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

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley: and a draining one. Actually, it was last week that did the draining, this week we're just drained. Cause and effect. The weather remains stubbornly cold, what I recall of it. And when it hasn't been cold, it's been very cold. Even the sunshine has been what Bob Copper called the pale, counterfeit gold of February. "February fill-dyke" was what my old gran always used to say, and with snow forecast next week, who's to say she was wrong.

With five degrees of frost on the morning that the Kyoto agreement on global warming came into force, the irony has not been lost on me. Our central heating has been struggling manfully with the temperatures (and usually failing) The animals have been making their own arrangements to cope. Nigel has taken over the spare bedroom, taking advantage of the fact that this is the first place which the rays of the sun strike and warm each morning as it rises over Berry Brow. Kitty has devised a new Kitty-hole, shunning the warm fur fabric cat bed and the Felix play tent, and creating a nest for herself amongst the decorating tarpaulins in Colin's kitchen, where she nestles and rustles away unseen, to her catty little heart's content, harvesting her own cat-warmth through the night, only emerging when I come in to feed her and catechise her about Chinese communist leaders of the 1970s (Mao!)

Dusty has taken to nesting in the filing in the office (I knew there was a reason not to do it) alternating this with stints of laser printer watching, having temporarily usurped Russell as chief "printer's devil", checking each sheet of A4 paper as it goes in at one end and miraculously emerges out the other, as the big Epson C900 churns out page proofs of SPB Mais. Given the preponderance of this wonderful machine to jam, stop, or otherwise have a fit of the vapours at the slightest provocation, I share her wonderment at the way it's run today.

Russell's incredible convalescence continues for the moment, thanks in no small part to you people who prayed for him. You will never know how grateful I am. Mick the Vet said that a) he was delighted to have been wrong and b) it was like looking at a different cat. Russ has been fortifying himself and fighting his anaemia by wolfing down plate after plate of Liver and Beef dog food. Not exactly the ideal fare, but at least for the moment he seems to be thriving on it, and as I type this is curled up in his favourite chair in front of the stove, which is chucking out max heat, Debbie having bombed it up with coal about an hour ago.

We're not out of the woods yet, he still spends a lot of time sleeping in his bed in the hearth, and he's only been outside a couple of times since he came back, but on the other hand every day at the moment he does seem to be growing a little stronger and every day is a small miracle. This morning he jumped on the bed, meowing for food, and invaded the duvet, purring with all the strength he could muster. I just pulled the duvet over him and beamed a silent prayer of thanks.

Freddie has been staying with us, another furry hot-water bottle come bedtime. Granny is spending a week with Becky and Adrian and the vastly-growing Katie. At first, Freddie behaved like a spoilt little mummy's boy dog, sulking on the chair in full-on "I'm an abandoned orphan doggy" mode. As he's got more used to being here, however, in the last couple of days he's managed to have a disagreement with both Nigel and Dusty. Unfortunately, as has been observed before, Freddie is the only one who doesn't know he's only nine inches high, and he's completely oblivious to his chances of losing a large chunk of his snout if he keeps on annoying bad-ass momma cat Dusty, whose evil Medusa glare alone petrifies Nigel, every time she fixes it on him.

I've had little energy, and less motivation this week. The crisis over Russell really sapped my strength and I'm also conscious of the need to keep up the effort on that front, and not take my eye off the ball. That's one reason why I was wandering around last week singing "Take this badge offa me" and considering giving up writing these Sunday summaries. After all, if I feel too drained to find any spiritual sustenance, what am I going to write about? The holes in my socks?

I had another blow on Friday night when the clutch went on the car, leaving me stranded in Midgeley for an hour, while Green Flag turned up and towed me to Pennington's garage at Crosland Moor. By the time Debbie made it up there in the camper van to pick me up, I was cold, tired, hungry, and dispirited. It was 10 past nine and I had been awake for fifteen hours.

Since I wrote about giving up, I have had quite a few emails urging me not to. There is a pleasing symmetry to stopping after almost exactly a year, and in the next two weeks we've got to get SPB Mais off to press, we've got a crunch meeting with Waterstones on Wednesday in Brentford (home of nylons)and the annual bank review coming up. At the same time, though, I have been taken to task over the parable of the talents. "On a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands, and he that will seek it, about must, and about must go".

Perhaps I have been looking at this the wrong way, from the inside out. If people really do find this stuff useful, then maybe what I am meant to do is to create some good out of the situation. If it works, a book creates revenue. That revenue could be given to the PDSA or the CPL, or perhaps a more struggling cause like Mossburn Animal Centre, in gratitude for Russell's continued health. Well, it's one way of looking at it, and would of course mean a fair bit of extra work.

I don't know what I should do, to be honest. I feel I am groping my way forward, a step at a time, and time itself will make things clearer. When I wrote a couple of weeks ago about different religions being like leaves on one tree, a friend sent me her version of this idea. That God was like an elephant, but that we were all so close to it, that we could only see our own particular bit of the elephant, so those of us next to the legs, saw God as a tree trunk, and so on. We can't step back and see the wonder of the whole elephant. Or something.

Well, in the words of Michael Stipe, this weekend has been a bit like pushing an elephant up the stairs, waiting for a message from the great beyond … and all I have got to say at the moment, is "never give up". Even when the odds are so stacked against you, you may as well have a go. In fact, what have you got to lose?
It is better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep, or so the Chinese proverb says. This is all getting very zoological.

Interestingly enough, if you mouth the words "Elephant Juice" silently, it makes exactly the same mouth-shape as "I love you". So, in the words of Jesus, elephant juice each other as you would be elephant juiced, and all you need is juice (and an elephant, of course)

So, time to sleep, perchance to dream. The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. Tomorrow is another day, Monday, in fact, and Phillip will be here at 7.40AM to give me a lift in the van. I think I might have got my elephant as far as the landing, at any rate. He'll be fine there til tomorrow. Sleep well and consider yourselves Elephant Juiced, by a grateful cat and its more grateful owner.