May 2004

Dear Visitor,

A little late, but at least you didn’t have a three-month wait for this one! I’m still catching up very slowly with work. It’s two steps forward, one step back, but I’ll get there in the end.

None of this is helped by the fact that my e-mail disappeared for weeks. When I say disappeared, I don’t mean that it wasn’t there any more. It was. I could download it, and I knew who it was from and the subject. I could open it. I just couldn’t read it. It was as though the text of the message was written in invisible ink. In order to read it I had to right-click it, go into details, go into message source, and then scan back and forth to make sense of it. And that was only possible if it was in plain text.

Outlook Express is supplied by Microsoft, but Microsoft said that if it came pre-installed on the computer, the retailer would deal with it. Dixon’s gave me a help line to ring, and I rang it, pressing all the appropriate buttons only to get a message saying that due to an unprecedented volume of calls, they weren’t taking any. Guess what they advised me to do? E-mail them. However, I left it for a few days and rang again, and the very helpful adviser got my e-mail back for me.

And that’s a step in the right direction, but getting my e-mail at all is a bit of a lottery, because I still have alternative broadband – always off. But the paradoxically unfortunate thing is that it sometimes does work, because apparently the BT engineers can’t find out what’s wrong with it when it’s working. I don’t know when I’m going to get a signal (never when I need to use the Internet, that much I do know), so does that mean they can never fix it? I really needed all this hassle when I’m three months behind with everything.

And you hoped that I would moan at you about my problems, didn’t you? Other writers’ newsletters are full of news of their TV appearances, their slant on the world situation, their Sunday supplement interviews, the glowing reviews of their latest novels – and what do you get from me? One big moan.

But I do have other topics of conversation besides computer-related ills – you might remember me telling you about Greta, the half-Siamese cat whose one aim in life was to get into this house. She came complete with a blue collar and had obviously been neutered (no tomcat smell, but no kittens either), so I thought she lived round here, and was just visiting. Eventually it dawned on me that she/he was living rough. (She’s very big, muscular and heavy, but all the neighbours agree that she looks like a girl.) Now she’s a sort-of semi-detached member of the family. We can’t let her move in – Frankie (our own cat) is sixteen, and isn’t terribly fond of her, so it wouldn’t be fair to him. But she gets fed twice a day (more, if she can get in and steal Frankie’s food), and she is frequently to be found curled up on a bed or chair or Frankie’s beanbag, if a window’s been left open. I keep trying to interest people in giving her a proper home, but without luck so far.

Poor Frankie has always been beset by other cats – I said that one day I’d tell you about the pink cat, so here goes.

She appeared just before Christmas one year – at first we just caught glimpses of a light-coloured long-haired cat hanging around, but then she took to sitting in the open kitchen window, which was when we realised that she was the colour of pink champagne. That time (unlike with poor Greta) we knew she didn’t belong to anyone in the vicinity, so we took her in and advertised for her owner.

She took over. Frankie banished himself to my bedroom, having been cuffed by her once too often, and she would sit in splendour on any chair that anyone else wanted to occupy. She also scratched the leather furniture – something Frankie has never done, but for which he always gets the blame if people notice it. ‘I see your cat’s had a go at the sofa,’ they say. We have to leap to his defence. He has always sharpened his claws on the tree in the back garden – he’s the most organised cat ever.

In response to the advertisements, an entire family turned up to look at her. They had lost their cat, and though they didn’t think she matched the description, they wanted to check her out to be sure. Sadly, she wasn’t their cat, but they fell in love with her and said they would have her if no-one claimed her. In due course, that was what they did, much to Frankie’s relief.

After they had had her for a few days, they realised there was something under her fur on her underside that felt odd, and thought she might have been hurt in some way. They took her to the vet, who discovered that it was the stitches from when she had been spayed, which had been done long enough before for the fur to have grown long again. He also informed them that she was a very rare breed and would have cost a fortune; it was therefore very unlikely that she was an abandoned pet. He thought she must have escaped from the vet’s surgery when she had just had the operation, and he rang round every vet in the county but none of them had ever seen, never mind operated on, such a cat.

She must, presumably, have escaped from somewhere a long way away and got into a vehicle of some sort. All avenues were explored but her original owner was never found. By then she had of course settled into her new home and taken command, not allowing their dog to go upstairs past her being her first act as sovereign ruler. That was a few years ago, and last heard of she was still doing very nicely, thank you. A cat with attitude, and a lot of luck.

So that’s it for this month – I’m off to tackle the BT broadband help line again. Wish me luck.

See you in June,

Love,
Jill

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