Mishmash

The Summer of 1954

"I'm just going up the garden to paint the cat's eyes."

That's not something one says every day.

Yesterday I had painted the flaking Buddha and used the same  black paint to refresh our old stone cat.  He had been crouching on a paving stone for twenty five years. Under that slab is the grave of our first family cat - Blizzard. We acquired him from the RSPCA animal shelter at Bawtry one snowy day in January 1982. By the time we got back to Sheffield  that night,  a full-on blizzard was making driving conditions dangerous. We ditched the car and walked the last half mile back to our terraced house with me gripping the handle of the cardboard pet carrier in which Kitten Blizzard was miaowing in terror. This is how he got his name.

You can't have a black cat with black eyes so I painted them green using oil paint from a tube. And I decided that from now on, he won't be crouching at ground level, he will sit on the stump of  our old horse chestnut tree which we now use as an extra bird table.

I am happy to report that the scaffolding finally came down today and  that the three scaffolders took it all away in their flatbed truck. Now we can see properly that our rendering is the smartest and whitest on the street. It was looking rather shabby beforehand. I am so glad we bit the bullet on that one. I have just got the rendering below our front bay window to paint but before I do that I shall jetwash the block paving in front of our house.

I made a nice spaghetti meal this evening with bacon bits, courgette, cherry tomatoes, fried onion and chopped mushroom with grated parmesan cheese. There was some left - mostly from Shirley's plate. Instead of casting it into the kitchen bin, I chopped it up and chucked it on our lawn. Sure enough, as dusk was descending, I looked out and saw that a fox was cleaning it up for us. The other day the same fox was chowing down a chicken carcass.

Sorry I didn't take photos of the restored Buddha or the stone cat to accompany this writing. Instead I'm sharing two of the pictures that were re-discovered in our attic. That's me with my mother in the summer of 1954 when I was ten months old and the other one is of me with my late brother Simon on my wedding day in 1981.  There were reasons why I asked him to be my best man when there were three or four other blokes I might have picked - including Tony who I went walking with last week.

October 1981