And so we are in Windermere once again, on the taxi rank, predictably enough, and all adventuring is over.
I am not at all sorry about this. Adventures are not good for my digestion, and if they get too exciting I find myself beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable.
This was probably not helped much by the colossal dinners and the Old Fashioned cocktails.
Also I woke up this morning with a cold.
My nose was leaking and my head was stuffed with catarrh, and I rolled over in bed and felt very sorry for myself.
I grumbled, nasally, to Mark, who hauled himself out of bed to make coffee, and reappeared a few minutes later not only with coffee, but with a glass of whisky stirred with honey and hot lemon.
This turned out to be such a divinely wonderful start to the day that it was entirely worth feeling rubbish. Better still, by the time I had drunk both that and the coffee I was feeling considerably improved, and apart from the occasional sniffle, the day has passed reasonably well. It is very nice indeed to be back to my predictable diet of predictably dull English foods.
Indeed, it is nice to be back, although there has been a lot of laundry.
Not only was there every single item of clothing worn on our adventures, this morning we were obliged to do some minor surgery to poor Guffy, and there was quite a lot of cleaning up to be done after that.
I had to disinfect and boil several towels.
Poor Guffy has not yet had her kittens, which are due any day now. I certainly hope so, if the poor little creature gets any rounder then she won’t be able to walk. She has become truly huge whilst we have been away, and is in a very sad state.
As you know, her Little Problem has not abated, only she is now so enormous that she has not been managing to clean herself. The unmentionable holes in her back end had become horribly crusted, and were raw, and scarlet, and bleeding.
Almost as bad as that, she seems to have been hiding underneath the leaky bit of my car, and her back was covered in sump oil, to which all sorts of grime appeared to have become affixed.
She was not in a good state.
When we got home last night we managed to clean her up a bit and plaster her in Germolene, which made a considerable difference. The vet said that we should not use human stuff on the cat but we didn’t have any cream designed and marketed especially for sore cat bottoms and would probably have been aghast at the price even if the vet had been open, so we used Germolene and I can tell you that it worked brilliantly. She was less sore in minutes, and by this morning she was quite a bit better.
She was so much better that we thought we would have another go.
Last night’s cleansing had proved bloody and violent, she is a tiny cat but fights hard, and both Mark and Oliver had some savage wounds from being in charge of restraining the sharp bits in order that I could pay attention to the business end.
Today Mark put on thick leather welding gloves, and we immersed her in the washing up bowl.
Oliver cleaned off the sump oil, and then we washed and shaved all around the terrible, pitiable sore bits at her back end.
They were actually almost recovered by then, Germolene is brilliant stuff.
We smothered her in some more cream and swathed her in a towel, and she was too defeated and exhausted even to run away. She collapsed on the back of the sofa and buried her nose in her paws.
She is enormous. We are all hoping that she is going to have a lot of very tiny kittens, because if there are only a few then they must be huge, and there are going to be some difficulties.
She is eating enough to feed a dozen. Really, she can’t go on like this much longer
I hope they come tonight.
