On Albert Smith

 So a while ago I picked up a book called 'the lost diaries of albert smith'. I skimmed the blurb and picked it up. Middle aged character. Likes making lists, owns a grocers shop. Disapproves of his sons friends. Sounded like a middle aged Adrian Mole.

I finally got round to it and .. oh goodness it is not. 

It may start off as a similarly clueless diary (the narrator cannot understand why his son is against him, or why his wife won't 'obey' him) but it goes into much darker territory.

From the start there are slurs against pretty much every non-white/christian group. But the main characters ideals seem otherwise understandable, if misguided. He likes to keep his shop running well, and his household in line. He idolises his father who served in WWI. He despises the 'degeneracy' of the younger generation who have no discipline. He especially judges the young couples who park their cars at 'the point', so much so that he occasionally visits just to check on the terrible things they get up to there. 

The hypocrisy is a bit strong at times. Mr Smith disapproves of what the young people get up to, but enjoys hearing about it. And young 'troublemakers' getting into fights aren't the same as members of the 'youth front' parading around in uniform and cleaning up areas of 'undesirables'.

Yes this book quickly goes from 'patriotism' to 'racism' and far past it.

The most worrying bit for me, was that i have been told my whole life that we resisted Hitler because he was BAD. He persecuted and killed whole groups of people for no reason and that's why we fought him.

The view of Albert Smith is that we fought the nazis because they tried to take England but it's all ok if England does it to other people. 

And he starts with what he sees as 'reasonable' arguments that they aren't racist. They just want to keep England English. They don't want to be violent against POC. They will just restrict where they can live. And shop. And work. And then round them up into 'instruction centres' when they don't go along with the new plan for 'the good of the country'. 

Oh yes, this book goes fully into 'camps' complete with coloured patches for different types of 'instructees', forced labour, medical experiments, the works. All while sticking to the idea that the 'British spirit' that got us through WWII is still the ideal. Even when  superiors are going against the ideals of 'the movement', they have to be followed because that's what 'the leader' said to do. Despite the rationing and shortage of supplies, during this 'great new era'. 

The scary thing is, this guy believes right until the end. He sees everything falling apart around him, he himself becomes a prisoner. He sees friends and family die, and he still clings to this idea that it's all for the good of the country. For a higher cause. 

This book was published in the 60's and maybe this seemed a possible future then, but right now it seems all so much likelier and so, although this was not an enjoyable read at all, i think it should be brought back into print or at least made available online.

Ferret Tales part 2 - animal rights and mental health

 Ok this one is going to go to some dark places, and i must start by saying this is how I acted in this situation, but i would not necessarily recommend that anyone else follow my example. 

This story started about three years ago. At this point i had already had pet ferrets for about 6-7 years (not including the one i had as a child).

Many days, as i was walking to the station to catch my train to work, a neighbour tried to start a conservation with me. I was polite but understandably rushed but he kept at it, we learned each others names and eventually that we both had ferrets.

I thought he was much older than he turn he turned out to be. The flat cap, and mention of keeping pigeons... He seemed to belong to a previous generation and maybe he does. 

Anyway, one day i was walking back from the shop and i saw him standing at his front door talking to someone, and now know which house was his. So one day after i may have had a few drinks, i decided to pop by and ask if i could see the ferrets. 

I was not prepared for the backyard crammed with hutches and 11 ferrets. The smell was obviously overwhelming but in my current state i didn't think further into it until later. Apparently his nephew had a couple of them at first, got bored with them so he offered to take them. I assume they'd just been breeding since. 

I started going round more often. I noticed how rarely the hutches were cleaned out, and that cleaning time was pretty much the only time they got out of their hutches. They were fed once a day, a mix of dried ferret food and tinned dog food, both the food dishes and water bottles were filthy. I realised that i was going to have to try to convince him to surrender some or all of them to the ferret rescue so they could have a decent life.

I started to help out a bit. If he was out at the allotment he'd ask me to feed them if he wasn't going to get back in time. I gave him my number as otherwise he'd turn up at our door, asking for a favour. So instead he'd call almost daily, either asking for help with the ferrets or to borrow money/cigarettes, or just ask if i could pick up something from the shop.

So at this point I'd started mentioning the rescue. Dropping hints at first, then suggestions. If i asked why he wanted to keep them, when it was a struggle of time and money to look after them, and even then he never played with them, he would say 'I'm used to them". Sometimes if i asked a question he'd just pretend he didn't hear.

Of course this is where someone else might have just cut ties with him. He wasn't listening to me, and really just seemed to want me around to do him favours and lend him money (at least at this point he was paying me back). But i was also so worried about these ferrets, and wanted to do whatever i could to help them. As i said at the start, this is what i did but i wouldn't suggest anyone else put up with something like this. 

I did consider ringing the RSPCA and just seeing if they would take them off him, but there were a few problems with this. First of all it was the start of the pandemic, the RSPCA were only able to respond if animals were in 'immediate danger' and just having a shitty life didn't seem to count (as i was advised by a friend who works at a rescue).

Also, i had no idea what would happen to ferrets taken by the RSPCA, would they be handed to a specific ferret rescue or would they end up being put down? 

And finally, if he knew I'd reported him, well that would be unpleasant. Really it would be better if i could persuade him to let them go to the rescue.

So this was a pretty stressful time for me. I was constantly worrying about the life these ferrets had, trying my best to make sure they were cared for, while at the same time knowing that, as long as i was helping him, he'd have less reason to give them up.

And then two litters of kits appeared. 

Apparently he had no idea how to tell boys from girls, so one hutch had contained a hob and two jills, resulting in five kits. The other jill was on her own, but one of the boys must have got in at some point, because she had eight kits. If you're keeping count, that's 24 ferrets.

I now started to be even more insistent that some of these ferrets needed to go to the rescue, surely he couldn't be 'used to' these kits already? But he still didn't trust the rescue, he didn't know them. Eventually i asked if i could take a few of the babies when they were old enough, and he agreed to that, as long as i was keeping them and not passing them on to the rescue.

At this time we had four of our own: Bobbi, Rocky, Rikki and Morty. We thought they wouldn't take immediately to some kits, so we were able to get a hutch for the backyard, which we were in the process of fixing up.

Then one day our neighbour rang me and asked if i could take one of the older ferrets immediately. This was the hob who was in a hutch with two jills and five kits, and he was being 'nasty' to the babies.

We took him and put him temporarily in one of our smaller cages that we use for shows. This is Fergus. He was a little nippy at first, then after a day or so took to following me right by my feet (nearly tripping me up) wherever he was out. He was and remains the sweetest ferret ever. 

When it came time to take some of the babies, i decided to take the girls from the oldest litter, so reduce the number of potential babies if i didn't get them away from him by next year. However i had miscounted and there were actually five girls! However they were happy in the hutch together and got LOTS of playtime out. 

Finally, there was Stevie. Stevie was in a hutch on his own, and whenever i was round to feed them he would be pacing up and down at the bars, almost like when you see that video of the tiger in the zoo going mad from boredom. He seemed to be one of the older ferrets in the bunch, and it broke my heart to think he might live the rest of his life like that. So i asked both my partner and my neighbour, and we took him too. 

Stevie lived with us for a few months. That first night we didn't even put him in a cage, i sat him on the sofa next to me and he didn't even leave the sofa to explore, he just curled up and fell asleep looking happy, and i didn't want to disturb him so we just left him in the living room overnight. 

He and Fergus both quickly got on with our existing lot (something we still haven't managed with the young girls). Unlike Fergus, Stevie didn't even go through a nippy stage with us, he was the gentlest natured, barely even knew how to play with other ferrets, was just happy to sniff about the place and cuddle up. 

Sadly, one day Stevie seemed a little more tired than usual, not eating as much, and a little later we noticed he seemed to be having a little trouble breathing. 

We took him to the vet where an x-ray showed her had fluid in his lungs. Attempts to drain it were unsuccessful and it was considered kinder to let him go.

I'm still angry with my neighbour. Maybe Stevie was unhealthy from the way he lived for so long. Maybe not, but he spent way too long like that and not enough time with us. I have to tell myself that in those last few months he got to know comfort, fun, good food, new friends and as much love as we could possibly give him. At least he died knowing he was loved, not alone in a filthy hutch. 

I want to end this on a happy note, but I'm mentally drained from going over all that so I'll be brief. I was able to persuade my neighbour to surrender his remaining ferrets to the rescue. I was there to help them gather them all up in carry boxes, advising as best as i could on ages (my neighbour of course could barely tell them all apart). I know some are still with the rescue or being fostered, others are in homes living great lives.

At some point my neighbour started borrowing money faster than he could pay it back, probably not even keeping track of how much he owed me, and honestly I've just written it off. He's not getting anything else from me, but I've pretty much paid him to get those ferrets rescued. 

I've suffered anxiety throughout the whole thing and now I've finally cut ties with him. 

He still has a dog, who i walked in the past, and i know probably still should have better care than she has. But for my own mental health I've had to say 'not my problem' - if i offer to take her for the occasional walk, it'll turn into me being expected to do it every day, I'll be asked to lend money or pick up shopping again so, no. Sorry Pepsi, I'll miss you. 

Shit, this was meant to end on a happy note wasn't it? Well i got 24 ferrets saved during lockdown. Not bad, even if it did almost cause a mental breakdown.

Ferret Tales part 1 - loving and losing

 So we had a very bad day recently. Warning, this story doesn't have a happy ending.

We've had our bino boy Morty since 2017, when we took him and his sister Rikki home. They were very shy at first, Morty especially wandered as far as the first corner he found and lay there so long he fell asleep. But they were soon made welcome by our other lot (at the time that was Mia, Bobbi and Rocky). 

Morty soon got confident, he could demolish a chicken wing and grew very big, he weighed 2kg at one point! He and his sister played very roughly, but I'm pretty sure she was always the boss. Morty would squeal when she bit him too hard.

Oddly enough he learned quickly to stay away from our oldest girl Mia while playing, despite her being a quarter his size she must have firmly told him to back off!

He was a very needy ferret, and a big soft lump. If he wanted attention one of his favourite tricks was to flop onto his back, belly up and look up at you with big pleading eyes. 

We took him for walks and he loved digging in sand and dirt (typical bino) but then would scratch at your leg when he wanted to be carried for a bit. One time we stopped to talk during a walk, and turn we looked down and he'd curled up in the long grass for a nap! 

In the last month or two, we noticed he wasn't as lively as usual, although his belly seemed big he had actually lost weight, he wasn't eating well. 

The vets found out that he had a very enlarged spleen so we made the decision to have it removed. This was risky as he was an older ferret by now, but it seemed best to try as he was not having a good quality of life as he was. 

He got through the operation well, afterwards he was very lethargic we spent lots of time giving him cuddles. He had a little grumbly cough at first, the vet said it was from the anaesthetic tube and it did seem to subside, although he was still noisier then usual when eating or when he got excited. But he was eating better, wandering around exploring, and even almost interested in playing with a toy. 

But then in a couple of days the noises he was making were more frequent, and we took him into the vets for further tests. By the time we got him there he was clearly struggling with his breathing so the vets put him on oxygen and tried to do an x-ray. He still wouldn't stay still enough. The vets said they could sedate him, although in his current state this was high risk. I said do it, as the alternative was just to euthanise anyway.

They were expecting to find something wrong with his lungs, perhaps fluid they could drain. What they found was that his trachea had collapsed and this was something beyond their surgical skills on such a small animal. 

I came back into the vets, and got to cuddle my sedated boy for a little while before he was peacefully let go. 

So this has been nearly two months of worry, vets bills, close calls and hopes rising and falling.  Would I do it again? Would I do anything differently?

Ultimately I wouldn't change a thing (in what I could actually influence i mean). The surgery didn't keep him with us any longer but i think until the last two days he was in less pain, he was certainly acting more like his old self, and we got that time to show him how loved he was. 

I don't know if the surgery caused the trouble with his trachea, apparently in older ferrets these muscles can just get weaker and they can have a partial collapse which can be hard to spot, so he may have had trouble for a while before the full collapse. But taking his spleen gave him room in his belly again, and he was able to have one last taste of all his favourite treats, so honestly it seems to me it was worth the risk.

This is of course part of what you sign up for with pets, you're generally going to outlive them. We gave him a good life, and no matter how it hurts I'm going to try to keep giving a good life to others too. 

Next time I'm going to tell a story about rescue ferrets, but for now I'm just going to remember the gorgeous Mortimer J. Ferret xx

Mabel Stark and the joy of discovering a Tiger

 So last time I was talking about the overwhelming pressure of what should be read. The list keeps growing, and its the same with music or films or TV or anything else. Seriously, I've pre-ordered Encanto on DVD because I'm sick of not getting all the memes butIi refuse to subscribe to disney plus. 

I have many lists. Music artists to listen to on spotify (I add the songs I like to an ever growing collection of huge playlists, so if spotify turns out to be another service I have to righteously cancel, that's going to be a real pain). TV shows and films to watch, both ones I own on DVD and ones I'm just waiting for the change to catch on a streaming service. 

And of course, books. I don't want to get into the whole thing again but there's 'classics' like Dickens, Bronte, Tolstoy, etc and 'modern classics' which were written in the 1920's/1930's and then... I don't know what we're supposed to call anything after that? One flew over the cuckoo's nest, american psycho, fight club, and all these others that have been turned into films where people totally miss the point. (I don't even know about that, I've not got round to reading them yet). But then, it's not like anything written after 1970 isn't worth reading. Or even 2000. There's just so much out there and its so much easier to be published than back in the 1900's, so contrasting the fear that you're missing out of the great things everyone else is talking about, is the fear that ALL OF YOU are missing out on some undiscovered masterpiece because it hasn't been reviewed on a talk show or popular blog or whatever.

It is for this reason (and not because it's so much cheaper) that I have a weakness for random books found in charity shops. Neve rmind judging by the cover, I scan the spines looking for a title or design that catches my eye, look at the blurb, maybe give it a sniff, and think 'yes, THIS may be worth adding to the hoard'.

And until a couple of years ago, the hoard grew and I barely read any of them.

Since I've motivated myself, I've read a lot of stuff. It would take a lot of time and reminiscence to talk about what surprised me in a good way, and maybe I'll get back to those gems one day, but for now I'd like to talk about my new friend Mabel.

I had never heard of Mabel Stark before. When I found this book I had no idea she was a real person, but my little gay, burlesque-loving eyes saw a book about a woman with short hair joining the circus and jumping into a male-dominated field and thought 'yeah, this will do.'

This is not 'tipping the velvet' with tigers, although I do think Keeley Hawes could have played this role perfectly. It's easy to look at stories from this period and assume the sexuality of women who didn't conform to the stereotypes of the time, but that's just another stereotype isn't it? It's perfectly possible to wear leather pants and wrestle tigers, and still want a husband and children. Of course, the problem here is that this is a fictionalised account, written by a man who read through a load of newspapers and letters some 30 years after her death. From what I can gather the author did thorough research and certainly based a lot of his guesses on solid clues from her correspondence. But I still wonder how Miss Stark would feel about some of the embellishments. 

Some of the most touching moments in this book were likely totally fictional, with only the names of persons and tigers involved being based on evidence. But either way, its an amazing story and one I think will stick with me for a while. I'm certainly going to have a bit of trouble letting go of these characters and starting on another book.

Hello again

 Hi. So, I nearly didn't come back here. I had other ideas. Ideas of using a blog for such gut-spilling, closet-opening reality that this one wouldn't do. Oh no, I wanted one where I could be completely anonymous. But do you know how hard it is to find a FREE blog like this, and not have it connected to your g account? Or make a NEW one? Er, nope. No way. Too much effort.

So I figured I'd come back here and babble away and just hopefully not say anything that would get Me ostracised from society or fired. Notice I say 'ostracised' and not 'cancelled'.  As much as this blog will be somewhere to exercise my freedom of speech, if anything I say comes across as homophobic, racist, transphobic, etc I FULLY expect to be called out on it. That's how we learn. I'm Bi and female but also cis and white and not exactly living in poverty, so I don't see from all those sides and would rather hear that something I'm saying is insensitive than continue saying it in ignorance.

Anyway, now that I've got the introduction out of the way, I'm talking about books today. More so the books I choose than the books I'm reading right now. 

I started to realise a couple of years ago that I was buying more books than I read. Way more in fact. And at least with novels, with a story, I'd read them all the way through. Non-fiction or 'coffee table' books I'd buy to look at interesting pictures and not much more. So I thought, 'no more!'.

I started doing LISTS. I made a note of every single book I owned and hadn't read properly. and started keeping track of which books I had read that year. I generally had one novel and one non-fiction on the go at the same time. It's been working pretty well.

But in rediscovering my love of reading, I also noticed how much there was out there that I hadn't read, and hadn't even thought of reading! Sure, I've read Les Miserables and Bronte, but I haven't read Dickens or Tolstoy or Melville! (Gilmore Girls fans, I am NOT choosing Moby Dick as my first Melville). My amazon wishlist grew amazingly. 

At the same time, I asked around in online book groups for suggestions to add to my ever expanding to-do list. I usually just pick up whatever takes my fancy from the selection at charity shops, but I was now making an effort to keep an eye out for non-fiction that appealed to me; ancient history, social subjects, natural history. But then I realised, as interesting as these were, if I was really going to expand my horizons I would need to ask around a bit more. Because when I was reading history, I really wanted to hear the things we DIDN'T get taught in school. And do you know what we did get taught in school? History as written by a load of old, white men. Sure it was interesting to read about ancient Egyptians and Greeks, but really what I was reading was the standard western take on such things. I wanted to hear from other perspectives. I've added a bunch of history books to my list, from not such a white/western perspective but I'm still on the look out for more (I've got about 3 years of books to be read, so if you suggest something and I buy it soon, I might even read it before the 20's are out).

On the other side of this huge idea of what I SHOULD read, all the sorts of perspectives and subjects I should let into my head, there is the fact that most of my book shopping happens spontaeneously in charity shops. Ok, recently more of my charity shop buys have been things on my list (wuthering heights, mill on the floss, far from the maddening crowd), but then that's mostly because my wish list has grown.

But what DO I end up buying and reading?

Well right now I'm reading my way through the fantastically packaged boxed set of Danielle Corsetto's comic 'Girls With Slingshots' (seriously, probably one of the fanciest hardbacks I own now).

The other book is 'The Final Confession of Mabel Stark' by Robert Hough,

This I believe I saw in a charity shop, looked at briefly and took home. I had never heard of it or her before, but she has now come into my life and I will talk about her next time.