It’s a strange and the saddest feeling watching a beloved (and that is not too strong a word) pet slowly dying. It’s almost a year since we thought Sweeney had had it but she is still with us only now it seems she can’t stay upright for more than a minute or two or, apart from eating, spending her time tottering from one sleeping place to another and the position in which she lies you have to look really close to make sure she’s still breathing and hasn’t gone. She likes lying under my desk where she is right now and has a snuggle in the breakfast room and at night she sleeps with Douglas. This means he has to get up very early as, being incontinent , she wants to go out and, being incontinent, she wears pampers at night just in case and they have to come off. In the heat of summer she will sometimes lie on the tiled kitchen floor or try to find another cool place which isn’t easy. She smells and Douglas shaved off her hind feathers as she tended sometimes to foul them with urine. She’s well over fifteen years old now and you expect her to go not in a day or an hour but in a minute. My sister, Ceri, is right, you get a pup and somewhere down the years you’re buying heartache. She was bought from the Halifax RSPCA as a birthday present for Douglas all those years ago and is our last link with Yorkshire and Hollings Farm. I think I might have said all this in an earlier blog. I know she won’t be the first pet over which I’ve howled my eyes out at the end but it doesn’t make it any easier. Fortunately she doesn’t seem to be in any pain and Michael, the vet said just to leave it be and let it take its natural course. I don’t think any of us realised how long that natural course would be. She is virtually blind, deaf, and sometimes when you wake her up totally disorientated so that she doesn’t know in which direction to walk and has to be guided and prodded every step of he way. I am really surprised she hasn’t bumped into obstacles more often. She still knows though when favourite people come to visit. I presume as she can’t really see them that she recognises their scent. I always thought that, after our first dog we had in London, by the name of Natalie, that no other would ever equal her but I reckon Sweeney is on a par. I wonder what goes through her mind. Is she aware of what is happening or just upset that she is so weak these days? She has certainly given us many years of happiness and it is so sad now to see her so frail. Well, guess it comes to all of us sooner or later.
Yesterday, to talk about something as mundane as the weather, was overcast which certainly cooled things down after weeks of searing hot weather, sweaty days and sweaty nights to put it crudely. It is not supposed to rain in August at all but it would be nice if it did. One year it did rain in August. That was when Douglas took the roof off the main building to renew it and it rained chair legs as the Greeks say. Talk about flooding? It certainly took days of mopping up and drying out. Of course it was deliberately timed to happen before he could get the new roof on! Sod’s law!