The Things I did not say

Posted By Tania Kindersley.

The sun is shining. It has been a good, productive week. I am generally happy. I have very little about which to complain. And yet, and yet.

I told you, a few weeks ago, that one of my dogs was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. I told you how it struck at my own heart. Since then, I have decided on a stoical and optimistic strategy. The pills seem to be working; there are things to be done. The magical thinking kicks in: I can keep her alive, if it kills me.

What I did not say is that I took her to see the vet again on Friday. He was not optimistic. He is pleased that her lungs have been cleared of fluid, thanks to the miracle of medication. But as he listened to her poor old ticker, with his stethoscope, he frowned. The murmur is still pronounced. That will not get better. That will be the end of her.

Oh, I said, a little plaintive, but you know, she is well in herself. He nodded. I waited, hoping he would give me good news. He would not. He will not say it, quite, out loud, but we both know she is in her final months. For all that she pricks her ears and lopes along like a panther when we take our morning walk, I know that everything is not quite normal. I do not need the vet to tell me that.

Unlike her soft sister, she is the independent dog. She has a cat-like tendency to take herself off on her own. She is the wanderer, the one who does not come when she is called. (She gives me her Duchess look, and carries on with what she is doing, and returns in her own sweet time.) When we are sprawled out on the sofa in the evening, she is the one who will suddenly sigh, jump down, and spread herself out on the floor. When she does this, she looks back at me, with her amber eyes, as if to say: don't take it personally. She just likes a hard surface.

I always know when something is not quite right, because she gets needy. This is most unlike her. She is doing this now. As I sit at my desk and type, she comes and rubs herself against my knees. I keep my eyes on the screen, and stretch down my left hand, to rub her ears. She pushes her head against my leg, as if to say: concentrate. She butts her nose towards me, as if to say: come on, I am more important than those mere letters.

Her sister, who is the intuitive one (she licks tears off my face when I cry during sad films) also knows something is up. She will not move from The Duchess's side, and indulges in frantic grooming sessions.  They have a sweet habit of tidying each other, cleaning eyes, ears, eyebrows with gentle, tender movements of the tongue, but at the moment it is all one-sided. The dear Pigeon licks and licks and licks, as if by that very action she can make it all better.

Last night, I was watching Ashes to Ashes. I had not seen it on the television. I was delighted to catch up with it now. It was so funny and clever and well-written that I laughed out loud. It took me back to my own days in the eighties, when I used to go to the Embassy, and hang out with entirely unsuitable gentlemen, and wandered up and down the King's Road, in the days when what is now Marks and Sparks was The Great Gear Market, and the benches outside Safeway were populated with Chelsea Pensioners and punks called Spit and Razor. (Actually, they were very nice suburban boys who would come up on the tube from Amersham; it was just they had piercings and green hair.) As I watched, I stretched out my hand to the Duchess's chest. I could feel her heart, struggling, beating in a ragged, irregular pattern, banging against her ribcage. When I felt the Pigeon in the same place, there was a steady, low, strong beat. I did not need a special veterinary implement to see the difference.

I rolled the Duchess onto her back. She gazed up at me with her straight, grand gaze. I said, out loud: Could you not live for ever?

I said: I cannot imagine life without you.

That is what I have not said.

Pictures of the day are on one, glorious note:

There is a voice in my head which says: well, all that is a bit self-indulgent, is it not? But then I think: what the hell else is a blog for? If you can't indulge, once in a while, then I don't know what else you can do.

No hill today. My mind is with my beautiful canine, and that's enough.

In which I invent a new diet

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I know there is marching on the streets of London, and rebels taking government strongholds in Libya, and mounting unrest in Syria, and mourning in Japan. But forget that: I have invented a DIET. Hold the front page, baby.

Remember that great moment in The Big Chill, where Jeff Goldblum is on the telephone with the longest cord in the world, trying to pitch his editor an idea for a story? Jeff is busking it. He says:

'Hope, hope, where did our hope go. It's about lost hope'.

Pause.

'Yeah, well you think everything is boring. You wouldn't say that if it was the Lost Hope Diet.'

I actually hate diets. I disapprove of them on political and utilitarian grounds. They make lovely women feel inadequate, and they almost never work. If they did work, the Diet Industry would not be making millions, and a new stupid diet book would not come out each week, to bore us into catatonia. As Sarah and I said, rather dogmatically, in Backwards, the only thing that works is to eat a little less and move around a little more, but you can't make money out of that.

I often think, in a giving perspective rather than a morbid way, of one's deathbed. I can guarantee that when you are breathing your last, you will not be saying: thank God I never ate any carbohydrates. I am a proud size fourteen, and I shall not be moved.

However, even at my most hardline, I do admit there are times when everyone, men and women both, would like to shift half a stone. It's not a question of body hatred, but of feeling a little lighter, especially as the weather gets milder and thoughts of spring abound. I did that exact thing this week, without even trying.

I call it the Deadline Panic Diet. Because I took last week off, naughtily, I had to work twice as hard this week. I read five books, took five thousand words of notes, wrote four thousand words of actual book, and thought of almost nothing else. Because of this, I did not have time, in the day, for cooking proper meals, and was too tired in the evening. But I needed strength, and protein. So I found myself simply slapping a steak on the grill pan, and having it with garlic butter, or poaching a piece of salmon and eating it with mayonnaise. I had bacon for breakfast. In the evening, I had smoked mackerel fillets, or salt and pepper prawns, or tuna sashimi. There was no time for even salad (all that chopping), let alone side vegetables. In order not to get scurvy, I made a huge pot of my newly invented tomato and beetroot soup (recipe here), which happily lasted the week, and made sure all the food groups were represented.

I do not weigh myself much, but I had happened to get on the scales on Monday. I stepped on them this morning, and was amazed to find that half a stone had simply gone. I had felt no consciousness of deprivation, or even trying to diet in any way. I had made myself a big pot of popcorn with salt and olive oil on Tuesday, and naughtily bought scampi and chips from the van in the village on Friday. I still took sugar in my pitch-black morning coffee. But the essence of the week had been protein and soup.

So there we are, my darlings. In the spirit of public service broadcasting: that is what you do if you need to get into a slightly too-tight frock. Do not spend your hard-earned cash on Durkin or Murkin or whatever his name is; you can get it here for free.

And now for your Saturday photographs.

It was a day of clouds and sudden sun; the colours were singing:

Those were all taken within ten minutes of each other. See how the light shifts even in that short time?

Everything in the garden is suddenly bursting into leaf, as if they got a memo saying Grow, GROW:

But you can see that the bare winter tangle is still there:

My current favourite tree is that silvery one that you see each day in the foreground of the hill shot. Today, I went to examine it up close. To my absolute amazement, I found this:

I'm not sure I ever saw that on a tree before. This one is not on my normal walk, so I have only ever watched it from a distance. All the time, it was putting out incredible catkins.

Ladyships, in all their outrageous beauty:

(The Duchess has her 'seen it all before' face on, which makes me laugh.)

Today's hill is lost in the white sky:

Have a lovely weekend. And for my readers in Blighty, don't forget the clocks go forward tomorrow. I usually do.

Miscellaneous Friday

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I do not know how those of you who have jobs and children and husbands and wives and civil partners and dogs and social lives actually do the whole blog thing. I have to: write a book; be nice to two exceptionally nice canines; call my friends on the telephonic device; and cook food. That's it. I do not have to commute or attend to the conflicting demands of three small people under nine, or listen seriously to another half's woes (or joys, perhaps, on good days), or worry about the school play. And yet there are still days, like today, when I sit down at the end of the week and my mind is as blank as the Arctic tundra.

I do, admittedly, have to tend my obsession with American politics, and in fact all politics; think about different ways to make delicious things to eat; contemplate a bewildering array of ephemera; and, obviously, keep up my typing skills. But really it's not that much.

So I have not much in my poor old head. The day was all eaten by work. When I was not working, I thought of: the Song of Solomon; the musical nature of Hebrew; Salman Rushdie; the faint kitchness of Stratford on Avon; the importance of friendship; whatever happened to Romeo Gigli; and whether I should buy a coat exactly like the one that Benedict Cumberbatch wears in Sherlock.

I also contemplated the greatness of aunts. I spoke to the Beloved Cousin this morning. She is also an aunt, and takes her duties very seriously. My nieces are my joy and pride. The tiny great-nephew came for a visit yesterday, bringing with him gales of happiness. The aunt does not get a good press. She is associated with dowdiness and second-best. Thanks to naughty PG Wodehouse, she is sometimes ascribed a rather gorgon-like aspect. I love being an aunt. I think the aunts need a revamp. It's not the most important thing in the world, what with everything that is going on, but it is my very, very small thought for the day.

I realise that the photographs are getting a bit same old, same old; I have developed a terrible habit of shooting the same things over and over again. But here are a few for your Friday viewing pleasure:

Have again been useless about comments, but in reply to two specific queries:

The little blue flowers are a mystery. I thought they were a type of crocus, but they do look rather like irises. They are only three inches high though. I have a terrible habit of buying and planting bulbs and throwing away the packets and then not remembering.

And the hill is about three miles away from my house, I suppose, as the crow flies. As I come out of my front door and look left, it is what I see. I photograph it with a zoom lens from just outside.

Have a lovely Friday.

In which I make a confession

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I am aware that I have a horrid tendency to flaunt my liberal credentials. Oh, look at me, with my fair-mindedness and my determination to see all sides of an argument and my freedom from bigotry. Regardez-moi, with my Child of the Enlightenment banner, waving from the moral high ground. It is perfectly ghastly, and it must stop at once.

Sometimes, because I believe that we all carry a little prejudice in us, however hard we battle against it, I examine myself for the bigot within. I am ashamed to say that I do tend to make assumptions, without any available evidence, against: people who drive four by fours, unless they are actual farmers who need to drive across fields; hedge fund managers; women who refuse to eat bread; and the very, very rich. I also harbour suspicions about fundamentalists of any religion, although to be fair, they do return the favour by believing I am going to burn in hell for eternity.

Even if I were entirely free from any prejudice at all, I cannot really take credit for it. I have to give the kudos to my old dad, who does not even notice race, class or religion, but divides the world strictly into two camps: bores, and non-bores. I would not even say that he harbours a direct animus towards the dullards, although he does have a tendency to groan aloud when he sees one hoving onto the horizon. (He is the only man I know who actually groans; grinny-groan, he calls it.) He is an iconoclast without even meaning to be. He was christened Gay. One of his favourite hobbies is going up to meaty, sporting men, sticking out his hand, and saying: Hello, I'm Gay. He once did this in a dressing room populated entirely by the Australian cricket team. Chaos ensued.

Today, I discovered that I am a filthy snob after all. I am a flower snob. In celebration of spring, and because as a good citizen I clearly have a duty to keep the economy going, I went to the village to buy some tulips. This was entirely selfless, you understand: in these dark financial times, one must support the small business.

Once there, I decided that tulips were not enough. I was going to make an Arrangement. This plunged me into confusion. The roses were too expensive, even for me. The ranunculas looked a bit dowdy. I was not in the mood for phlox. There were some of those lovely lime green chrysanthemums, which I adore, but I needed a splash of scarlet. The only other flower was the carnation. CARNATIONS??? I shouted in my head. Are you mad? Carnations are awful low-rent flowers, with a hint of pretention, the kind of thing that you find with the even more dreaded maidenhair fern. They are a nasty, cheap Abigail's Party of a bloom, that go along with net curtains and fake Dresden shepherdesses bought out of Sunday supplements.

You see? Revolting, instinctive, ocean-going snobbism of the most rebarbative kind. I had no idea I had it in me.

Once I got over the shock of discovering I was not quite the delightful, prejudice-free human I like to imagine myself, I looked more closely. It turns out that the blowsy pink carnation is not an especially beautiful flower. This is not a class-based, knee-jerk reaction, but observable fact. But the little tight deep red ones are quite, quite gorgeous. All these years I have been turning my toffee nose up at something of tremendous beauty. I bought two folds, in amazed delight, went home and put them in vases, and I don't know if I ever saw anything more pretty in my life. And they are wonderfully cheap. In these straitened times, this is not something to be sniffed at, but something to celebrate. I now declare the Carnation the Official Flower of the Recession. And in the meantime, I am going to put myself in the corner with a big dunce's hat on, until I have learnt the error of my ways.

Today's pictures feature, naturally, far too many shots of The Arrangements, for which I apologise.

Here is the big vase:

Then I discovered that they also looked enchanting in tiny  glasses. The coloured one on the left is a type of Victorian glass which I collect. I wish I knew what they were used for. I like to imagine, fondly, it was for the ladies to have a little eleven o'clock glass of champagne, to keep their strength up:

In my excitement, I cut some heads off by mistake, so I put them in a tiny glass salt cellar, and see how chic they look:

Main one again. Do admit:

Outside, there was also some tremendous flower action:

I cannot tell you how late everything comes into flower up here. In some cases, we are six whole weeks behind the south. So the dear hellebores, in their pomp in March, are like Christmas and Easter rolled into one:

This is the first spring for my little blueberry bushes, and don't they look happy?:

I have been absolutely useless about replying to comments recently, partly because I have not yet quite settled back to routine after my week away, and partly because I am working so hard I do not know what my name is. (983 words today, plus research and three pages of notes.) I do beg your forgiveness. Anyway, one of my dearest readers asked for pictures of the honeysuckle, and here it is, just coming into leaf:

(Also, some of you turn out to be just as fascinated as I by the mouse eyebrows which I mentioned yesterday. I am ashamed to say that I cannot find any more information on them. The book I am reading merely mentions them in passing, and there is no footnote. I am as baffled as you.)

Along with the beauty of the flowers, the dogs were looking particularly fetching today in the spring light, so there are rather too many pictures of them too, since I could not resist.

Dedicated stick chewing:

BISCUITS!!!

I love these close-ups. The Duchess has her 'I'm too grand for my shirt' face on; while the Pigeon is doing her best 'I am so unbelievably good that I must have all the biscuits' impression:

I know it's a terrible sappy thing to say, but I do feel grateful each day that I have such glorious creatures in my house.

And finally, two views of the hill: