Day to day musings of a cat minder/ sitter in North Tyneside and Newcastle upon Tyne . For details of services go to http://www.catminders.biz

Welcome to CatMinders

Welcome to CatMinders


Friday 22 February 2008

The Queen and her Left hand Man ( Who's Your Friend Ma'am ?)



Click to enlarge .

Can't help wondering if this is a genuine photograph or a bit of clever airbrushing ? Any thoughts ?

What causes recurring dreams ?
Mine is of a huge old house , well known to me in the dreamtime though not somewhere my waking self recognises though I can recall it perfectly when I wake and could reproduce it in a design or drawing if I had those skills . Mostly its a sense of a house , a feeling of a place , a sense of texture and rich details . Its a place I seem to return time and again , often when I have or have had headaches . It doesn't make me better , but there 's something about it .
The rooms are on many levels and I spend time wandering up and down the levels , sometimes on staircases with wide stairs , sometimes using glass escalators which move with great speed . At the top of the house on one occasion I found a roof terrace , with a coffee bar open to the sky with Mexican colours and palm trees . Yet we were bang in the middle of Linskill Terrace , North Shields . How about that for detail and surrealism . You would have to know North Shields to make sense ( or not ) of that . The roof terrace was hosting some kind of open air party under the stars and everyone was there , happy and relaxed . There was a shiny coffee machine right in the middle of proceedings , making all the right espresso noises . No escalator or grand staircase that night , just a simple stair way down the back of the building and off to a field where someone ( but not me ) was keeping some red hens and some white chickens .
That was one particular version of the house .
It comes in many guises .
Early this morning the version was more traditional . The one where I am staying in someone else s home and I am wandering round looking for my room and aware that there are a variety of rooms I could sleep in and each with a bathroom nearby . There are no bathrooms en suite . The house is too old and unreconstructed for that . The bathrooms have doors but many of them also have heavy brocaded curtains pulled back with tie backs adding to the sense of drama and grandeur .And always as I wander this sense that I have been here before , and indeed , as I pass along a particular hall , that I have slept in these rooms many times , and that I am not chosing a room in which to spend a night , but that these are all my rooms and I can sleep in any one of them , and that there are friends who will sleep in the rest of the rooms .
Where do these dreams come from ?

I love how she sighs


Especially when her sigh lasts a full minute .
I am multi tasking in the sitting room , post coffee in cafe 22 with Debbie , which means I am reading the Times , trying to do the Codeword , and keeping my eye on GoogleReader at the same time , watching what the blogs are saying , as befits a very windy and very lazy Friday afternoon , with the occasional foray onto Facebook to reply to messages from one of my nieces .
Suddenly a whole host of people much younger than me have noticed that I am there and messages are appearing faster than I know how to deal with them. Its much more complex than say aol messaging or dare I say Blogging .
I'm also psyching myself up to this afternoon's newish CatCall with three delightful cats and a complicated arramengment of fish cooking and roast chicken carving . Or should that be arrangement ?
I sit there , doing what I do , the cats all dozing upstairs on the water bed , apart from Kitty who still favours the middle of the landing for her own brand of cockroaching , Alice the rescue greyhound at full stretch on the sofa having pulled two cushions over her face and a tartan fleece over her person , and a mobile goes off , rock style , next door .
D falls over himself to answer it as usual , some inbuilt terror of missing a call which I fail to grasp with my own one in five rule on answering phones ( one in five chance it will be for me so four out of five times I leave it .... usually works fine ) .
He starts an intense conversation of a business nature with a local solicitor and I try to concentrate on my own affairs whilst blocking out his conversation . Difficult . Loud voice . Much repetition . Etc . My codeword is sticky and the Times is boring . Etc . He is at the start of the conversation again and re repeating . I do that too .
Alice sits up slightly , her peace disturbed and one of her cushions lands on the floor . She raises herself and stares at the floor . Then at me . She looks at the door . At the voice . Presumably breaching the peace . She stays silent but glances at me and I smile at her . The voice continues , then states , in summing up , ..if that all makes sense . Silence . " Oh No " says the voice . Hello . We understand the voice is cross , irritated , has lost his signal and been cut off possibly at some point a while back , possibly even before the first repetitions .
I hold my breath and do my utmost not to snigger unhelpfully . It is a banana skin moment .
Alice has no such qualms . She sits up , lies down again , readjusts her fleece and her remaining cushion and sighs for a full minute .
I kidd you not .

Migraine Days

Migraine Days

Flower and Bee on a Sunday

Flower and Bee on a Sunday

art on a sunday

art on a sunday