The phone rang before nine this morning. As we looked at each other wondering whether it was a real person at that hour and possibly an emergency it went to voicemail before either of us answered it. The caller left a message, and was not a recorded voice trying to sell us a new boiler or get us to seek compensation for our mis-sold PPI or recent accident, but the county treasurer of the beekeepers, enquiring whether I was still divisional treasurer and if so had I sent him the 2014 accounts, because he couldn't find them.
I felt a pang of terrible guilt. I hadn't sent him the accounts, for the simple reason that I completely forgot about it. I emailed them over, with apologies that I was very sorry they were late, but I'd had an awful cold and after the relief of getting them approved by the inspector and voted through at the AGM, I'd forgotten that I was supposed to do anything else with them. The county treasurer replied later in the morning that at least my accounts added up.
The next challenge was to dose Our Ginger for worms, since the state of his bottom last night reminded me that a worm pill was overdue. Worming Our Ginger, or performing any other kind of medical service, is a task to be approached with dread. In all other respects he is intensely loving and very trusting, so much so that he often gets in the way. If he is stretched out on the hearthrug in front of the stove he won't move while one of us tries to refuel it, the possibility that we might drop a log on him, let alone thrust him into the flames, having apparently never crossed his mind. But try to get a pill down him and a whole new facet of his personality emerges. He fights like a demon, wriggling so violently that we are scared in case we break his neck, and slashing with his front claws. In theory you can stop that by wrapping the creature in a towel, but in practice a cat that's determined to resist will wriggle its legs free within seconds.
We have succeeded in tricking him, by sticking the pill to a cat treat with butter and slipping it to him after giving him a couple of unadulterated treats first to put him in the mood, but nowadays he seems to be able to take or leave treats. It's the short indignant tabby who shouts for them after breakfast. I went to the vet, and joy of joys, the dab-on-the-back-of-the-neck flea treatment is now available in a formulation that kills all types of worms. So no more worm pills, ever. That will make life much easier, for Our Ginger as well as for us (we once wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to get a pill down the big anxious tabby, who kept hiding it in the side of his mouth until we let go of him when he spat it out, until in desperation we simply offered him the pill, and he ate it).
My favourite piece of wildly inappropriate advice on animal care was from the Australian official who suggested that people having to evacuate their homes in an emergency due to bush fires, who had pets but no pet baskets, could carry their cats inside pillowcases. Had he ever tried to carry a stone of panic stricken cat in a pillowcase, I wonder, let alone five cats? I haven't, but I don't believe it would work.
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