly, and, most importantly, robust and healthy. Luckily, a lady on the Pets Ireland board was able to help us out, and she drove over from Finglas with a 16-week-old kitten called Berry. He is now named Marvin Berry, although I call him little Roo (he also goes by Mini Smidge). He's an amazing little cat. No sitting around in one room for a week waiting to acclimatise for him. Oh no. He was out and about with his face in everything inside the first couple of hours, and he marched boldly around the dogs for hours on end, annoying them just by being small and forbidden. Woody in particular is fascinated by him, and just follows him everywhere, trying to lick him and wash him and love him. I only worry that he might accidentally swallow him.

The Smidge and Linus have taken to him tremendously as well, and the running around plan is working very well. Not to mention the fact that he hasn't had so much as an ear mite since he arrived.

Marvin Berry is also an affectionate little thing. He likes to be picked up and cuddled, and he loves to nap beside me in the afternoons. He has a loud purr and he loves a bit of a chat, too. Now I have three cats who lie around me on the bed when I'm having a lie-in.

Of course, now that the ex-hubbo and his missus are heading back to the U.S., cat number four will be on the way in the next few weeks. Now that really will be fun in a house this size.