Peru

I leave for Peru today. After a week where as expected I did lose the cat without really getting to say goodbye properly) and get made redundant, I then fell down the stairs and injured myself. I'm lucky not to have broken or fractured anything, I am still walking with a noticeable limp.

If you'd like to follow my progress, you can with the day by day itinerary, but naturally there'll be no blog, email, Facebook or Twitter for about 10 days. I'll make up for it with pictures and journal extracts when I return.

This is it.

After months of planning and fundraising and training, today I set off to hike the Inca Trail.

If it were any colder I could disengage

"This is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die."

extract from 'Survivor', by Chuck Palahniuk

The cat is gone. I miss him.

One foot in front of the other is an acceptable plan

I guess there's no other way to put it, other than "work continues to suck". I am today exactly one week away from my second consultation, where I will find out if I am "matched" to a position, "pooled" with a number of other candidates for one particular job, or simply made redundant. In my first consultation, I told them I considered myself at the level of "PR and Marketing manager" rather than Markting assistant. I also told them I wouldn't be willing to take a pay cut -- even though what I earn is good money outside of London, I don't see why I should consent to have them cut it, I should be looking to do better, not worse. I also told them that relocating wouldn't be an option if it made life more difficult or expensive for the girl getting to work in London every day. But that if they wanted me to relocate to London that would be ideal.

We have mixed feelings about living where we do. On one hand, it would be nice if the girl didn't have an hour's journey to work every day on packed commuter trains and tubes. It would be good if we could live in London and do all the wonderful things there are in this most amazing of cities, or could get home at night after doing these things. I know the girl didn't move clear across the world to live in the home counties. On the other hand, where we live is nice. It's pretty quiet, we have a big green in front of the house, trees in blossom and cats lying on sunny window ledges. Some people in London can pay more for a room or a small flat what we pay for a two bedroomed house, and the girl knows for her half of the rent in London she would probably see a room in a shared house.

I think if we really had the choice, there's other cities where we would rather live than London -- we'd live somewhere by the sea, like Bristol or Portsmouth or Southampton or Brighton. Or most of Australia. Sometimes it feels like some part of me is calling out to live by the water.

In other news, all else failed. The cat is dying. It wasn't his arthritis. It wasn't his teeth and it wasn't his gums. He wasn't depressed or upset that my parents had been away. He is just dying. A couple of weeks ago he had his dental appointment, and I was told his gums were inflamed. My parents fought with him to get his little cat antibiotics down him. He was also given shots of steroids.

When I met Mum for lunch last week she told me he was doing much better, but it seems her reports of his eating and getting out more were apparently exaggerated to make me happy. Hope has faded, and he has gone rapidly downhill.

When I last saw him he was all but refusing all food. He struggles to stand on his own or to walk, and spends most of the day and night just lying on his side. If you talk to him he's happy enough and purrs, but the vet says she thinks he has leukemia and there is nothing that can be done, other than more shots of steroids and vitamins. This is about where I started with his first visit, so I can't say I haven't been prepared. I asked Dad how much longer the vet gives the cat, because I don't want to come back from Peru to find the cat gone. He doesn't expect the cat to last until I leave, and I leave in just over a week from now.

The girl and I visited my parents for tea, mainly so they could see her cute new haircut but also so we could see them and see the cat. It's so sad to see him this close to the end, it's almost painful.

Next week could turn out to be a double-shot of fun if I lose my job and lose my cat. But I leave for Peru next Friday, and as with all things I have to be brave. If my knees are hurting so bad I can barely walk, I just have to keep going -- one foot in front of the other is an acceptable plan, and that can apply to many things. I just have to put my head down and keep going, sometimes, even if it is hard.

Capturing a moment

I'm a fraud, and a liar, and a phoney.

In my sidebar "about me", it claims I'm an artist. I've decided recently that I should face that this really isn't true. When is the last time I actually created anything? It's been almost a year since I painted anything -- my one and only picture, and I've been feeling disillusioned with photography.

I describe myself as a photographer, and I even tried to sell my pictures on canvas, but that idea never really got off the ground -- simply because my work was no more remarkable or special or interesting than anyone else's -- and it was less so than a lot of others.

I have mixed feelings about digital photography. I like the ability to instantly see the image, and it's hardly like I'm some kind of analogue purist, since I don't even know how to change a film, but it sometimes feels like with digital cameras everyone fancies themselves as an artist. I feel frustrated that everywhere we can go has already been seen, and now extensively photographed and uploaded to Flickr within hours.

What I used to feel distinguished my work was what I did with pictures -- I like to climb into places or seek out unusual angles, and then digitally manipulate images. Now everything just looks so immediately and unmistakeably Photoshop.

The tag line here attempts to pin down why I blog -- to avoid being that tree falling in a forest -- but sometimes it feels like reality is only what we can record. If you go to a concert, people are clambering over each other to get video and pictures, I know I've been so absorbed sometimes trying to get just the right looking picture that I've realised I was missing the whole reason I was there -- for the music. If a singer comes off the stage to meet the crowd, they must find it difficult to see the people for the forest of cameraphones. Is something only real if you can record it?

I was struck after the G20 protests when you saw photos or images of scenes like the alleged police brutality or the rioters storming the RBS building that in the background there are great swathes of people with their cameras.

Maybe I'm just jealous, and feel like I'm not good enough. I feel like I've stagnated and I can't reasonably call myself an artist any more, even though many would argue I had no right to call myself one to begin with.

I want to upgrade digital cameras, I want to learn to process and develop films and I want to feel like I'm creating again. I hate feeling average and I don't know how to find my way back.

The cat came back, he just couldn't stay away

Every time I want to write an update about the cat, the situation changes. I don't even want to necessarily update, but it's a rainy Bank Holiday Monday and I like to think several readers would want to know how he's doing.

At the end of my last post, the vet had called and the news wasn't good. The blood test results were clean, which suggested there was a more sinister problem -- but when I called my neighbour to give her a version of the news, she said the cat was doing a whole heap better and I thought maybe after all it was just his arthritis.

Unfortunately, that was wishful thinking. The cat went off his food again quickly, so I made another appointment a few days later and told my boss I'd be late into work.

This visit was much sadder for me. It sounds pathetic, but I chokingly told the receptionist his name when we arrived, then sat quietly sobbing in the waiting room, while the other pet owners awkwardly shuffled their feet, looked at each other, and talked very quietly, trying to pretend I wasn't there.

I continued to cry like a little girl with a skinned knee when the vet called us in, and I tried to tell her how just maybe the problem was with the cat's teeth. She took him away and weighed him, and confirmed on her return he was still losing weight -- and I think perhaps to humour me, agreed to book the cat in for a dental. The danger was, she told me, that he was an old cat and there is always a risk with general anaesthetic. I hesitated, but she laid it out plainly -- we could risk the operation, or the cat could starve to death. Hardly a choice.

The vet did have an idea for the meantime, and she fetched some special prescription cat food. The food was high calorie, high protein and especially palatable. She opened the tin for him, and let him lick some food from her fingers -- he seemed keen, so she gave me three tins on top of the opened one.

The cat was only required to eat one tin of food a day, and all seemed fine for a couple of days. I agreed with the vet to postpone the dental until we'd fattened up the cat a bit more, and we we went away for the weekend. A phone call to my neighbour on Sunday confirmed he was still behaving and eating reasonably well.

The girl and I decided to come to my parents house to keep an eye on the cat until they got back from holiday later in the week, and it was only a day or two before he was back to refusing food again.

I called the vet again on Thursday when my parents returned (shocked to see such an old and thin looking cat in the place of the one they'd left, two weeks before) and even though they were clearly busy, when the receptionist talked to the vet, they were able to fit in the cat the next day for his dental.

The girl and I separately spent the whole day wondering and worrying about the cat. I counted down the hours until 4.30 when I could call my Dad and find out what the outcome was. The good news came that the cat had behaved well, and was awake following the procedure. The bad news he told me was that they found nothing wrong with the cat's teeth, instead they were in remarkably good condition.

I was practically crushed. If the blood tests revealed nothing and a dental exam revealed nothing, then it must really be something like a tumour. What I hadn't been told on the phone -- annoyingly -- was the vet had decided the cat's gums were inflamed, especially on one side were he was particularly shy and they had given him antibiotics. That night the cat polished off a whole tin of his special prescription food. Unrealistically, I got my hopes up.

Saturday and Sunday followed with the cat showing no interest in any food, and my hopes faded that he was still full from eating a whole tin on Friday night. On Sunday my parents began force-feeding the cat his antibiotic tablets he was refusing to take voluntarily, and now it's Monday and he seems like perhaps, just maybe, he might be a little brighter and a little more inclined to eat.

Tomorrow once again he returns to the vet, where they will ask for a long-lasting antibiotic injection for the cat in place of the tablets, and a steroid shot to boost his appetite.

It's an update, it's where we are up to, but I don't know where we go from here. It's been so up and down emotionally last week and this weekend that I can't even speculate. We just have to remember he's the best cat in the world, the cat who once ate an entire wood pigeon (leaving only one foot) and we aren't letting him go anywhere yet.