When I say "moving to the countryside", I mean that I am moving to a western suburb of Greater London. I am moving approximately twenty minutes further away from Soho. This is not a move I anticipated making voluntarily.
The reason for this uncharacteristic decision is that my parents are going travelling for a month and someone has to feed the cat, Minty. There was talk of moving Minty to my sister's flat, but she's getting old and is showing signs of decline - she's losing weight and has started (occasionally) pooing on the carpet, much like an elderly relative with dementia (what, other people's relatives don't poo on the carpet?). Sigh. It's very sad. So I will be spending the next month mostly sitting on trains and cleaning up poo. But it will be worth it for the quality time I will get with Minty, the two of us sitting on the sofa, her moulting, me having a vodka and tonic, while watching America's Next Top Model (Minty loves Jay Manuel).
I'm sort of excited about it, in a perverse way. There's a little high street with nice pubs and shops. It's like living in a village, except better because it's London and nobody knows or cares who you are. And the house is big and I can pretend it's mine. I can play the piano (badly) and abuse the Sky Plus and run up the phone bill. Maybe I'll write a novel. No, I probably won't write a novel, that's ridiculous.
This morning I've been gazing at The Book Cover Archive - an online catalogue of beautiful books. It's very diverting. Only yesterday, Sandeep agreed to lend me The Worst Thing A Suburban Girl Could Imagine, after I caught sight of the cover and decided it would be a really good read.
A cover should give you an instant idea of what kind of book it is, and who's going to enjoy it. If the cover is doing its job, you should be able to use it to judge the book. So there. I'm championing snap judgements.
5 readers just couldn't let me have the last word:
"There was talk of moving Minty to my sister's flat, but she's getting old and is showing signs of decline - she's losing weight and has started (occasionally) pooing on the carpet."
I may have the same problem as your sister!!! :-)
Two things:
1: I'm glad someone loves Jay Manuel. Miss Jay gets all the attention, it just doesn't seem fair.
2: I'm a champion of judging a book by its cover. Having worked a minimum wage job for so long the vast majority of my reading material comes from Oxfam, and you have to be able to filter out the shit somehow. I once bought a book because it had a photo of a Jelly Babies truck wedged between the pages. A year or so later I went back to it to discover it was written by a writer I had come to really like in the meantime. There's something to be said for snap judgements!
Two things.
(i) Minty? Minty? What sort of a name is that for a cat? Is it green?
(ii) It reads rather as if your sister is the one suffering from dementia and weight loss. I haven't known her (your sister) very long, but if this is indeed the case, she (a) must have been very, very switched on before and (b) should seriously up her pie/curry/Clever Wally's Raw Pizza intake.
She's white! Minty white! Like a polo mint! And stop being rude about her, she's old. And to reiterate, my sister is not demented or incontinent...
That's pretty rock and roll your parents are "travelling" for a month- I'm picturing them with ethnic beads and rucksacks camping out in airports! And yes, many of my relatives poo on the carpet, hope Minty's bearing up ok.
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