2007: A poodle tale, a lost limb, a hint of chickens to come, statements of the obvious, and deceiving bishops
This is the penultimate part of my blog retrospective. 2007 was the year that saw me enter my forties. Marked by a poodle for the glory of gay gods tells the story of how my mother’s pet poodle bit the doctor who turned up too late to attend my home birth. It might arguably be not only my best headline ever, but also one of the funniest personal stories I’ve ever shared online (even though I, obviously enough, have no recollection of the events as told to me by my mum).
Mandrake, our marmalade tabby, had one of his rear legs amputated in February, after being hit by a car. He managed seven years before this happened, though he lived a life of extreme sports, we surmised, owing to the fact that he was always accident-prone. But the loss of a leg was in a different league to the scratches and scrapes he’d gotten himself into previously. He went on to get hit by another car in the early autumn, that time suffering head trauma. We kept him indoors after that, until we moved from the house in the middle of nowhere that nevertheless sat on the side of an incredibly busy road. Although we now live in a town, our road is generally very quiet and almost traffic-free.
Drusilla, my beautiful black cat, who was only with us just over a year, wasn’t as lucky as Mandrake: she died just a few weeks before we moved. A driver had not only hit her and killed her outright, but had picked up her body and placed it on a neighbour’s doorstep, which is better, I supposed then and now, than just leaving her for any cars that followed on to run her over again. The grief was made worse by the fact that had our girl survived, or never been run over, the chances of her being hit by a car in our new home would have almost been zero. But Dru was slender and fragile in comparison to the bulky, muscular Mandrake. I wonder if he managed to inflict some damage on the cars that hit him on those two occasions. I must admit, I certainly hope so. And while I have said for some time now, that’s enough cats for us—we have five at present—if a black female cat was left on our doorstep, I’d be very happy to give a home to Dru 2.0. Hey, I’m a witch—black cats are supposed to be mandatory (and yes, there’s a broomstick in the hallway).
I took solace, as I always do when upset, by communing with nature.
2007 was the fateful year when our friends Jo and Martin came to visit in the summer, and a discussion about how cool chickens are developed. I recall saying I’d love to have some but, I added, ‘you have to have a farm’–to which Jo replied, ‘no you don’t’. She then pointed me to a few websites and my eyes and mind were opened to new possibilities! When we started looking for a house to buy, we made sure that there was nothing in the deeds to prevent us from keeping chickens. And look where we are today. Thanks Jo. I blame you entirely.
My former employers in London seized the opportunity to ditch me after a medical report informing them I’d likely (not definitely) never work again. The problem for them was that I had monthly payouts resulting from medical insurance I’d been given as a benefit of my contract. So they had to buy me off, and I landed a hefty sum that provided us with the necessary deposit to get a mortgage. The money also bought my 24-inch iMac, an iPod Touch, and a 17-inch MacBook Pro. Well, I had to have a few tangible things, didn’t I? We gave the Windows PC away to my beloved’s dad. We will, without a doubt, never buy a Windows machine ever again. I started out with PCs, switched to Mac 1998-2003, then back to PC.
There will be no more dalliance with the evil Microsoft. In over a year now I’ve had to reinstall the operating system just once, on the iMac, and that was because I screwed up, not the hardware or software. With Windows (XP and Vista), it was the norm to have to reinstall and fuck around with drivers on a near-monthly basis. And then there were all the viruses, trojans, software incompatibilities… Ugh. No more, thank you. Now I have pretty and highly functional as well.
2007 was the year scientists confirmed that deforestation was bad. Either this year or next we can expect them to announce that decapitation leads to death, pouring boiling water on your genitals is always painful, and that eating too much fat makes you fat. I reported towards the end of 2007 that Hugo Horton from The Vicar of Dibley won the leadership of the Liberal Democrats, and I still insist today that the resemblance is uncanny. I fell in love with Darren Hayes’ third solo album, this one a double called This Delicate Thing We’ve Made. It still gets played, in full from first to last track, at least once a week. It’s superb.
But I leave you today with a post all about African bishops telling lies about condoms. Telling lies in the name of God is sadly something powerful and influential people have done ever since the Christian church first began to spread across the world, though of course there are many decent and sincere followers of Christ who don’t use lies to convince others to do as they say, and to believe the same. It’s just, I wonder how those grand and pervasive concepts of Heaven and Hell, the duality of good and evil, God and Satan, can ever be reconciled with the decision to tell big, fat, dangerous porkies about condoms in order to stop people protecting themselves from HIV and AIDS.
We are to believe, I guess, that everything happens with God’s approval—including large families of children to very poor parents, and the contracting of diseases—but I’ve always held the view that God (or the gods, plural, in my view) gave us intelligence and the ability to make decisions for ourselves, and that we must live with those decisions for better or worse. Besides, these bishops have no qualms about drinking clean water in preference to dirty water from wells infested with mosquitoes; they have no problem with vaccinations, personal hygience, properly prepared food. They aren’t outraged by scientific work to eradicate mosquitoes and therefore malaria. Yet an invisible virus must be left to run amok in Africa and, indeed, the world? Logic, my gut instinct, and my pagan spirituality tell me otherwise.
I remain as convinced in 2008 as I was in 2007 that these bishops, and the Catholic church hierarchy as a whole, are doing nothing less than advocating genocide through deceitful arguing that whatever happens is God’s will, that argument supported by outright lies and wilful misrepresentation. The logical extension of their illogical argument is that global warming is God’s will also, as is the now inevitable mass extinction of at least two-thirds of animal, plant, and microbial life on Earth. No. I can’t believe any deity would want the world to be as it is today. We, as a species, are responsible. This—all of it—is not God’s will. Of that much, I am certain. It is up to us to change things for the better, with the help of the divine available to us if we ask for it.
Tomorrow, although 2008 is still very much with us, I’ll bring you the best of the year so far. And that will conclude the retrospective.
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