Chateau Midden Cats 1: Dominic & Tiddles

When our family home was being cleared and sorted prior to sale as our parents were both in a care home, and my siblings and I too far away to take it over, there was some eighty years’ worth of family photos to go through.  Being the furthest away, with demanding children, this fell almost entirely to my older siblings.  But they tried to make sure I got to see as many as possible.

I was intrigued by a photo of Granma, possibly in her sixties, holding a black and white cat remarkably like my Felix.  She had always been quite stern with our family tortoiseshell cat Tiddles.  Granma died when I was 13.

“But I thought Granma didn’t like cats” I said to Bigbrother, who is 14 years older than me so had known her longer.

“No, she always had a cat, usually two.”

I got my first cat, Dominic, around my 25^th birthday when another failed romance had persuaded me that I would be forever spinster. 

In the mid-eighties the Squire and I were flatmates.  A Cloggy friend’s cat had had kittens “free to good home”.  She wanted the tabby.  I went with her to choose one saying “If there’s a tortoiseshell and white I’d like it.”

When we got there something that looked like a little bundle of black oily rags ran up to me and I picked him up fell for him.  Dominic grew up into a slinky black witche's cat and was with me for 18 years.

The Squire had his sister Tiger.  When the Squire moved in with her fiancé Tiger went with her.

I was entirely wrong about spinsterhood and about a year later Dominic and I moved in with Phil, the man who became my first husband, in his little Leech Countrystyle cottage in Wallsend.  
It was far too small for us and all our stuff so in 1987 he, I and Dominic moved here to Chateau Midden.

A few months later the Squire phoned.  Her student brother was living in a shared house in Sunderland which had taken in 3 feral kittens.  The landlord objected and homes had to be found or “they’re going to the big cat basket in the sky – and one of them is a tortoiseshell and white”.  We’d flat-shared for five years.  She knew my weakness.  So it was a drive down to Sunderland and back with a mewling cardboard box.  I put down some cat food, which Tiddles scoffed down gratefully.  She stayed within 6ft of me for the next three days and was a beautiful companion.

Dominic didn’t speak to us for a year after she arrived.

Like Granma I’ve had two cats for most of the years since.

There will be more cat history …

Communication Disorder

Ferretfingers’ secondary education started in the Communication Resource Base of a local mainstream school I shall call Hamron College.   

The Base was good, set up with the support of the Local Education Authority’s Special Needs Communications Co-ordinator with an experienced lead teacher, energetic and enthusiastic  second teacher and teaching assistants.  It comprised three rooms with an outside area.   

One room was a classroom with study carrels.  Then there was a short passage to a life-skills room with cooker, sink, fridge etc and door to the quiet outside area.  Off the passage there was an office for private and individual discussions and a “quiet” or “decompression” room for the times pupils needed to be separate.  

 Many little souls who found a big school hard to cope with found their way to the peace and quiet of the Base.

Sadly, after a couple of years Hamron’s management decided to put all their Special Educational Needs pupils into the Base and called it The Additional Educational Needs 'Faculty'.   

Sounds good on paper except not all Special Needs are the same.  

People with autism might have a problem dealing with the noise of those with ADHD, or other behavioural and social problems.   

In addition the person who had set up the Base retired (defeated?) and the second teacher was told that, as she was an English graduate, it was a waste of her skills being full time in the Base and she must now take lessons throughout the school.  She resigned, mid-term, and was immediately snapped up by a school in a different county with a better understanding of autism.

The calm classroom became noisy and chaotic.   

The life-skills room eventually became a staffroom.  The AEN Faculty pupils were expected to ‘access’ the library instead.   

The replacement teacher seemed to believe that “being the mother of a toddler” she could understand pupils with autism.   

I assume she’d been on a course but I wouldn’t put hard cash on it.

I had many issues with the new set up, and I will never forgive myself for not realising how unhappy my son was there and not finding and fighting for a better placement.

I don’t know whether it’s just schools in my county but I’ve found the one thing they are really useless at is communicating with parents.

As these facebook postings illustrate - bear in mind that there was a home/school diary system where parents could write in anything they thought staff should know, and vice versa.

Wednesday 10 February 2010 at 16:17 ·

Have just learnt that Ferretfingers' school has a Consultation Day tomorrow:

FROM HIS TAXI ESCORT saying "See you Friday".

No letter or message has arrived from Hamron.

The Additional Educational Needs 'Faculty' has Statement Reviews so we don't need to go to Consultation Day.

We do need notice that the school is closed.

Thank God I don't work and Fester’s flexible.

Hamron College is to communication what I am to pole-dancing.

DHG you may be better at pole dancing

Bentonbag  I was never that athletic - and now my shoulder's buggered  ...

LHS Been there too ... just like we sit there all day waiting for something to happen  ..  .and  go mad in the process.

22 February 2010 at 08:34 ·

Hamron's done it again! David all ready, no taxi, phone school, "oh it's a teacher training day - letters have gone out" - not to this house they haven't. At the start of the year Treegrass Special School give you a calendar with all the dates on - how come Hamron can't manage to organise itself!

A H What a great start - not!

 

Re coil

Facebook’s timehop threw up this posting

18 January 2010 at 15:49 ·

GP has just rung to ask if I want my coil taking out anytime soon. It's been in so long she (the doctor) has forgotten it wasn't a hormone one so theoretically can stay in for ever. If getting it out is anything like getting it in I'd prefer to wait for the undertaker to pick a bit of molten copper out of my ashes if it's all the same with her...

AH - Lucky you.....coil didn't work with moi, I bought him a HD flat screen tv to stop any further pregnancies

***

I was 39 when Thunderthighs (aka No2son) was born.

I’d never been happy taking pill and decided that a coil would be a better option so made the appointment.

“You’re coming with me” I said to Fester.

“What!?!”

“Well it’s as much for your benefit as mine.  I don’t see why I should suffer alone.”

He was there at both births.

So he trotted along with me.

My lady GP Dr M was quite surprised, as was the practice nurse.

I don’t think they’d seen the like.

In the surgery I lay on the couch, Fester sat on the chair.

Pulling the curtain around the couch Dr M asked

“Do you want to be this side of the curtain?”

“I’m fine out here thanks.”

Dr M, obviously tickled by the situation, “The coil isn’t the only option you know.  There is such a thing as vasectomy.”

Grunt

“We’ve got a couple of bricks out the back ….”

I shall draw a veil over the rest of the proceedings for fear of frightening the horses.

Organised family planning first started in the Victorian era when it was seen as “women’s things”.

That attitude remains, for the most part.

I quite understand that pregnancy, childbirth and childcare impacts entirely on women’s bodies, careers and social lives (with the exception of those very few men who chose to be househusbands).  The financial impacts hit men as well, but only if they stick around or can be caught and made to pay maintenance.

That aside it only seems fair that, as both of you are in on the conception, both of you should be responsible for the contraception.  

The least a gentleman can do is provide moral support whilst one is having a fence installed in one’s lady-garden.

Mind you I got a firm “No” when I suggested he accompany me when it was finally removed.

I don’t think he relished another meeting with Dr M.

Train of Thought

A couple of Christmases ago Fester bought me an mp3 player, onto which I download radio podcasts to listen to whilst doing housework or when bored travelling.  Before this gift, if I was on a train and bored with reading I would either write letters to a friend or jot down thoughts or feelings in my little red book, or journal.

(If I’d been on a river I’d have called this "Stream of Consciousness” – it does burble on a bit.)

1 October 2009

It’s a lovely autumn day.

Still a bit of green about, but lots of gold and red and yellow in the trees.

Very flat around Peterborough.

Scarlet berries on bushes and trees.

Train full of people on computers and mobile phones.

Behind me a couple conversing in some eastern European language.

Now we’re out in the fields again.

Huge, cropped short and yellowing,

Some already ploughed and fudge brown.

Rough emerald rows of brassicas, possibly Brussels sprouts waiting for Christmas.

Lonely farmsteads islands in a sea of agriculture.

180⁰ wide skies make a Welsh valley girl feel very exposed.

Bigger islands of trees.

I can’t get into the magazines I’ve bought to read and I’m not sleepy.

Fat cotton reel bales flung about a field.

A solitary grazing pasture of brown store cattle.

Ear popping night time tunnel.

Another pasture now with some Friesians,

Black and white in the dun brown mix.

A spire, a town, a carpark but no station stop – where was that?

Sheep almost the same shade as the field they stand in the grass is so sere.

Dusty lanes and shining drains.

Slowing down for Newark.

Nearly one o’clock – time for lunch.

Finally – the White Horse on the hill

Landmark that says I’m in the North

And heading for the North East

Almost out of the indian territory that is Yorkshire

And into the pale of County Durham.

Soon there’ll be the lift of the heart

That comes with crossing the Tyne.

Home – or at least my motherland.

My first home in my heart

Is the land of my fathers,

Or at least a small patch of it

Near Cwmifor where Boyds lived for eighty years or more,

But now are all flown,

Except for those nestled in the churchyard of St Paul’s Manordeilo

Together with friends and extended family

Aunties, uncles and cousins

From Grandma’s Thomas side of the family.

“This place has a comfortable smell to it” said Dad 

The last time we took him there to see Mum’s grave.

When he joins her

There will be no excuse to go home again.