Merry Christmas/Happy New Year

At 02:30 this morning we packed my mother-in-law and Miss M______, her travelling companion, along with their four suitcases, into a taxi which would take them to Copenhagen airport in good time for their 07:00 flight to London. It was very cold as we bade our farewells, and an unblemished inch of powdery snow lay on the ground. Provided all is going to schedule, they should be in Heathrow by now, wearily pausing for breath before their flight back to Canada. They had been with us for two weeks.

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The day they arrived (Sunday December 22nd) was no less chilly. I had travelled out to meet them alone, as we'd had a veterinary emergency that morning, having observed Cat spend an inordinate amount of time in the litter box, to which he would return every few minutes, in evident discomfort, depositing no more than a pinpoint of urine each time. A few phone calls led me to speak to the on-call vet, who advised an immediate examination, suspecting the possibility of a urinary tract obstruction. Within an hour my wife and I were in the deserted clinic assisting the vet as she sedated, examined, anaesthetised and cathetered the unfortunate feline, before syringing saline solution into his bladder and draining blood-tinted fluid back out. She could find no stones or crystalline deposits, which led her to prescribe an anti-inflammatory and to test for bacterial infection. Cat was in a pitifully groggy state upon our return to the Mañana, so my wife opted to stay and keep an eye on him while I packed a book (Proust's The Guermantes Way), some pistachios, an apple, two oranges, and a bottle of mineral water, all of which had been consumed by the time we returned, some eight hours later.

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Between arrival and departure: much shopping; feasts of julskinka (Swedish Christmas ham), roast turkey, and roast beef; a whole lot of lounging around reading and watching TV; rounds of phone-calls to the folks back back home; a few hours exchanging gifts; a champagne toast on our balcony as a fusilade of fireworks and a carillon of bells announced the turn of the year.

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I came into work by mistake today, forgetting that January 6th is a Swedish national holiday. I should have realised by the dead quiet that prevailed at 07:00 when I was out in the park with Dog, but it wasn't until I stepped outside again at 08:30 to find the streets scarecely less deserted, that the truth of it belatedly dawned on me. Holiday or no, I reasoned, there was enough for me to do at the office to make a half-day worthwhile - so here I still am.

A few minutes ago I went downstairs to pick out a snack from the freezer-cabinet vending-machine there, spending 18 SEK on a pre-packaged köttfarspaj (minced meat pie) which I popped into one of the bank of microwaves. I sat down to eat at one of the tables that afford a fine view of a Baltic inlet, dotted with islets, which separates my place of work from an arm of the mainland beyond. The water has been frozen for days, a bright white plain after last night's snow. Dozens of distant figures could be seen skating across it: a parent and child, the latter being towed by the family dog; a 'paraskater' being dragged along by a bright orange fabric canopy; a cyclist using the sea as a shortcut. I heard and then saw a helicopter, gleaming in the bright sunlight black and orange like some poisonous bug I thought, and watched with growing interest and alarm as it circled and descended to a point on the ice a mile or so away. Its rotors conjured up an almost opaque cloud of floury snow around it, so I could not see exactly what was happening, only hoping that the ice had not given way under a skater's weight.

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Cat, it turned out, was suffering from an infection and inflammation of the bladder and urethra. After a few days' medication we were delighted to watch him return to full health.

Posted by misteraitch at January 6, 2003 12:41 PM