D is for Death...comes to smallscaleworld

Actually, death comes to all of us...

This is little Jasmine, she was eight years old the other day, not that old, even for a cat, but sadly she breathed her last today. I had hand-reared her when she was a kitten and wouldn't follow her siblings on to solids, she had been her Mothers first, and she (her mum) didn't get the hang of it until the second one and a bit of non-veterinary intervention from me...like I can teach a mother cat anything!!

Anyway - while I seemed to teach her mother how the deliver the subsequent three, the first was never quite the norm afterwards and would have starved if I hadn't fed her from a syringe. She lost her eye about two years ago, it just marbled over, so the vet took it out, but she was already getting white hairs in her otherwise perfect witches-familiar uniform black!

Then a couple of days after the above shot was (29th September) taken she got ill again and while the vet was sure it wasn't cancer (and sold us two courses of totally useless antibiotics), I knew different as my mate John lost his little cat Charlotte to the same thing...anyway we did the best we could until the inevitable, which came this afternoon with a quick injection.

She's now on the far right (no bullfighting! Although the odd mouse 'got it'), with 7 of her fellow felines to play with...I know - there are only six headstones - but life being stranger than fiction, one of the graves has two cats in it; neither of which belonged to us, they happened to be 'returned' to us by neighbours within hours of each other - both traffic related, and we never found the real owners so laid them together.

In time she will - of course - get a hardy Jasmine trained  up the fence-panel behind her, despite usually being called 'Blackitt'! But a silver-lining (if there are any) in pet cat deaths is the fact that unless you've called it something really silly like Moon-unit Dweezil the III, you can normally find a Shrub-rose to match, as we did with John's Charlotte the other year (a nice yellow standard). Not a trick that works quite so well with Rover or Fido, which is why gardeners should have cats, not dogs!!

We never seem to forget our pets, they fade, as all things do (except Alexander the Great, Caesar and Genghis Kahn!) but fond memories always remain, so just wanted to say she was much loved, is sorely missed and won't be forgotten.



Normally I wouldn't be quite so publicly sentimental, but I've had a mare of a day on another front and death has been an aspect in the background this last few weeks.



A chap most of you have probably never heard of; Clive Fairweather (Telegraph Tribute) passed away the other day, I only met him once or twice myself, but thought I'd add my only anecdote...

My brother and I were about 12 or 13, and had been holidaying in Europe with dad, when Clive who was at the time connected with the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC), a territorial unit of some historical significance (not least - that they are older than the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company of the US Army...by a hundred years!! - it's a friendly rivalry) who had been exercising in Southern Germany with me and my brother tagging along like a couple of annoying little tykes (because we were!). Anyway: the unit travelled up to Wildenrath by coach at the end of the course from where they would fly back to UK. Our father was flying with them, but Clive and a future Lord Mayor of London, had decided to drive.

Well when we got to Wildenwrath to meet the 'plane, all the troops were given the list of stuff they couldn't take on the flight, and started dumping vast quantities of hexamine fuel blocks, lighter fluid, cigarette lighters, book matches and the like in the ash-trays (little did  I know a few years later I'd be stubbing my own camels out in the same ash-trays!). Now...my brother and I had developed a taste for all things 'compo', being soldier's brats, and ran around collecting all this stuff up, in the end we had a sandbag full of highly of combustible, flammable, explosive material which the lovely Clive then helped us smuggle through customs in his Mercedes...we'd never been in a Mercedes either. He also stopped at the services to buy breakfast when we said our parents never stopped at the services!

I met Clive again at my Father's 80'th, and he still remembered the incident and even managed to remind me that my brother and I had climbed into the luggage racks on the coach to sleep (and escape from soldiers boots!), something I'd forgotten and I have a good memory! He was in short - a nice man.



And then this week, Clive Dunn (Corporal Jones in Dad's Army) passed away and the obit's revealed a man who was far more interesting and complicated than you would ever have guessed from his role as the famous veteran of colonial brush-fire wars in some indeterminate period that seemed to preclude WWI!

Another good man.



Now - actor, cat or friend of parent? They all enriched the world in which they lived, and their passing diminishes the present a little, spare a thought for them, or someone/something you've lost recently.

Normal - cynical - service will resume shortly, although this close to Christmas it's only a matter of time before I get maudlin again!

Happier Times - although still a bit thin!

I suppose I should just mention that also this week sometime, bigoted, right-wing bible-belt Republicanism apparently died - almost by accident, so while diminished slightly in the short term; the world is a better place already. {June 20th 2021 - fatal last words - four years later the Republicans would give us Trump for four years of dark madness . . . }