Hi Val !
So lovely to meet you and Malcolm yesterday. And such a good cup of tea that I forgot to thank you for!…and this house of yours full of cats and dogs…and this big, big love you both have for them all…..Ok, so let’s do something for all those poor French people that are gagging to read Tag. Let’s start by writing about about the difference between you ( as in YOU English people) and the French when it comes to relationship to pets and other animals. When we got our 2 cats, Couscous and Curry, a few weeks ago, my mum, bless her, tried to convince me that cats really prefer living outside. Yeah right! When I said, look at those two in front of the fire, and tell me again what you just said, she said feeling sorry that I was more English than French!
When we were children on the farm we had at the most 17 cats, hanging outside the kitchen door. We were raising 120 calves at the time and for many years, and made up large quantities of milk mornings and evenings, and any surplus was going to feed the pigs. The cats always got some milk too and therefore hung around for ever ….. They were up to a lot of mischief, getting inside the house at every opportunity and stealing what ever they could find in the kitchen. It was a nightmare for my mum as she could not leave a door open. The best one was when we won a beautiful Siamese cat at our local church fete!!!! No-one around understood when mum said no thanks.
My mum had had 3 dogs, one after the other: Poor Oscar always chained, Puce, her only bitch ( and one that the farmer next door had given her, swearing it was a male, but that’s another story..)and Feu the last one that came from the dog pound. They were never allowed in the house with us. I remember, it was heart breaking in the winter when we all got inside the house on our way back from school, and our dog would stand by the door step waiting to be invited in…but it never happened. They were such good and honest companions for my mum who in the winter had all the pruning of the peach trees to get on with for weeks on end, and she said how much she loved having her dog by her side, but it never occurred to her that they would have loved to be permitted to live inside our home and sit by the fire too…When Puce disappeared one day and was found in the ditch at the bottom of the drive by a neighbour, she was told that dogs leave home to die…my brother buried her and that was the end of that. When our first donkey, Galopin, died and both Geoff and I were unconsolable, she said but it’s only a donkey! Was he? No, he wasn’t just a donkey…he was our little one and we still miss him. So here you are, about the difference between the French and the Brits…
Val says that is so interesting Martine and reminds me of the French lady who had this house before us who had 12 cats at least living outside, and one poor dog who died in a ditch covered in ticks.
I can see the difference between pets and working dogs, so living outside I understand but chained up for long periods - never.
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