Arise around 9:30, I think, and feel the pain of last night. Errrrrgh. As one heads to Caffé Nero for e-mail, etc., the face of the most notorious punk band in the world appears on a billboard advertising butter. Yes, Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols shilling for Country Life Dairy Products; and he’s wearing an excretiable red plaid jacket. Surely this is one of the signs of the apocalypse?

Breakfast out of the way, I seek an alarm clock so as to ensure catching my flight in a couple of days… Hang on, Jennifer’s note mentions picking me up at the airport Friday afternoon, which is excellent… but, erm… FRIDAY?!? Wasn’t it Saturday…? Shit!

I rapidly e-mail a few people pointing out that they now have a 36-hour window to meet me before I leave the country at an abominable hour Friday morning.

Back to hotel we head, after buying a newspaper for the sole benefit of confirmation of today’s date (and ensuring that there is a world outside for which to return), then check my printed flight information and itinerary. Friday, yes. Good to know that now. It might have been a bit of a problem had I got it wrong by a day.

Right. So off to Soak-Up Culture of Great Worth: the British Library to wander and stare at Really Old Books and Papers. These include (but were not limited to only): Read the rest of this entry »

While the commentary about the trip hasn’t started yet, we interrupt the possibility of them showing up here with sad news from the house about a family member.

Ms Shaft [#0037] Originally uploaded by I am I.A.M.

This morning, around 7am, Jennifer heard a thump from downstairs. She’d just fed our remaining cat ‘Ms Shaft’ her breakfast at an astonishingly late hour. Jennifer asked me if I ‘had heard that?’, and I grumbled something that sounded like Ancient Mesopotamian.

An hour later she went downstairs to do something laundry-related and discovered Ms Shaft lying on her side in the doorway of the basement bedroom.

She was already dead.

We have no idea what happened, nor was it in any way expected. She was seemingly in the best of health, full of energy and completely able to wake us at 4:00am demanding food because she wanted some and we weren’t immediately attending to her needs.

Admittedly, she wasn’t the brightest of cats. She once got herself into the tool shed next door, but couldn’t figure out how to get back outside; so she howled until she was released. ‘Ms. Daft’ she was commonly re-named.

Jennifer’s at the vets now to see what if anything can be explained about how this passing came to pass.

Added at 9:30am:

Dr. Cavanaugh’s best educated guess is that she suffered a heart-attack, commonly caused by Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy. This is the most common cause of death for cats who are fine one minute, and dead the next. While quite common in males, it’s not un-heard of in females’ sudden death.

The other possibility is poisoning through strychnine, commonly used in rat poisons. The cats eat the rats, the poison continues working, the cat dies. Ms Shaft wasn’t successful enough for this to have been a possibility.