The Outcast

I took Eloise to the specialist vet this morning, which meant an early start – early for us, that is – as I had to leave by 8 o’clock. She was hungry, poor girl. I’d fed her 12 hours earlier and she was allowed a snack at 10, but she wasn’t hungry then, so ignored the food.

I phoned reception from the car park and the vet came out. He’s the same one who operated on her last year and he said that he’d half expected the second leg to go. It’s a more common occurrence with dogs but, if a cat has cruciate ligaments go in one leg, it tends to suggest a weakness. All I can say is, I’m glad she only has two hind legs, at the cost of them.

I had a phone call this afternoon to say she’d come round from the anaesthetic and all had gone well, she was recovering in her kennel and had been fed. Only then could LT and I acknowledge our relief that she was alive. Of course, there wasn’t that much risk, but we were afraid, both of us.

Anyway, so all will be well and we will both go to pick her up tomorrow afternoon. Today, Wince came for his usual day a week and he spent it on the annexe garden. Rose’s hay fever hasn’t allowed her to do gardening recently and the rest of her co-habitants don’t do such things, not unless she’s there to chivvy them on by example. She has worked very hard the last couple of years and put in a lot of plants too, so it’s very pretty. It’s a shame she won’t get the benefit of it any more, though of course she will visit often, I hope. It’s meant a lot to me, having her here the last five and a half years and I hope I’ve supported her as much as she has me.

The weather is still cold enough to want a fire in the evening. The forecast declares that it will improve over the weekend – warm rain tomorrow, woo hoo, and then getting sunnier. I still have the prospect of taking Scrabble and her chicks out of their present coop into the other one and I’m not looking forward to it at all. They are all so happy and she’s a loving, attentive mummy. I don’t want to upset them all, and it’s bound to happen. The young cock bird, Foster’s son (from Slapper’s egg, that is) is not popular with anyone. I’m so sorry for him, though I don’t much like him either. I throw him extra treats of corn or mealworms, but all the hens and Jenga, his father, chase him away. It’s difficult to get him indoors in the evenings because they intimidate him and he daren’t go in the greenhouse. Tonight, I couldn’t persuade him and the poor boy was crouched next to Polly Garter’s coop when I went down again in the rain. I couldn’t let him in with her, I didn’t trust him with her chick. He has several places he can shelter and he’ll have found one of them by now – the Dutch barn, the old henhouse or the greenhouse, if he doesn’t want to roost up a tree.

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