Take ten points if you recognised the quote from Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Those are the names of the four cows under Adam’s lacklustre care, but honestly, it also describes how I’ve been feeling recently.
We took down the decorations on January 5th and switched off the strings of lights decorating the garage, the verandah and the Christmas tree. Everywhere went dark, and the weather slid into gunge territory – not anything as exciting as snow, just rain, mud, dark clouds, cold winds. General early winter yuk. Too wet and windy to enjoy a session of clearing the greenhouse for next year’s seedlings, too muddy to rip up weeds without a pint of mud sticking to roots, clothing and hands, too cloudy at night to go stargazing. This is the time of year when we could do with a small celebration of light rather than signalling the end of festivities.
Festivities ran on much longer this year. I can safely say it here, as none of my fellow cat-maniacs follow this blog – I’m part of a group of cat servants on FaceBook, and we ran a Secret Santa. For our cats. Low spending limit and this year the kind of outright chaos that happens when an automated Santa program has a Skynet moment. Elfster is great, if you keep it in its place, but this year it went off on its own and drew in previous participants (who no longer wanted to take part) and assigned partners before shutting itself down. Add the postal strike, and only half of the group received presents (whether they wanted them or not).
I took the lazy route and ordered a cat bed from that famous South American online store. The seller wouldn’t send direct to my recipient, so I was resigned to receiving the bed and sending it on to her. Best laid plans… six weeks after that order, the bed has not yet arrived, even though other parcels have broken through the blockade. I gave up after four weeks and got into that Soddit mood. Soddit. I was going to make a cat bed. How hard could it be?
Do not ask. I’m about ten miles from any good frivolous shops, so I was relying on the craft stuff I’ve built up over the years. I did manage to get hold of a large bag of sheepskin scraps for a low price and stitched four of them together to form a fluffy base. I had quilt wadding and wool stuffing left over from a project in the distant past and enough cloth remnants to start a shop.
It took three days, and one of those days I got into a proper mood about it and stayed up till 4am to follow through the idea I had for connecting the whole lot together. When you see the Sewing Bees run up an evening dress from a binbag and three staples, it’s skill. Mine was more of a comedy act with vintage thread and sheepskin. But on the third day, it was finished. It looked a bit wonky, but that stitching will not come undone. Well, famous last words. I once sewed a catnip mouse for a friend’s ginger tom with cat-proof stitching. Within one day, the ears had been torn off, the tail was severed and the woolly guts were being extracted bit by bit through the gash torn in its belly seam.
But I have faith in this cat bed. The three toms who got it as a ‘Christmas’ gift have taken peaceful turns to sleep in the bed and show no signs of wanting to take it apart to examine the stuffing. No better thumbs-up than to see a cat choosing to sleep in a cat bed you’ve made rather than plonk their furry bums on a clean jumper or your smartest black trousers.
She posted three photos showing one cat after another taking a turn to settle in the bed before one staked his claim by curling up and going off to sleep in the bed. It was worth three days’ work to see them enjoying their present. The job of sorting out the whole mess of who got a present and didn’t want one and who sent a present and hadn’t received one in return goes on, though the man who took on the task planned to finish it by Friday 13th January. In the meantime, there’s three cats asleep on my handiwork tonight and my fortnight of feeling dull and unable to get up and get on with things is coming to an end as I take heart on the projects I could get on with.
Julia Chalkley 