The Whistle-stop Tour Enters an Ironic Part 3

Posted by litlove

Every so often, fate relents. Pretty much the moment we arrived in Triscombe and stepped into the warm glow of our little log cabin, we knew we were going to have a good time there. Over the weeks that followed, I fell completely in love with the place, the area, the lifestyle. If we hadn’t been renovating our house, I’d have lobbied hard to stay.

People had been saying to us, was it really a good idea to go and live in one room? But if that one room is extremely comfortable and cozily warm, with the best shower ever in the ensuite, and wonderful people as your hosts up the road, then yes. The cabin was long and low, panelled in rough hewn wood and solid as the Quantock Hills, which rose like a natural rampart behind us. At night, in our comfortable bed, we lay and listened to the winds of the winter storms howling far overhead with an intense sense of wellbeing, protected, warm and safe. I fell hard for the countryside, which has a kind of storybook beauty, the epitome of that rolling, lightly wooded land of far, far away. Most people we told forgot where we were really going and assumed it must be Devon or Cornwall. But Somerset is better because it is hidden in plain view. We were about twenty minutes from the coast, about the same from the great purple bulk of Exmoor, and it was very rural, very quiet, very peaceful. Every phone call my mother would ask, but you have a shop near you, don’t you? And every time I would reply, no, it’s a fifteen minute drive for a pint of milk. She had a deep distrust of any place so under-resourced, but I was beginning to see the benefits of not living crammed up against other people. I could sum it up this way: most of the roads were single carriageway with passing places, and on the relatively rare occasions I met another car (or tractor), there was no aggro or intimidation, no battle of wills. Instead, we reversed, we squeezed past, we smiled, we all waved thank you at one another, and went on our way. Courtesy on the roads. Quite incredible.

I’m a bad traveller: the disruption makes more of an impression than the destination. But living somewhere different for a while – and this was very different to East Anglia – was a joy. The unfamiliar surroundings, the new routines, the different faces, all gave us an unusual gift: the chance to reinvent ourselves. Within a couple of weeks, Mr Litlove had been transformed by his experience of the workshop. Williams & Cleal is a terrific place, a little haven for nurturing creativity, lots of support in design, lots of attention paid to precision in making. Mr Litlove loved being surrounded by other makers, and I wondered whether the ransacking of his own workshop was perhaps a nudge towards finding something more collective when we were back home (though there seems nothing like this anywhere near us). He needs people. He benefits from routine. I was invited to all their social events and sometimes called on Mr L in the workshop, and I – with no great need of people – loved talking art and creativity with them. They were a special bunch.

The prototype of our kitchen cupboard doors in the making – spruce veneer and a design inspired by designer-maker Franz Karg.

My (re)treat was to sign up for an online course, working through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron under the guidance of Louise Tucker. I’d just thought it would be fun to do – and it was, mostly because of Louise and the other women on it, who were a delight – but it turned out to be more apt and well-timed than I had expected. The book is a series of essays and exercises designed to help you work on your artistic self, in particular, dealing with any creative blocks and limiting beliefs you may be holding. I never think of myself as especially blocked because generally, I just like writing and I don’t have to force myself. But at that time, I was starting out on the fourth structural rewrite of a novel I’d begun in 2020’s lockdown, and frankly, I was jaded. I wasn’t sure that my usual determination to reach the end of a project would overcome the entropy and malaise involved in rewriting 90k words, each one of which required extraction by forceps without anesthetic. Doing the course obliged me to stop pushing the Sisyphean rock uphill and have a good look at it instead.

The writing fatigue was understandable, if not easily solvable. No, the real problem for me was emotional. As soon as I get near to selling something, all the pleasure goes out of it. I have a problem with the book industry as it is at the moment. I think it’s become about power and ego, with agents and editors often careless or ruthless towards writers who are supposed to be submissive. I don’t like the pile-ons that happen in social media (also about power). And most books just die quietly unread for lack of publicity. I’m not saying that great books don’t come out of this – sometimes they do. But I think it’s a deeply unhealthy environment for writers to work in. I haven’t come to any conclusions about what I should do, but there’s a way to go yet before I’ve written a novel I’m proud of. So the course gave me a lot to think about.

And so winter melted into spring, the clocks went forward, our birthdays and Easter passed by, and there was only one problem with Somerset: we were going to have to leave it. I ended up returning a week early because the builders had reached the stage where they really needed one of us on site to make decisions. As it happened, we went back to the cottage we’d been renting before, because the landlord’s renovation plans had been delayed, and our house wasn’t ready to camp in. Mr Litlove drove me back and as soon as we reached the village, we eagerly rushed across the green to see what the new build was like – and the moment we stepped inside we started rapidly shedding layers of outdoor clothing. The atmosphere inside was tropical, as hot as a sauna with condensation running down the windows. The heating had recently been put in and the builders needed to dry out the screed, so they’d switched it on without leaving any windows open. There were plastered walls up now, the start of tiling in the bathrooms, new spaces we experienced in a sweaty daze, but everywhere was filthy, furred by plaster dust and grit and grime, littered with boxes of supplies, discarded packaging materials and tools. The months of wet weather had caused mould to form in patches on all the downstairs walls, and our belongings, piled in the upstairs spare room like an afterlife treasury in the Valley of the Kings, reproached us with their uselessness. We hadn’t needed these things for months now. What was all this crap, and why were we keeping it? The amount of work to be done before we could move back in was overwhelming.

And then, three days later, my mother suffered a major stroke.

The first time I walked into the acute stroke ward at the hospital, I didn’t recognise her. And then when I did, I felt sick. My mother had gone, leaving a bundle of bones that barely made a hump in the institutional blue blanket. Her face had the glazed look that strokes bring, and she was almost completely immobile. We wouldn’t get her diagnosis for a couple of months, but she had suffered a major incident, deep in the brain, and this was on top of a number of small prior incidents that we hadn’t been told about (although she’d been in A & E a handful of times over the previous few years). She stayed in the acute ward for about ten days before being transferred to a rehab unit on the coast. There was some rehab, but not an awful lot. The Stroke Association produced a report recently that says only 13.3% of stroke patients receive the recommended amount of rehabilitation, such is the impoverished state of the NHS, which means that the average amount of time spent on support is less than 4 minutes a day. And my poor mother, who hates hospitals, was stuck there lonely and bored and probably stressed for six weeks until the doctors decided there was nothing more they could do for her. Throughout this time, my Dad and my brother visited her daily. My brother lives five minutes from our parents and is the person you want beside you in a crisis – stalwart, utterly reliable, a sensible problem solver. He’s been a complete hero and we are lucky to have him. We visited when we could, the rest of the time cleaning and sorting and painting our house. I didn’t have the energy to unpack our suitcases yet again, so we camped in the cottage, where shortly the boiler conked out, never to be replaced. And then, in the midst of all this, Mr Litlove caught Covid. It was a crazy, exhausting time.

Let’s fast forward to the present day and where we all are right now. We moved back into our house three weeks ago, which was not a moment too soon. After all our travels I developed a craving for my own space, for our new space. It is strange and wonderful to be here, with the front of the house much as it always was, and then the back entirely transformed. There’s a Narnia feel to moving between the rooms, and I sense the possibility of being different here, of living differently. There is still a ton to do, but time now in which to do it.

My mother is also back at home, with my Dad – from the generation of men who never even needed to look after himself – as her full-time carer. Mum has the use of her right hand and arm. She can talk (the injury was to her right brain) and feed herself and smile again, but that’s about all she can do. They are both being very brave and stoic and it breaks my heart. I batch cook for them, and we visit regularly, but I feel horribly inadequate. I take this as a useful reality check. I want to fix and to rescue, to give them back their old life, their old selves, and none of this is possible. I haven’t got the hang of things yet, and approach them the way I would a 9 am lecture on a Monday morning with the second years. I try to pick them up and hoist them across my shoulders and carry them over the rocky terrain they find themselves on, and when I catch myself doing it, I think, really Litlove, this again? Years ago I fought my family quite hard to get a special dispensation for CFS, an agreement that I wouldn’t overstretch myself energetically and of course now that I have it, I don’t like it. I feel it reflects badly on me, like I’m not equal to doing whatever is necessary under the circumstances. Please understand, no one is making me feel like this apart from myself. My parents are simply grateful for any love and support, even if it comes in unnecessarily amped up form. No, what I see again and again, is how complicated our emotions are. How convoluted their roots and their triggers. We do ourselves and others such a disservice by assuming too often that what we feel is a direct response to what is right in front of us.

This is my favourite photo of us. I am 24, Mum is 51, so this was 31 years ago, which is to say back when I knew nothing. My mother had made my dress, incidentally. She had skills, my mother, and was beautiful, could be very funny and insightful, and when she was happy and loving there was no one like her. But she was was an easy prey for fear and put a lot of energy into her insecurities. I am aware I have the capacity to do the same. I own that DNA. This little series of posts has begun and ended with confronting mortality, and in each case I find myself with the same question: what makes a good life? After my treatment, I rushed into the world, accepting all the challenges, seeking change and action and adventure. I felt I’d cooped myself up for too long with all the insecurities that were the legacy of CFS. And it was fun in its way, but I lost track of myself, too, for I am easily erased in my own mind by the demands of other people and other places. ‘Think of yourself as dead,’ Marcus Aurelius wrote. ‘You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.’ If I am to keep writing here, then these are good mantras to think about. What is it to live properly? What makes a good life? It’s implicitly at the heart of every book I read. It’s a place to start.

A Whistle-stop Tour Through The Highs and Lows of the Past Four Years

Posted by litlove

Four years and (almost) three months have passed since I last posted here, and I am not the same woman that I was. So much has happened, to me personally and also in the world, that some sort of reckoning is required. I’ll try to keep it brief.

So I stopped writing in this blog at the start of the pandemic, at which point none of us really knew what we were in for, did we? All the things we’d been told could never happen were happening: the schools were closing, the shops were shutting, the planes stopped flying. And here’s where I have to confess that, as an off the charts introvert, I loved lockdown. I’d been unwittingly fantasizing about it all my life, although in my imagination I’d only got as far as being snowed in one winter, perhaps. In those early months, I experienced an unprecedented level of peace and my chronic fatigue syndrome improved noticeably. My entire day was under my control, as far ahead as I could see, and this was paradise. Well, apart from the guilt that is, when I thought of the cost to much of the rest of the world. Mr Litlove used to joke that when the end came, I’d ignore it, and be like those soldiers who emerged from the jungles of Burma believing WW2 was ongoing when it had ended years before. I still think that it would be nice for introverts to be allowed mini-lockdowns on a yearly basis, without large numbers of people needing to die for it to happen.

But there were many things that I hoped would come out of the pandemic and didn’t. I thought that when the world stopped rushing around and had to sit quietly in a room without the usual manic distraction, all the real problems would become clear and in the emptiness, real solutions would arise. I thought we might take the opportunity to cut back on travel and its polluting ways; that we might realise the true value of the caring professions, like nursing and teaching, and pay them accordingly; that we might understand how much community matters; that we might all take the chance to rest and become a bit less angry, and entitled and resentful, because it would be so obvious that life is fragile and it can turn on a dime. I was, of course, completely wrong on all these counts.

In any case, as we entered the first winter of lockdown, I stopped worrying about what other people were or weren’t making of the pandemic. At the start of February 2021, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. To begin with, the doctors hadn’t thought the little lump I’d found was anything dangerous. ‘The index of worry is low’, the consultant said to me, and all I did was wonder where on earth he’d found that phrase. Well, not true. I was terrified, having feared this eventuality so much. In January I had a biopsy and life changed. I entered the timeless time of medical treatment, in which the days go by too slowly and the nights are very long, and the conveyor belt draws you inexorably closer to dreaded appointments. But I was lucky, lucky, lucky. I’ve never considered myself a naturally lucky person, but if I’d been saving my quota of luck up in some cosmic investment bank for this time in my life, I’m good with that. The surgeon squeezed me in on the end of a day’s list on 25th February and I had just the one operation. He told me later that if he hadn’t done it that day, then I would have had to wait until August. I feel weak with gratitude when I think of it.

I spent a week in bed, reading reports of the missing Sarah Everard, pondering fear and risk and safety. The whole experience had given me a compulsive need to find some sort of meaning out of the event. I was listening online to lectures from Alan Watts (I’ll write about him one day) and Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. I can’t say that things always happen for a reason. They don’t. And some things are so awful and cruel and pointless that it would be an insult to suggest it. But I was beginning to think I would survive this, which was something I had never believed possible, and I wanted an insight that was as profound as my terror had been. I couldn’t make out the takeaway: here I was, still alive, when it would have been so easy for fate to nudge me off the edge of the mortal cliff. ‘Think of yourself as dead,’ Marcus Aurelius wrote. ‘You have lived your life, now take what’s left and live properly.’ I wanted to, but how?

It wasn’t until I was going through radiotherapy that I began to get an inkling of an answer. Three weeks of daily treatments and I had been warned there would be serious fatigue. I braced myself for a return to the bad old days of CFS, when I would have thought twice about leaving the house even if it was on fire. But that fatigue never came. And whilst, yes, I was tired, it felt more like a disinclination to get off the sofa, than the old systemic shutdown.

I felt the strangest mixture of triumph and irritation. Ever since 1997, I had thought of myself as a wimp and a coward, suffering some kind of ludicrous anxiety syndrome that was simply a shameful judgement on my lack of moral backbone. I had been so gaslit by our culture over the reality of CFS, I struggled to believe the symptoms of my own body. And yet here I was, radiotherapy a doddle in comparison, and thousands of people contracting long Covid off the back of the virus, just as I had developed CFS off the back of a kind of viral pneumonia. It turned out that I had, in fact, been ill, and the years of working through it had left me more mentally tough than I’d realised. I revised my entire history. I began to look at my body differently. I had healed well after surgery and the fire of survival was in my veins. The clinic sent me to be assessed at their gym and that brought me back down to earth – I was about as unfit as a person could be. But I was determined and very well rested. I made promises to myself of the kind I hadn’t made in years. From this point onwards, I would go to the gym and I would continue to challenge myself.

If you’re hoping I’m now going to describe my triathlon training, you’re going to be disappointed. I’m still me. But I did start going to the gym regularly, and I took up yoga, and I did begin to challenge myself. I travelled to visit my parents, something I hadn’t done in ten years. We went to Bath to visit friends, a distance I hadn’t covered in fifteen years. I didn’t suddenly start loving parties but I realised I’d been wrong to fear them; after all, no one was about to give me a biopsy me at one. I wasn’t writing – I couldn’t, somehow – and I wasn’t reading much either. But the very strangeness of life made me feel vividly alive.

If the trials of the pandemic released something in me, they did a number on Mr Litlove. And that’s where I’d better stop for now. So much for brevity! Part two in a few days’ time.

Notes From the Bunker

Posted by litlove

23rd March 2020

The first thing I said to my CBT therapist on our skype call last weekend was: I’ve picked one hell of a time to deal with my health anxiety. Henry was pretty ho-hum about this. I expect he was thinking the same sort of thing my old therapist, the psychodynamic one from almost a decade ago, used to say about issues I shied away from because they seemed too hard: you’re dealing with it all the time anyway, so you might as well really deal with it.

And we are dealing with it all the time. In our village the shops have been empty and every day is a Sunday. Things that people would have said were impossible to change have changed almost overnight. We are seeing already the best and the worst in people. One finds out quite fast the best and the worst in oneself. Mr Litlove and I are, I think, fortunate, in that we both work from home and our village is very supportive. And yet I find myself in a state of constant partial stupidity because my brain is so busy assessing every moment for threat. A few days ago I decided to spoil us with watercress soup and put both my precious bags of watercress in with a tin of coconut milk that I then discovered had expired in 2015. I caught myself just in time as I wrapped my Mothers’ Day gift in paper that said Happy Birthday. And I keep thinking to myself that I could manage all this better if only the world would shut up about it for a bit. There is constant chatter and no real news and for people like me who are anxious and readily self-isolating, far too much frightening stuff designed to rein in the cavalier and the rebellious.

One of the things that upsets me foolishly this time around is being 51. The last pandemic, good old swine flu, was back in 2009 when I was only 40 and happily out of any real risk category. And swine flu turned out to be very mild for the most part and more hype than bother. I remember being in the porters’ lodge at college when the nurse came in with the most enormous box of thermometers. When we asked her what they were for, she said she’d sent an email around all the students telling them that they absolutely had to bring a thermometer to college when term began again and these were for all the students who thought that message didn’t apply to them. Well, plus ca change, but even while it was happening, we could joke about it.

When my good friend from the university dropped by last week to bring me some paracetamol, bless her, the situation there was quite different. Her husband is one of the key figures in the college organisation and he was having a huge headache reducing down to a skeleton staff while trying to get students home who couldn’t find flights out of the country. We stood about three meters apart while my friend lobbed the box of tablets to me. Her first attempt hit the wall of the house. The second made it through the door, I stretched out my hands, and watched it sail over them and into the cupboard under the stairs. Moral of the story? Don’t make academics play catch. But there was some good news, in that while the virus was going through the remaining student population fast, they were suffering only mild symptoms and were soon back on their feet. I think about that, how the virus affects people on a very wide spectrum, as part of my rule that any catastrophising must be balanced by a positive thought. Good things come out of bad things, because only bad things force us to make real change. So whilst it feels mad and disastrous at the moment, we must keep one eye on what positive change we want to come out of all of this. If I am forced to improve my anxious thinking habits, then that would have a significant and lasting impact. It’s worthwhile trying.

So where have I been these past months, you may wonder? Well back in October I was sent for a routine medical test, and over the fortnight between learning I had to have it, and the date of the test, I discovered that my medical test phobia had been growing in the dark and was now a bit of a monster. Long story short, I didn’t have to have the test in the end. But then there were a couple more (minor) incidents that provoked my health anxiety and each one brought with it greater and deeper angst than the last. By the time Christmas rolled around, I didn’t need the excuse of a minor incident any more. I was having white nights of overwhelming anxiety, sitting downstairs too agitated to be in bed and just waiting for the dawn. It takes a long time to come in midwinter. I wanted to get past it on my own, but in the end I rang my GP who allowed me to increase the anti-anxiety I take for four weeks. And he said it was time for some therapy, so here I am a few months later with online Henry, who likes to tell me I have to challenge my thoughts with evidence – as if reason had any real purchase on the irrational. I’ve had one bad virus that made me debilitatingly ill for well over a decade. It’s quite hard to be sensible once something like that has happened to you.

But, and here we come to the useful part of this post, I am beginning to see properly for once that when you are up against it, you must stop faffing about and actually attempt the difficult things that scare you. I am very guilty of thinking I can both change and stay the same. As someone who loves their routines and the old familiar and accepts powerful default settings, I have the biggest tendency to sit around waiting for everything just to come right. And this is not what happens. I watch what is going on in the UK and I can’t help but wonder how long it will take us to cotton on to the fact that we must change. That for the next three or six or more months, we cannot simply transfer the lives we were living into these strange new boundaries. How much time will we waste in frustration and resentment before we realise that we must take hold of our situations and alter them radically? And that this might be an opportunity for good things to come out of bad things?

25th March 2020

I was intending to get back to this post and finish it with some sort of normal conclusion. But last night my mother was taken into hospital. Not with the virus but with confusion following a migraine. She didn’t know her name and couldn’t understand simple questions that were put to her. She is currently still there and being tested very thoroughly with, thankfully, nothing showing up yet. So we know her general health is good, but the confusion remains an enigma. A special shout out to the doctors and nurses at Colchester hospital, who are taking such good care of her despite being in the middle of the corona virus situation. These people are amazing.

Eventually, tackling health anxiety in the midst of all of this will seem funny. Haven’t got there yet but I travel in hope.

Litlove and the UFO

Posted by litlove

A couple of domestic incidents in fact, as quirk and whimsy seem essential qualities to balance out what’s going on in the world right now. You may remember a while back I wrote about my cats using next door’s delightful garden as the litter tray from Harrods? Well the campaign of intimidation continues. When the cats come sauntering into the kitchen with a particular look in their eyes we ask them where they’ve been, and they reply, ‘Oh just next door to do a poo,’ and wink at each other. Knowing full well that they annoy our elderly neighbours, they are doing what cats do and upping the ante.

About a week ago, Mr Litlove was just closing up the house for the night when he received an emergency text from our neighbour. Could he go round because Deedee was somewhere in their house and they couldn’t find her? Mr Litlove put his shoes back on and went round. Deedee had made the first stupid move by deciding to explore next door’s kitchen uninvited, and then our neighbour had compounded the stupidity by trying to chase her out. The result was a small black cat in a big dark house, coordinates uncertain. Mr Litlove hunted about to no avail, with our neighbour expressing disappointment that Deedee didn’t come when he called (as if!). And eventually they gave it up for the night, hoping she had left the building while they looked.

But by breakfast the next morning, Deedee had not returned home so Mr Litlove waited for the inevitable call about our miscreant child, which came about 9.30. Deedee had been found preening herself behind the dining room curtains and was now in the kitchen, and they couldn’t get her our. Mr Litlove went round again and was successful, for Deedee came rushing breathlessly into the kitchen, telling us excitedly that she had had a big adventure and been very, very brave, and maybe just a little bit stoopid. Then she wolfed a huge breakfast and rolled around in her favourite places until she calmed down. Mr Litlove returned having had to do a lot of apologising. and in need ot pretty much the same kind of therapy. ‘She kept making such strange noises,’ our neighbours had complained. Well, Deedee IS quite a chatty cat but she’s only really mastered the imperative (‘Stroke me!’ ‘Feed me!’ ‘Clear my path to the cat flap!’) so I suppose she probably was hard to understand. Mr Litlove looked grimly at Dexter and said that Deedee had gone one better than him, and what was he going to do about that? Dexter didn’t reply but in his eyes there was a faraway look. We live in mild dread.

As it turns out (and this will probably surprise no one) I live in a permanent state of mild-to-medium dread. Fed up with the perfect storm caused by perimenopause and CFS, I started working with the OHC, a clinic in London that specialises in ME/CFS, and I have finally had some tests. My big anomaly lies with my cortisol level, which is off the charts in places. What was really annoying was that I felt quite good on the day I did the tests and was of the opinion that they would come back fine. But high cortisol over a long stretch of time accounts for most of my symptoms. How to solve this problem? Well, that’s the million dollar question: it’s not easy. Diet, meditation, maximum rest and peace and quiet that sort of thing. I need to gain the sort of serenity I’ve never really possessed. Suggestions on postcards, please.

I’m working with a nutritionist who is okay but a bit scatty. Before our first interview I filled in a 16-page questionnaire and wrote a medical and personal history worthy of a Pulitzer. In our first skype call it was clear she had read neither. When I told Mr Litlove he said, ‘You should have asked her if she’d like to take a moment to read through the papers.’ I stared at him and told him that was brilliant and it had never occurred to me. He said modestly that he had learned one or two little things in his 25 years of conducting meetings. The nutritionist and I are at a bit of an impasse as we must move to the next level of tests but are undecided as to what they should be. I think my hormones are all to blame and want to have my estrogen metabolism checked; the nutritionist is longing for me to have parasites (I so do not). I am supposed to get arbitration from my GP who, as a matter of professional dignity, will undoubtedly disagree with both of us. It’s too hot for any of it.

But like the good girl I am, I go to bed nice and early and lie there listening to audio books, summoning inner calm. A couple of nights ago, as I was doing just this, the most extraordinary noise suddenly erupted directly above my head. It sounded like the extractor fan had gone berserk, or an old strimmer in the loft had leapt to ghostly new life. It was the kind of noise that propelled me off the bed, exclaiming, what the hell is that? I called for Mr Litlove who normally has short shrift for the strange noises I hear, but even he found this one disturbing. He went up in the loft, where all was quiet, and then moved towards the back of the house, feeling the ceilings as the noise carried on in staccato bursts. I had just asked him if he thought it came from outside, and he had said no, when there was a knock on the door.

Mr Litlove went down and opened it and all I could hear was some guy saying he was so very, very sorry. And then Mr Litlove went for his shoes again. He called up to me as he went past – there was a father and son on our doorstep apologising because their drone had got stuck on our roof. Who could have guessed that? Apparently they’d been fitting it with new batteries when it had come to life, completely out of control, and flown madly away down the street. It was lodged on our roof and Mr Litlove offered our stepladder. He said the first time was amusing, the second time he would be shorter with them and if there was a third time, it was staying there. The father hastily promised we would never see it again. The next morning, they came back with a bottle of wine as an apology, which was very sweet and as I said, entirely unnecessary. I told them I fully intended to dine out on the story for weeks to come. It’s so 21st century to have someone at your door saying, please may we have our drone back.

Yesterday we were in the garden, trying to brush Deedee (don’t ask) when we heard the strange noise again. I looked up and high in the sky above us, twinkling in the brilliance of the sunlight, was the oddest contraption I’d ever seen, a fine metal cat’s cradle flitting about. We stood up and waved at it while it hovered uncertainly over our garden. And then it flew away.