THE HEART IN THE HOME

I measure houses.  I see the full spectrum from the good to the bad and the ugly. 

I see lavish, pristine showcases, derelict hovels and pretty much everything in between. 

But what strikes me more than anything else has to be the way the places feel. 

There's the meticulously styled nouveau-decor environment that feels as if you've been sucked into the photo shoot spread. It's beautifully rendered, it's painstakingly arranged yet it's spiritless and sterile. 

These are houses (not homes) that haven't yet soaked up any real family energy or assumed an aura of having interfaced with haphazardly emotional beings of all ages and persuasions. 

The ones that have been lived in feel entirely different regardless of the decor. Some emanate warmth and whisper silently of long, blissful summers past when visiting family and friends clattered through the halls and blasted the walls with their laughter. 

Others are unspeakably melancholy. I seek only to do my work in those and move on before I feel the sorrow reach out and touch me. 

That isn't to say every deceased estate is a maudlin, tragic mausoleum of fragile, broken memories, no. Many of them still harbour rows of family portraiture, chronicles of flourishing children, burgeoning into maturity, seeding new life, sharing joyous milestones. They emanate a nurturing tranquility these homes. 

Yet some are just too despairing for words. One recently - room upon room of multiple lifetimes hurriedly crammed into boxes and garbage bags, no consideration given to what such trinkets or memorabilia might once have meant. The flotsam may as well have perished with the owner...

Wherever there have been animals, I can feel the difference. There's usually some sympathetic resonance within the walls.  

And often people just want to share a moment of something with someone simply because they're there and will listen.  

We should never stop listening and we should take the time to hear. 

And what you imprint upon your walls shall speak softly to the world long after you depart this realm. 

We are never far from the people and places we've touched.

INCONSEQUENTIALITY

                                                               Huh?

A friend urged me to write stuff about my life on my blog - this blog. Small, stuff, trivia even, as she was captivated by our journey, my wife and my journey from Africa to the smallish enclave of Adelaide, South Australia.
I thought about it. I mean, I'm already writing a book about this, I mused, precipitated by our disastrous honeymoon in 2008, which, in hindsight kicked off the sequence of events that led us to settle in Australia.
I've always said (in the ethos of Desiderata) everyone has a story to tell, sometimes many.
Some people just don't see it.
My life is a story - every day I see and experience magic around me, not least of which originates from my wonderful wife and our seven cats.
Then I realised something that's become manifest recently, kind of risen up and carped my diem - the idea of remaining in the present and talking about that.
The book is the appropriate forum for our anecdotal legacy, the trials and tribulations that got us here but the blog, I decided, should be a chronicle for the here and now...
until tomorrow then it's legacy once more.  
I wrestle with the demons that haunt me over a decision to become fully vegan, for example, when outside the magpies, my new friends greet me each morning hoping for a morsel of the pet's meat I've been buying to feed them....I've even resorted to donning latex gloves (my wife's artistry sometimes requires hand protection) such is my revulsion at dipping into the bloody, flesh-filled bag to hand out chunks of meat. It makes me gag at times.
Even owning (nay, WAITING on) cats has that inbuilt dilemma - they're natural carnivores, domesticated for man's pleasure (and what a consummate pleasure it is) so must it follow that one be part of that horrific cycle of abuse that is the meat industry? How does one get round it? How does one reconcile with the awfulness that is rife within it and still provide the necessary nutrition to the cats who are oblivious to my wistful agonising? Scour the highways and byways for likely roadkill or take out a classified requesting any donors who might have access to birds and rodents that have died of natural causes...?
Hardly seems plausible or even mildly pragmatic now does it?
I've started some research on the topic of animal veganism and have been surprised at what I've uncovered, however, I'd never subject my babies to anything without embarking on that road myself - no, not eating vegan catfood - simply becoming vegan myself.
This post wasn't meant to be about veganism or the debate over whether cats and dogs can thrive healthily on such a diet - arguably they can - it just seems to have meandered here of its own volition.
The magpies on the other hand, have no such quandaries to overcome - should I elect some day to proffer them non-animal titbits of a morning, they're free to reject them and forage for themselves, carrion and prey animals notwithstanding.
I can already hear the rampant carnivores among you rising up in protest, howling at how cruel that would be - forcing cats to become vegans when their natural instincts and biological imperative is premised on carnivorism and hunting. 
But that's all bollocks too. We abdicated that argument when we commenced the domestication process. The fact that we have all evolved culturally since then - yes, even cats - puts forward the potential to thrive healthily without contributing to animal suffering. We have developed alternative products and natural foodstuffs that allow this.
Here in Australia they have a love-hate relationship with cats. They bang on about how domestic cats, allowed to roam uncontained, decimate the local wildlife so they should be banned or at least confined or at the very least, restricted in their numbers. I'm all for that - all of it - to a degree. I personally think it's more cruel to confine cats to being housebound when their natural instincts are to roam and explore and hunt. Yet this is, by nature of urbanisation, a very prevalent phenomenon where cats are confined to apartments and houses for their entire lives. Is it cruel? Many a doting cat owner will vehemently disagree. And, like I say, it's become a normal lifestyle for millions of cats worldwide. They still thrive. They're the ultimate adapters - not for nothing were they accorded nine lives and a penchant for aeons of snoozing, you know.
I've circumvented that particular issue, however, by building the cats an external enclosure which, although not as large as I'd like it to be, allows them the freedom to explore in the fresh air on grass and soil and up trees and to come and go as they please through the cat flap in the scullery door. No cruelty there then.
I've also built a very large litter box in the form of an elevated corrugated steel planter which is embedded in the garden and roofed off so the critturs can enjoy the freedom of outdoor natural soil-filled ablutions without getting rain-drenched or having to use nasty, overworked kitty litter. All good so far.
Most cats, by dint of their domesticated confinement in suburban environments, don't have the luxury of hunting as they might have done in the days of their ancestral wildness - our cats are similarly restricted unless some hapless creature ventures into the enclosure through the fencing - then it's everything for itself.
So we play with them and we amuse them, not to mention the fact that they amuse each other. All the time.
So I ask - if they have the freedom to come and go as they please, have all the stimulation we can possible muster (there are jungle-gym improvements I intend adding - watch this space,) and are loved and cared for beyond all imagining, why would it be at all cruel to have them try vegan food if it has all the necessary nutrition and protein any domesticated feline might require?
I can't see the cruelty there except to imagine that the carnivorous human horrified at the prospect of themselves having to forego meat and animal products, imagine that that deprivation is in and of itself a terrible thing ergo it must by necessity be cruel.
I simply don't agree.
The crux of the biscuit (to coin a Zappaism) will, of course, be getting any feline with a particular palate such as ours have developed, to eat a new type of food other than Hills Science Diet original formula... vegan or no.
We've tried switching their diets once already when we bought a different type of Hills - the furball management pellets - our menagerie was horrified, down to a cat. They hummed and hawed and strutted purposefully away from the dishes harbouring the offending product until we caved and drove many miles to reunite them with old familiar.
I dread the thought of this potential again - but face it I think I must....
I guess it's only fair to say - me first then the cats, then the magpies...
Watch this space...

THE CAT CHRONICLES - 1

"Y'know that hard square bed on the desk with the massage bumps?"

"Yeah - the one he uses with the funny vertical picture screen on it...?"

"Yeah, that one."
"What about it?"
"They use that gizmo to talk shit about us to their friends..."
"They've got friends in that thing?"
"I think so..."
"How can that be?"
"I'm not sure but I saw a picture of us up there last night with a lot of writing underneath it..."
"What did it say?"
"What do you mean - what did it say - you know I can't read Human. I have no idea what it said..."
"So howcome you know they're talking to friends on the gizmo?"
"I've just got this feeling. This ninth sense..."
"They've got mini versions of the gizmo that they take to bed with them too - what's up with that?"
"I know - sad creatures aren't they. Tapping away on the screen when so much snooze-time is awasting."
"I've fixed that though."
"What do you mean?"
"I just crawl onto his right shoulder and snuggle there asleep. Pretty soon he gives up with the mini gizmo and just goes to sleep which is pretty cool..."
"That IS cool."
"They're an odd species aren't they."
"Sure are."
"But I love them."
"Me too..."
"What time is it?"
"No idea. Think I'll snooze."
"Me too..."
Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr........

FOR THE LOVE OF CATS

We have seven cats. 

We used to have many more but intercontinental travel and feline politics whittled down the numbers. They're all still okay, let me assure you. By whittle down I mean - rehome amid much tearful farewelling. 

The remainder emigrated with us. 

One day, Jeremy Jinger decided to make our home his home yet little did that big soppy boy know he'd be trading the Magaliesburg terrain for the hills of Adelaide. 

To mix metaphors - cats are just the dog's bollocks. 

They all still look at me very wistfully as if to say: how the fuck did we get here? Or: better yet - where the fuck IS here? 

But they're happy. And that makes me happy. 

Never more so than late at night when the black apparition leaps onto our bed and snuggles in the crook of my arm while I try to read. Karen snoozes peacefully next to us, oblivious to the catman bonding going on just a foot away. 

This is Chakra, the most skittish and highly strung of the entire menagerie - a menace, a brat, a monster who'll hiss and bite you (emphatically but not viciously) if he doesn't get his own way. He's a cat. 

But when he climbs onto my shoulder, nestling in my arms and kisses my face amid loud, steady purring, he is pure love. He is my familiar. 

I fall asleep cuddling this cat and I'm sure at times we even share dreams. 

I love them all so profoundly - the chirpy little Shrew who tiptoes so daintily and never enters a room without announcing herself, Jeremy the Jinger Ninjer who's a quadrupedal purring machine, Beatle the butt-tickle collapsacat flopping at your feet for yet another rump rub, Jozi the manic mini marauder - claws clicking on the hardwood floors as she tears around the house dislodging rugs in all directions before attacking Chakra then complaining bitterly because he decides to reciprocate, the twins, Isis and Ozzy, brats both but pigeon pair curled up on the bed in their yin yang pose just too cute for words. Then there is my nocturnal shadow lover, Chakra asleep in my arms when he's finished bullying and terrorising the rest of the clan and is ready to settle. 

It's a magical part of my day. 

It's profoundly comforting and can be described, I guess, as contagious contentment. 

Try it. Love a cat. Or better yet - let a cat love you. They're the ones who decide after all. 

You won't regret it. Ever.