Guffy is not very well.
I don’t mean the usual sort of not very well. No, I do mean the usual sort, it is, of course, her guffing difficulty that is causing the problem. I mean it is very much worse, and she is becoming ill.
She has spent a very great deal of the evening just curled up on my knee, purring the sort of purr that cats do when they are feeling unhappy, not the rich, mellow sort of purr that you might hear if they have just stolen the butter and gone to sleep on a cushion in front of the fire.
She is still eating and drinking, but I think she is dying.
She is not going to die tonight, but I think perhaps it will not be very long. I think she has put her soft little paws on that path, and I do not think she will find her way back.
I am feeling very sad, but I would rather it was like this than the vet’s way. I do not think she is in pain. She just seems to be very tired. All of her muscles relax when she settles on my knee, and she seems peaceful.
She is leaking poo practically the whole time now. We have cleaned her up but she hates that even more than she hates the vet. She is still managing to clean herself up a bit, so we have just put a towel down for her to sleep on and let her get on with it.
I will keep you posted.
In other news, of course I have not just spent the entire day nursing a sick cat. For most of the day she has been asleep in the sunshine, on her towel underneath the log store. I have been doing normal things.
I left Mark faffing about in the garden this morning when I took the dogs out, and when I got home he was halfway through cutting up the last few flagstones.
Over the last couple of months the front garden has become dreadfully overgrown. Actually it wasn’t dreadful. In fact it was rather splendid, green and vibrant and bursting with the fresh energy of life.
All the same, it did look a bit as though nobody lived here.
There were still several patches where we hadn’t paved it, so Mark started cutting the stones for those, and when I got home I set about trimming everything back so that we could get through the front door again, and digging out the weeds.
Whilst I was occupied, everybody else went off to the farm to have an afternoon of pretending to be stunt drivers, hurtling around and practising handbrake turns on the field. Emily has not got her driving licence yet, and so they did lots of things like reversing in a figure of eight and stopping and starting on steep slippery bits, all of which probably won’t be in the driving test but which Mark thinks are very useful skills for new drivers to have.
I did not feel any need to join in, and better still, they took the dogs with them, presumably as a collection of entertainingly moving targets. They all came back again, so they must have been pretty good at getting out of the way.
It was lovely to have the peace and quiet to get on with the garden by myself. I tootled around, weeding and trimming until everything began to look tidy and cared for again.
When Mark came back we lifted the flagstones and laid a sheet of black plastic underneath them, so that the weeds will not grow back through. I stabbed it with scissors in lots of places that will be underneath the stones, so that water will be able to drain away downwards, but dandelions will not grow upwards. We have not quite finished yet, and tomorrow we are going to get some sand and fill in the cracks.
I should have taken a photograph, but of course I didn’t. I will try and remember tomorrow. It is looking very civilised and hardly like a thicket at all.
I am going to go and see how Guffy is getting on.
