I feel a teensy
bit better today. Went for my walk with C., now safely back from Kirkmichael. I
had a grocery delivery, and got a certain amount of additional exercise putting
it away.
I get a daily
email from the New Yorker, I don’t quite know why. It includes a cartoon from
the archives, and on Friday it was a picture of a rather silly-looking cat with
a stick in its mouth, bringing it back to her master. Two dogs in the
foreground: “It is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all.”
I showed it to
Helen, who smiled at the cartoon but didn’t recognise the caption. (What do
they teach them at Oxford?) As I hope you know, it is a remark of Dr Johnson’s
about women preaching. Making the cartoon doubly or trebly delicious – it isn’t
Correct, these days, to laugh at women,
but perfectly all right to laugh at pussy cats. I wonder if I could get it on a
tee-shirt.
Shandy: yes, I
could have found someone to feed the cats, and left them behind. My feelings about this may well
be excessively romantic, or anthropomorphic. I have had cats all my life, and
part of the pleasure is the animal’s absolute freedom. Living as I do in a
flat, I can’t give my cats that here in Edinburgh. But I can in Kirkmichael,
and I think they enjoy it. I would hate to go there and leave them behind.
Yesterday was VJ Day,
of course. I’ve probably said this before. I honestly didn’t know, until 1985,
how the British felt about that. That year was the 50th anniversary
of the end of the war. In May (VE Day) we had Vera Lynn singing, and
commemorative stamps, and a breath-taking moment when the Queen Mother stood
alone on that famous Buckingham Palace balcony before being joined by her two daughters.
And I thought,
Gosh, this is wonderful, what will they do in August? And the answer
was, virtually nothing, although many of their men were out east when the war ended, including my
husband. Whereas in the USofA, VE Day was a day of great rejoicing, but only because
it was a Major Step Forward. The job wasn’t done. I'm old enough to remember.
As for the
Stillness Shawl, I now have one right-side row to do, and the stretchy
bind-off. And tomorrow I’ll have another episode of Suitable Boy to watch.