h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It has been a wobbly old week in the Holme Valley. Particularly on wobbly Wednesday, which was followed by terrible Thursday. The weather has been cold but non-committal, snowdrops a-plenty in the garden, but no crocuses. The three tubs of daffodils which Maisie gave us last year appear to be sprouting through again, so they obviously thrive on neglect and bad weather, both of which they have had lashings of, this winter.

The animals have been quiet, going about their normal ways, sleeping in the warmest places they can find. Tig, Freddy and Lucy have had their regular walks in the woods. In some respects, it has been just a very normal week.

But this week has also seen Russell return to the vets on Wednesday for his monthly jab and checkup, and sadly, this time, it was anything but normal. I could see Mick the vet was concerned when he brought him back in, and said they had weighed him, and his weight had dropped to 2.5KG. The upshot was that he thought there was something else going on inside Russ the Puss, and it was either inflamed bowel disease, or "some form of low-grade cancer". My first thought was "I didn't know cancer came in grades", but by the time I had taken it in, Mick was already outlining the options, one of which was to inject Russbags with a new injection which would de-inflame him, if it was the former and not the latter. And thereby give his food a chance of staying inside him long enough to do some good. Which was what we agreed, and I took him home, having made another appointment.

All through Wednesday night and the early hours of Thursday morning, I failed to get to sleep, churning thoughts over and over in my mind. On Thursday I finally dragged myself up as the ragged streaks of dawn were glimmering in the eastern sky, and went through into the office. I could see that Russ was stretched out on Freddie's dog bed, in here, and that his head was down and he looked ominously still. I stopped dead in my tracks, but Tig, bless her, squeezed past me and went and licked him, at which point he woke up, and looked at me wearily.

Relieved, I went downstairs, but he didn't follow. I didn't want to get Deb out of bed to pick him up and bring him downstairs if he was feeling yucky, especially as I found he'd been sick during the night and I had to clear that up as well. It seemed best to leave him where he was reasonably comfy. As back luck would have it, Deb had to go out all day for a meeting, and therefore I arranged for Deb's mum (the Neigbourhood Witch herself!) to look in on him during the morning. She phoned me to say he'd obviously got himself downstairs and was curled up in his favourite chair, sleeping.

I felt helpless and a long way away. True, in one sense, people would say, well, he's just a cat. And others would say, well, they have to go some time, but to me he's been a companion for the last twelve years, especially at the start when I was alone, and bereft, and it was only the thought that he was relying on me for food that got me out of bed and to my desk, some mornings; I owe him at least, enough to put up a fight for his life. And so I found myself praying hard to St Padre Pio at various times in the day, though with the Pope at that time rapidly deflating in a Rome hospital, St P-P may have had other things on his mind, and may have had to refer my request on to Big G himself, with the equivalent of a celestial post-it note asking for help…

If I was an ancient Egyptian, of course, I could have offered up a prayer to the goddess Bast, goddess of domestic cats (and lesbians, surprisingly enough). I have often wondered about that. How do you get to be goddess of domestic cats and lesbians? Did she sleep through the alarm clock, the day they were sorting out who was going to be god and goddess of what? I can just imagine her arriving half an hour late, flushed and breathless, and the Pharaoh's Caliph holding a clip board (or Caliph board) and saying "Look, love, if you can't get here on time, it's nothing to do with me, The Nile, The Sun, Fertility, and the Sky-Boat to the Underworld have all gone. It's either the domestic cats and lesbians, or goddess of wheelie-bins, that's all that's left: take your pick!"

Of course, I am not meaning to mock the ancient Egyptians, who made such a wonderful job of communicating throughout the ancient world, with their wonderful language of hieroglyphics, which is especially useful, of course, if you want to write about people with funny heads walking sideways.

But I digress. By the time I got home on Thursday night, I had spent a lot of time reading up about Cat Inflamed Bowel Disease on the internet, and knew more than it was healthy to know about cat poo and how to tell, from scrutiny of it, whether it was more likely to be IBD or cancer. Which, I suppose, isn't a lot different from what the Egyptians did. So I shouldn't scoff. (In any sense of the word "scoff," having looked at the pictures!)

Russell, however, seemed much more inclined to scoff. In fact he scoffed half a tin of pilchards and some processed chicken slices. And kept them down, and in. By that time I had already been emailing the various friends who've been helping me pray for him, of all types and denominations, so their influence might have helped. These are people who have emailed me since I started this online diary/chronicle/epilogue last March.

On Saturday, things looked a little better still. (Despite the fact that, in the driveway, transferring stuff to the back of the car, I dropped a box of print which was the equivalent of five reams of paper onto my bad ankle, fortunately only from about knee-height.) Baggis was taking strips of shredded chicken roll from my hand, and seeming generally perkier, once we had managed to get some Kao-gel down him. He has also taken to sitting actually in the hearth, directly in front of the stove, toasting his whiskers ("My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you… Russell's whiskers!") It was with this in mind that Debbie decided to try and get a huge lump of clinker out of the stove, and ended up dislodging the riddling-plate with the poker, so that most of the red hot coals fell through into the ash-pan beneath.

There were only two choices: let the fire go out til the stove was cold enough to sort it all out, or try and fix it with fiery coals raining all about. With Russ in his current state, I didn't want the former. So, like some latter-day Shadrach, I managed to pull the ash-pan out, using the metal tool supplied for the purpose, although the manufacturers don't expect you to do this when it is glowing red-hot itself and full of red-hot coals. Gingerly, I lowered it down to the stone hearth and got on with trying to whack the riddling plate back into place, now that most of what had been stopping it going down had been removed. It was then that I noticed my right shoe (which had shifted to rest against the side of the ash pan during my efforts, and which did, yes, contain my right foot) was on fire, but fortunately I managed to stamp it out.

So we have reached today. Steeling ourselves for the worst, and hoping for the best. And we go on into next week in the same way, in the best traditions of those Fenwick ancestors of mine who charged into battle crying "A Fenwick! A Fenwick!" in both the '15 and the '45. As one of my dearest friends said, with more truth than she knew she had mustered, "Perhaps Russell is a Fenwick too". Well, me, and Russell, and the Fenwicks, we all stand together and we say "bring it on!".

It's been such a fraught week, I haven't had a lot of time for spiritual contemplation. The dreaded syllables of "cancer" knocked the equilibrium of the gyroscope of my thoughts and sent it spinning, haywire. But today, one thought has struck me (half baked, half digested - no change there then!) and it is this. Of all the people who pray for Russell, there must be a lot of different faiths involved. Anglicans, obviously, since he's the virtual cat of I-church, appointed by Alyson, no less. Catholics. Agnostics like my sister (she makes up for it by being a nurse, maybe that's where she finds religion, in the healing process, though she'd never call it that) People who practice various spiritual beliefs of their own, involving candles and incense, Quakers, Methodists, and it just occurred to me, and I offer it as a thought, no more than that, that all of these people are like leaves on a massive tree of spirituality, all ultimately drawing nourishment from the great tap root itself (Himself?).

It makes a nonsense of the way in which religion has been used to fight wars. Just for a fleeting moment I had a vision of a new church. A new church for a new era, where all the leaves recognised they were leaves like all the other leaves, and that they had all sprung from the same route. Imagine a church with the intellectual rigour and the anthems and the cathedrals of Anglicanism, the pomp and majesty and symbolism of the Catholics, the contemplative and peaceful life of the Quakers, the reforming zeal of the Methodists, assembling hand-loom weavers on the windy moorlands of Northern England to sing ragged hymns and tell them there can be a better world in this life AND the next; the innovation of the people who are willing to believe in things like spiritual healing - and who is to say they are wrong, it could just be science that we don't understand yet.

Imagine if we all rose up together one day and went to one place and let out a resounding shout that war shall cease and poverty shall cease and everybody shall have enough food and water.

If my tiny little email list of prayerful people can (seemingly) save Russell's life for a little longer, by holding him in their affectionate thoughts, what could thousands of us achieve? What could millions? Bring it on!