Dram’s story. Part 5

Dram was not destined to have a long life. He developed a small lump on his chest. It remained small for a long time and the vet said that it didn’t seem to be bothering him and if it wasn’t bothering us we could ignore it. In retrospect we concluded that this had been bad advice and that the lump should have been removed while it was small.  Eventually it began to grow. Basically the vets adopted a wait and see attitude and long after they could have sorted the problem they announced that its size and location made it too dangerous to operate – and there was no treatment.
In those final months Dram behaved perfectly normally almost to the very end. He had always approached life with enthusiasm, welcoming each new day energetically,  greeting us on our return from shopping trips etc. with boundless excitement and helping to cheer us when times were difficult. None of this changed and all I was concerned about was that, when the time came, his end would be swift and as painless as possible.
On a Sunday in December 1997 he ate only half of his breakfast and none of his evening meal. This was serious, even though in other respects he behaved normally, trotting across our front lawn at the end of his evening walk, tail up, as if without a care in the world. Later, though, he became restless and I stayed up with him all night, able to do little but keep him company and take him out when he seemed to need it.
By breakfast time the following day my duty to Dram was clear. To his credit the vet came very quickly and it was all over in no time.
Lots of dog owners will have had to make the same decision. It was awful and all the more so because it was December 9th, his ninth birthday.

Dram’s story. Part 4.

 

You couldn’t fool Dram, even when he was asleep. Judging by his expression here as he gazes towards the kitchen, my guess is that he was having a nap when someone opened “his” biscuit cupboard.  I  reckon he is about half a second away from galloping to the kitchen.
As he got older we allowed him more concessions. For example he was allowed to climb the step from the living room and view our eating habits from closer quarters in the breakfast room. He was always curious but also very careful. He seemed to have a golden rule of his own in that he never touched anything that was on a table or other piece of furniture but if an item of food was on the floor then that was his, no question. In fact it didn’t need to be on the floor; on the way to the floor was good enough for him - its chances of reaching the floor were almost negligible. Being curious though, meant that he would put the very ends of his paws on the edge of the table from time to time just to peer over the top and see what was there. This was not a problem as he only looked and never touched.
However, there was one very funny episode that got him into trouble with Jennie. We each had a small cake on a plate and my wife and I had taken ours to the living room. Jennie had left hers on the breakfast room table while she went into her bedroom for a moment. When she returned, the plate was in the same place but the cake had gone. By chance I witnessed what had happened. Dram had put his paws on the table for a closer look at the cake but had accidentally caught the edge of the plate with a claw. The plate tipped suddenly, propelling the cake into the air where it described a really neat arc about three feet above Dram’s head before falling behind him. As the plate settled back into place Dram turned like a flash and no part of that cake reached the carpet. He left no clues. It was the perfect crime.

 Dram could take any amount of fussing. If Granny Anne stopped tickling him under his chin he would simply nudge her arm to start again. If she was watching TV or reading a book, or otherwise ignoring him he would nudge her elbow until she paid attention. If this didn’t work he had other ways to atract her attention including launching into his party trick, which was to spin round suddenly in the middle of the floor, grab his tail in his mouth and take it to her, walking sideways but taking good care to look where he was going. Then he would bring it to me – and both of us would make a fuss and tell him how clever he was.

It is widely recognised by now that our canine friends have “powers”, for want of a better word, that we hardly understand. I am not thinking here so much about their ability to “read” our moods and feelings and behave accordingly, amazing though that is, but of something more mysterious. Dram gave us reason to think about these aspects a few times. For example, through much of his life I worked from home but went away to work once per fortnight. These trips involved being away from home for anything from 12 hours to around 60 hours, returning in the evening or early hours of the morning. There was no way of predicting exactly when I would arrive home. Despite this, 20 minutes before I arrived, Dram would move to the back door, even though his bed was only a couple of feet away,  and wait there for me. His accuracy was eerie. 
I am sure that Jennie and Granny Anne could tell you a lot more about Dram, but my version of his story is almost finished.

 

 

 

Dram’s story. Part 3.

Dram’s bed was near the back door so that it was nearby when he returned from a walk. The bed had a removable cover, plus a spare, and these were washed at regular intervals and he was always excited to be given a freshly washed bed cover.
The location of his bed also helped him to guard the door. On one occasion when I was away from home for a couple of days our neighbour called. On getting no response to her knocks she let herself  in, closed the door behind her and called for my wife who was at the other end of the house. Although our neighbour visited quite often and was known to Dram, he didn’t let her get any further, in my wife’s absence from the room. He was not at all threatening. He didn’t even bark. Instead, he leaned against her knees and held her against the door until my wife arrived.
Mind you, if anyone approached the house that he didn’t know, or didn’t like, the growl would start somewhere near his tail, a low resonant note gradually building in tone and volume as it worked its way forward, finally bursting forth as thunderous barking accompanied by a most intimidating display of large teeth. We knew that he probably wouldn’t harm anyone, other than to lick them to death but strangers didn’t know that.

Like any sensible dog Dram loved to be the centre of attention and of course I spoiled him. Who wouldn’t? When he was very small I would sit him on my knee as I sat on the sofa. A bit later he found that he could jump up on to my knee – so long as I caught him so that he didn’t fall down again. This became part of the routine and it never really stopped – even when he had grown to around 80 lb in weight!  Otherwise he never jumped on to furniture but eventually we allowed him one exception to this rule – he was allowed, for a short time each day, to occupy the righthand end of the sofa as you can see in the picture above.  It was a great place for a nap! It was also a great vantage point from which to see whether anything interesting was happening in the kitchen.

Dram’s story. Part 2.

In the picture above Dram is 18 weeks old, weighs 50 lb and can pull himself up and lean on the side of his pen quite easily. At this age he barked only in his sleep. It was at about this time that he learnt to escape from his pen by shaking the side of it until the catch fell open. However, in his entire life he did hardly any damage inside or outside the house and soon we were sufficiently confident in him to discard the pen and buy him a luxurious bed, which was very much to his liking.
From the large living/dining room in which Dram spent his early months there was a step up to the rest of the house. This was a sufficient obstacle in itself in the early days and when he showed signs of climbing that step we trained him not to do it. So, three times a day you would find him stretched out on the living room floor, with his chin on that step, noting every scrap of food that we consumed at our mealtimes. He was always fed first – a hangover from my farming days – but he would still stare at us as if he hadn’t been fed for a week!
Another of Dram’s traits, and one that surprised me, was his devotion to cleanliness. It was almost feline. He was brushed and combed regularly and loved all that attention but it was inevitable that he would get muddy from time to time. On coming back to the house he would go straight to his bed and stay there, happily preening himself, until clean and dry.

“Me and my dog”. Jennie was about 10 years old here. Dram would walk miles and we devised a routine which included taking him out six times daily, mostly around our own large garden but also around the local country lanes.
His meals and their timing evolved as he grew. There were several wall cupboards in the kitchen which looked the same and (to us) sounded the same when their doors were opened and closed. One of them housed Dram’s biscuits. Even if he was 30 feet away in a different room it was simply not possible to open that particular cupboard without him noticing and arriving at your feet almost instantly. This happened only when “his” cupboard was opened, never with the others. When he had grown out of the puppy diet most of his meals consisted of mixer, topped with Pedigree Chum of one sort of another and followed by Shapes biscuits and a Bonio. At least once a week we would vary his diet by sharing our roast meal. The beef or chicken took the place of the Chum and he also enjoyed the roast potatoes, peas and gravy, all of which was topped off artistically with a Yorkshire pudding. Granny Anne made little round Yorkshire puddings, about three inches in diameter. There was always one for each of us including Dram. He would pick his off the top of the food in his dish and close his mouth aroumd it with both cheeks bulging. Then he would look at us as if to say “What do I do now?” If we had sausages, we cooked an extra one for Dram. If we opened those plastic yoghurt pots with the peel-off foil lids, Dram would lick the yoghurt off the underside of the lids for us. He was always obliging like that. “News at Ten” on the TV was the signal for Dram’s supper, just a light snack of three Shapes and a Bonio. Wherever he was in the house, as soon as the music started to introduce the news he would trot around, gazing at each one of us in turn to see whether anyone had noticed what time it was.

Dram’s story. Part 1.

This is the story of our dog, much abbreviated to make a series of five posts at 48-hour intervals.

Some time in the 1980s my daughter, Jennie, told me that she wanted a dog. At the time neither our environment nor our lifestyle was conducive to ownership of a dog, at least, not what I call a proper dog, so I told her that when we lived in a suitable place we would have a dog.
Well, we moved. From a conventional suburban semi-detached house and gardens we relocated to a large, single-storey rural property with more than an acre of garden adjacent to farmland. Now we could have a dog.
When I was about eight years old, I, too, wanted a dog. It was not to be. But I did have a rather nice book illustrating the best-known dog breeds and after due research the number one breed on my short list was the Golden Retriever.  It was the right sort of size. It was, and is still, in my eyes the most handsome of dogs and it had a reputation for its excellent temperament.  I had a feeling that any dog that was going to live with us would need both patience and a sense of humour. With a young daughter in the house the temperament mattered.
At the end of 1988 we made enquiries and discovered that a friend of a friend had a goldie that had presented her with a lively litter of eight pups on December 9th. Unbeknown to us, this date was to become even more significant. Arrangements were made to view the said litter. As we entered the owner’s kitchen the pups paid no attention at all to us for the very good reason that all eight of them were arranged around the perimeter of a very large dish and were tucking into their evening meal, heads down and tails wagging furiously.
Having cleaned the dish completely, they all set off in different directions to explore the kitchen and play and we didn’t choose any of them. Instead, we were chosen. He wasn’t that much bigger than some of the others but he was inquisitive and clearly a personality. According to the owner he was the King of the Litter and as if to say “Choose me!”, he nibbled my shoe. So we chose him and collected him when he was eight weeks old, in February 1997,  so that he was at home before Jennie arrived from school. 

Quite by chance we had acquired an aristocratic Golden Retriever whose not very distant ancestors included such renowned champions as Camrose Cabus Christopher and Stolford Happy Lad. We gave him a suitable name, following in the somewhat alcoholic tradition started by his mother and to this we added the name of our house making the whole thing look distinctly impressive in the Kennel Club’s records. For the purposes of this blog I will refer to him as Dram (another, albeit unofficial, alcoholic measure).
After a slightly nervous start Dram quickly proved to be happy with us. Our large living/dining room at that time had a parquet floor but we had not yet carpeted it, having been there for a fairly short time. In the picture above he is about 10 weeks old - a mischievous bundle of fur but trying hard to be good. To accomodate him safely, at those times when we couldn’t be in the room with him, I built a wooden pen from the remains of a cupboard that I had dismantled previously. Inside the pen the floor was covered with umpteen layers of newspaper and his food and water bowls were in there with him. I will not attempt to describe the state of the newspaper each morning for the first couple of weeks. Suffice it to say that I would scoop it all up and shove it into the solid fuel boiler (complete with the little white sterilised bones that he used to enjoy) and then start again with fresh paper and freshly washed bowls. By 11 weeks he was house trained. At 14 weeks he weighed 35 lb and liked nothing better than digging molehills while looking sad, yet enjoying himself hugely. By this age he would sit, stay, go to bed and do other things(!) more or less to order.

Another painting

 As regular visitors to this blog will have discovered by now, I do not finish a painting very often. This one was painted a few years ago and I came across it recently while unpacking yet another box in our garage. At present I am writing a rather long post, which is likely to be published here in two or three parts, telling the story of the Golden Retriever who was an amazing addition to our family some years ago. So I decided to show this painting by way of an introduction to that story.

The picture was painted on oil painting paper (7 x 9 in.) using Winsor and Newton Artisan water-mixable oils, my favourite medium. After some months it had been varnished with Rowney Acrylic soluble gloss varnish. When I unpacked it the other day it seemed very grubby but, thanks to the varnish,  it was easy to clean it without causing damage. The varnish is soluble in white spirit but not in water. So I quickly wetted the whole painting with plain water, using a two-inch paint brush, then wiped the whole thing with folded kitchen tissues, easily removing both dirt and most of the water leaving the painting as good as new.

Memories of Ballina – a different world

 Like so many others in recent years, my wife and I have been attempting to trace our family’s  histories with varying degrees of success. In the early stages of this research it is the older members of the family who should be primary sources of information but we have a problem. We ARE the older members of the family now and I have come to realise that I should have been more curious about my ancestors many years ago.
If our daughter or grandchildren embark on a bit of amateur genealogy when we are long gone they will have the results of our research to start with, plus all the rapidly improving resources on the Internet. To ensure that they have more than just names and dates we have both been writing autobiographies, my wife’s being a substantial work of well over 50,000 words thanks to the fact that she was better informed than me and has a good memory. Mine, by contrast, is a mere 10,000 words in note form (written more or less in chronological order as various recollections came to mind) and both have been dormant for over a year and need more work.
Actually I have been pleasantly surprised by how much I have remembered in general and disappointed by how much I have forgotten of those episodes that I regard as high points in my life.
One of the most wonderful, albeit brief, episodes in my life took place in about 1947 or’48, when my mother and I went on holiday to Ireland. I was seven or eight years old at the time and the holiday lasted four weeks. We lived in West Wickham, in Kent, which was (and remains) a very pleasant residential area but already, in effect, a suburb of London on the southern edge of the Greater London area.
The destination for our holiday was my grandmother’s home in Ballina, County Mayo. According to my mother’s Travel Permit Card we had been there on holiday previously, for four weeks, in 1941. I don’t remember. Perhaps I should have paid more attention but then I was only sixteen months old at the time. 
St Patrick’s Terrace was on the edge of Ballina and led from the town to open country. Number three was a small house of which I have only a hazy memory. There was no pavement (sidewalk) or front garden so the front door was at the side of the road and opened directly into the front room which had a single window, to the left of the door, looking on to the road.  As you entered the house the party-wall was on your right and against this wall was a large piece of furniture rather like a Welsh dresser, a combination of cupboards and shelves. Various shelves and compartments housed the stock for my grandmother’s small business as a retailer of confectionery and tobacco. I can remember still the boxes full of Cadbury’s chocolate and the open-ended paper packets containing four Woodbines.
Looking back now, day to day life seems to have been much simpler than it is for us today with all our wondrous gadgets etc. but it was also more demanding physically. There were open fires burning peat which had been cut locally.  There was no piped water. Instead water was collected in buckets from a well a couple of hundred yards along the road. Milk was delivered on a donkey cart carrying a large churn from which the milk was transferred to jug or can supplied by the householder. One of my daily treats while on holiday, was to ride the milk cart to the end of the terrace - only a short distance but a great adventure all the same.
Our milk suppliers, the local dairy herd, ambled by the front door four times daily on their way to and from their morning and afternoon milkings and I would rush out to follow them until they passed the well, which was some distance beyond the last of the houses where the countryside began. At seven or eight years of age this was living!
Then there were the trips to the centre of Ballina, which was no more than about half a mile away. My mother had spent most of her life in Ballina prior to moving to England in her early thirties, so on the rare occasions that she returned complete with her young son there were visits to be made to family and friends, many of whom had known her since she was herself only seven or eight.  ”Ah! Sure! He’s a Shannon!” (this being my mother’s maiden name) would be the reaction of so many of the folks in each shop in turn as we stopped at almost every one, or so it seemed to me, on our travels.
To a small boy, some shops were more interesting than others. In particular, there was Slater’s the photographers. The business is there still, so far as I know. The resulting photographs show that there was at least one more holiday in Ireland while I was at primary school, probably in 1950. The photography was not the main attraction to me in those days. It was the big ice cream cone that came afterwards – also from Slater’s.
I remember being taken to a local peat bog where the peat was being cut and stacked. The sight, and especially the smell, has remained with me ever since together with the happiest associations.
Then there was the more formal courtesy visit to the convent at which my mother had spent her schooldays. For this I was briefed, no, “drilled” would be a better description, in advance. Things were different in those days. Children were expected to be seen but not heard, to speak only when spoken to and to be clean and tidy and immaculately turned out on formal visits to the convent and elsewhere. We were expected to know how to behave – for example, to stand when adults entered the room and not sit again until instructed to do so. There were all sorts of finer points of behaviour which came naturally after a while and which did us no harm at all.
It really was a different world.

This one’s for Sandie…

…who commented on my recent post about the decline in handwriting and asked to see a sample:

So here it is. I don’t know how it appears on your screen but it is life size on mine (ie. the the width of the writing is 11.5cm), so quite big perhaps. It is interesting to compare it with Jennie’s, though I have no idea what handwriting experts would make of it!

Preserving the records

Recent discussions about the decline in handwriting have highlighted a disturbing thought, namely, can digital equipment and media provide a reliable means of long-term storage for our written records, photographs and music? If my experiences have been anything to go by then the answer is no. 
My first computers were Amstrad PCWs which stored everything on removable floppy discs. Just to be awkward, these were not the same discs as used in “IBM-compatible PCs” so that when I upgraded eventually to a Dell PC it was necessary to use a special cable and software to transfer all my text discs from PCW to Dell, and then import them into Microsoft Word. Those were the days when “state of the art” so far as the general public were concerned amounted to 100mb hard drives, Windows 3.1 and the WWW was for a small minority of “anoraks”.
Now, apparently, PC floppies are obsolete though I have still a couple of dozen unused. Anticipating this, I put all my back-up storage on to CDs. Then the trouble began. Despite careful storage some CDs later proved unreadable (even in the machine on which they had been recorded). Later CD drives failed to read CDs made on earlier drives and so on. Add to this major computer/hard drive breakdowns (three in 20 years) – precisely the reasons for making back-up discs in the first place – and, one way or another I lost hundreds of digital photos a few years ago and still more files in 2006.
Fortunately, most of the really important photos and text files pre-dated the advent of home computers and are safe still in their original paper form. Now, I use a one-year-old laptop and have everything important backed up on CDs and on a less than one-year-old USB hard drive. I am reasonably confident that I will not suffer major losses of computer content during the next few years but that is not the point.

The point is that I have family photos and other documents (for example) dating back into the 19th Century mostly in their original form. They, at least, could well last for another couple of centuries or more. However, in view of the ever more widespread use of digital equipment and storage media, how can today’s text documents, photos (and music files) be stored securely for the benefit of the next four or five (or more) generations? Or are we expected to become a society which is happy to discard anything that is more than a year or two old, including all traces of our own day to day history?

Handwriting?

Digital Dame set me thinking recently when she wrote about the decline of handwriting. It is hard to remember now that, not that many years ago, the ability to write fluently, and even with some style, was a skill possessed in some degree by most of the population. I can remember some of the earliest writing and spelling lessons at school when, using a pencil and writing between parallel lines, we constructed each letter and, later, joined them together so very carefully while spelling out the immortal sentence “The cat sat on the mat.”  Later, dip pens and inkwells almost destroyed my interest in handwriting, a situation more or less rescued by a succession of cheap fountain pens until each in turn began to leak on to fingers, school blazers etc. Then came the dreaded ballpoints which were heralded with cries of horror from the handwriting purists but which were very convenient and encouraged much faster writing at the expense of legibility.
At college I managed to develope a fairly tidy italic style of handwriting that I was able to produce at great speed. This was all thanks to a fellow student who just happened to be sitting on my left-hand side on our first day in the lecture hall. He was deaf but by a combination of lip-reading the lecturer, and reading my notes, he was able to produce a very comprehensive set of his own notes. So I tried to help by paying attention, noting everything and keeping it legible. It was good for me as well as for him and we continued this collaboration throughout the two-year course.
After college I had little use for handwriting and by the time I was writing again the typewriter was the thing. I had played with a Bluebird portable from a very young age and now had a typewriter of my own – an IBM Golfball no less which, on the rare occasion that I left it switched on for as much as a couple of hours, appeared to become overheated and promply ceased to function until switched off for some time to cool down. 
Years later I was given a delightfully ancient Imperial which stood tall on the desk on four stout legs with all its inner workings shamelessly on view. You have seen the sort of typewriter I mean. Every museum has one. Mine had probably been hard at work for several decades even before my employer at the time kindly donated it to me (well, I did intercept him literally on the way to the rubbish skip!) and it would have been good for several more decades had it not been overtaken by The New Technology.
During my “typewriter era” I bought an even more exciting device, a Gestetner duplicator (remember those?) complete with smart cabinet and accessories to enable printing in three colours. Was I the new Caxton in the making. Not really, though I produced letterheads and other stationery and  wrote and published multi-page newsletters. This was exciting stuff in those days but even more interesting developments were imminent.
The next toy, a few years later, was Sir Alan Sugar’s brilliant Amstrad PCW. I wonder how many people made their first acquaintance with computers thanks to the PCW. I was hooked from day one. First, there was one on my desk at work and then I had one at home. Years later I progressed to a “proper” PC.
As for handwriting, I write an occasional cheque – but they are said to be dying out. I might write the odd note for the milkman – if we had a milkman that is.  I have hardly any use for handwriting now. It is a shame.