Memento Mori

Tags

Birds, Inspiration, Memento Mori, Nature, Novels, The Hidden Valley, Writing

Time is stretching. It moves differently here in the Hidden valley.

The new house is talking to me. It’s telling me to write. It’s saying, look at my epic pine trees, listen to the bucolic peace, and for fuck’s sake write something. Well I am. About 15K into a novel, which is a thing that is happening, but life is immeasurably different to six months ago, life that is here in abundance. And so is death. Nature is on display and it’s difficult not to let Mr. Horror Writer out to start describing all the crazy shit. It would be easy to give yourself over to a particularly morbid outlook with the preponderance of animal death that has become nearly a weekly occurrence. From the large to the small. From the winged to the furry.

The sheep that visited us to die slowly on the river bank. A pretty place for it to die, amongst the nettles and pine cones, where it was swiftly consumed by a variety of other creatures. From life to death. From functional to food. Until the farmer came and silently removed it.

Or the mental thrush that flew full speed at the gigantic double-glazed window in Alexis’ studio and broke its neck. We watched it gasp its final, desperate, pained few breaths and then die in the grass.

Or the bat on the floor, or the other sheep out in that field, or the Great Tit behind the wood panelling, or the Chaffinch in the flue.

Or the three dead baby blue tits. Barely formed. Stiffened egg yolk with feathers and beaks and vestigial eyes. Cast from their nest in the eaves and dashed apart on the stones beneath. But the parents returned, hatched more and we hope they survived.

Memento fucking Mori.

But nature nurtures in equal measure.

Like the gooseberry bushes growing from the ruins of an old mill building about twenty metres or so from the house. And from the same ruin, the several mature ash trees exploding up to the sky. Or the wild raspberry bushes and brambles dripping from practically every hill-road verge, poking out between hawthorn, gorse and nettle. Or the feverfew pushing up from beneath the gravel in the front garden. Or the water that rises up out of the ancient mineral-rich rock into a tank, then down a steep embankment in a pipe, across a burn, and by the action of gravity up the hill to the house.

 

And there is life here in abundance. And I’d happily sit and watch it all day.

The Birds.

The leucistic chaffinch. A white chaffinch with black markings. Shorn of its pigment through some genetic process.

The ubiquitous pheasant. Three of them hanging out on the bridge as I pass in the car. A couple having a natter in the middle of the road, only moving at the most leisurely of paces.

The red-legged partridge! Black grouse!

And… robins, chaffinches, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, swallows, swifts, lapwings, siskins, sparrows, goldfinches, blackbirds, wood pigeons, magpies, ravens, crows (The Crow Wood), starlings, treecreepers, wrens, crossbills, merlin, buzzards, red kites, wagtails, thrushes and woodpeckers off the top of my head.

Flocks of thirty-plus small birds, unidentified as yet, but most likely youthful pheasants, or possibly youthful grouse.

Things on four legs.

Pine martens! Big fluffy beasts, roaming the countryside. Cute as hell, but will take your chickens apart if you leave the coop open.

Roe deer. Singly, in pairs or in tiny family groups, springing through the fields, or by the roadside panicked by the hurtling ton of metal that has just roared around the corner towards it.

Field mice, caught in our kitchen trap – a humane trap, I should add. Made of see-through plastic with air holes, catching Mr Mouse in the act of enjoying a pile of peanut butter. They are then repatriated to the field, across both burns and well off the road. No doubt, they just follow us back to the house the next day and have another peanut-butter-feast and imprisonment session. Cute as they are, they shit everywhere.

Bats. Not sure what type. Possibly Pippistrelles… out at deep dusk they come, from their nests under the zinc ridges on the roof, circling and diving for insects.

Foxes. A cub. Sitting in the middle of the road. Running off at the last moment. An adult, bounding long-legged through a field of knee-high grass. Just yards from the oblivious sheep.

Various scurrying smaller rodents, crossing the road. Rabbits. Hares.

Frogs. Toads big enough and horny enough to sit on one of the substantial toadstools that spore from the damp leaf-litter.

Insects.

In their hordes. Shiny carapaced beetles and multi-limbed winged things. Midgies, but the less psychotic East-coast variety. Wasps, bees and something I can only hope was a hornet, because if it wasn’t then we’re all in deep trouble.  

And the best for last. Spiders. Controversial eight-legged creatures. Feared by many, but gravely misunderstood. Despite their hard work cleaning a house up of mindless little flies, many of you still see fit to expel them in jars and flick them from windowsills. Worse fates await a spider. Flattened beneath a slipper or rolled-up magazine for example.

It’s tough on the small things all round, but to watch them cling on to life through anything, to fight every moment to breathe their last, to live whatever the cost, it’s humbling and terrifying at the same time.

Memento Mori. Remember that you will die.

Just don’t forget to live.

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Boris the Cat

Tags

Boris, Cats, Edinburgh, Memorial, Writing

Boris started life in the most desperate of circumstances. Stuffed in a bin bag with his brothers and sisters as a new-born kitten and left by the bins at the bottom of a Glasgow tenement garden.

Thanks to the brother of my then work-colleague, whose garden it was, he was rescued, nursed to health and eventually landed on my doorstep, tiny and black and curious. I knew there was something quite special about him from that first day, when he fell asleep under my bed and snored with that wheezy snort he always had.

He lived with me for the best part of five years in two far-too-small flats, but it wasn’t until I moved into the Stockbridge Colonies in Edinburgh with Alexis that he really was able to be his true, happiest self. We had a little garden, and the street was quiet so he was finally able to enjoy and explore the outdoors, even though the flat was still pretty damn small. He sunned himself on the bench in front of our bay window, sat amongst the daffodil leaves and ferns sniffing the air, watching blue tits and robins, hoverflies and bumblebees. He was a pacifist. He never really hunted, preferring to watch the birds flit from the laburnum tree to the bride tree and back again. He occasionally toyed with a beetle or a cranefly in that cute, slightly obsessive way cats have, but seemed to just enjoy following their crazy progress with his huge expressive eyes.

Everyone thinks their cat is the best in the world, or is the most eccentric character and truly the greatest cat by far. That says so much about the special bond that can exist between a human and a cat. It’s a relationship of mutual benefit. Boris was never shy about expressing his opinions. I’ve never met another cat with such a large vocabulary. From the tiniest little half-meows and throaty grunts and snorts, to his multi-syllabic meow-screams, telling you off for not doing what he wanted you to do, thoroughly putting you in your place. I’ve never known a cat to express indignation quite so pointedly as Boris could when you weren’t quite living up to your part of the bargain as human-owner.

He loved his fuss, his food (particular favourites – olives, cheese, tuna and ham) his catnip mouse, scratching post, sunbeams, eating grass (even though it made him sick nearly every time) and most of all, preening his shiny, immaculate midnight-black fur to perfection. He loved to sleep buried under blankets where he would leave an indentation coated in that fur. His hairs would follow us around the country. It wouldn’t be unusual to be 300 miles away and suddenly find a Boris hair in your eyeball.

He would tap you on the arm if he wanted fuss, or if you stopped with the fuss too soon. It wouldn’t be unusual to be lying in bed and have a paw stretch up from below and touch your arm. He would headbutt you, violently rub his cheek on your laptop screen, knock the book you were reading out of the way so you paid him the attention he deserved. He loved having his belly rubbed, would purr like an engine, loved having the bridge of his nose stroked with the tip of a finger, would get the hiccups when he became too excited and the fuss was just too much.

He had an uncanny ability to tell the time. His concept of routine was quite something to behold. He knew when I was coming home, would wake from his afternoon slumber about ten minutes or so before I got in and would be sat on the arm of the sofa waiting for me with a feed me meow. Sometimes we were like E.T. and Elliot. If he was feeling a bit under the weather, so would I. If I was nervous or upset, he would always pick up on it.

Like many cats, he inherited many names. Some cute, some cuddly, some profane, some ridiculous, some whose meaning would take far too long to explain…

He was: Fluffyhead, Fluffmonster, Fuzzyhead, Little Pal, Supercat (because of the way he stretched his front legs straight out past his face when he slept on his stomach). He was: Jobby-ferret, Spunk-badger, Shit-weasel, Captain Dingleberry, Spaghetti-head, Fluffbum, Dude and many many others. But most of all he was my Buddy.

Nearly three months ago we left Edinburgh. Through various miracles we managed to buy a beautiful house surrounded by woodland in a hidden valley, deep in the Ochil Hills. I had hoped it might be a fabulous retirement home for Boris, approaching his 14^th birthday.

He enjoyed his time here, while he could: chasing his favourite treats up the long hallway, watching the pheasants and chaffinches from the many large windows, snoozing on the sofa, stretching out in sunbeams on the wood floors, tentatively exploring the garden and a house bigger than he’d ever seen.

He had been losing weight, and starting to go off his food little by little, electing to sleep under the blanket on the sofa more and more. I thought his poor old teeth were giving him trouble so took him for some dental work at the vet. They found something more troubling, and over the last couple of weeks the liver disease ate away at him, taking away the things that made him Boris.

On Friday 2^nd September, one day after his 14^th birthday, and after the most difficult and heart-breaking decision I’ve ever had to make, the vet came to the house and helped him find some final peace.

I had hoped he would get to experience life here in the new house for much longer. To enjoy the heat of the wood-burner in winter; to explore the bushes and pine trees and fields of ferns. Still, what a way to come from the bottom of a Glasgow garden, dumped ignominiously by some callous bastard to a home where he was loved and cherished and had all the space in the world to be Boris.

We buried him in a small glade, between two vast old pine trees, with a handsome stone cairn to mark his spot. He can sleep peacefully now in the place he began to love.

Night night, Buddy. X