Fancy that
On moods, moors and incarcerated cats.
A new year
Get:
thinner
fitter
bendier
more focussed
less exhausted
more vegan
better gut bacteria
less drunk
more kind (women only, obviously)
more muscles
Et bloody cetera. It has been said by cleverer people, but choosing the hardest month of the year to give things up is nuts. I am giving nothing up. I have two resolutions which are really more about marginal gains:
wash the dirty dishes before going to bed
get up and do yoga rather than lounge around in bed for an hour drinking tea and watching my dopamine slowly disappear the more news I read
Both these things require not much effort (the yoga is usually harder than the dishes but not always) and the rewards are disproportionate: they both make me feel better about myself at the start of a new day. So far I have conformed and done both. And I need the mental boost because for months now I have felt that my HRT isn’t working as well as it should. It feels like I am getting less oestrogen, and I know that because suddenly my sleep is fractured, and my mood is consistently bleak. I used to have days where I didn’t have to tug my spirits up because they were fine when I woke up. Now every day is a tug. I thought it was because I didn’t get on well with the oestrogen patches I’d been given because my chosen patches were out of stock for months. So I paid £50 for a box of eight Estradot patches from My London Pharmacy (My London Overpriced Pharmacy), and they made no difference.
Why not go to my GP? Because GPs only focus on the dose given, not the amount of oestrogen absorbed. My oestrogen absorption is crap and always has been. Everyone absorbs oestrogen differently and it can depend on temperature, ethnicity, time of day, location on the body, all sorts. There is no way my GP would countenance increasing my HRT dose so I don’t see the point of going.
Next step: Facebook. A menopause support group. I know that HRT can seem to stop working because it is working alongside your natural oestrogen. But your natural oestrogen produced by the ovaries can sputter and sputter and disappear. Maybe I’m just all sputtered out. But I got plenty of fascinating responses from my Facebook post, all of them pointing out that Covid is thought to attach to oestrogen receptors, which are all over the body, and that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence (apologies to scientists who do not think anecdotes are evidence, but in the absence of research, they will have to stand in for it) of women noticing that their HRT is working less well, or they have resurgent symptoms after years.
Someone posted this Q&A about it:
I’m usually wary of men claiming to be expert on women’s hormones. But Nick Panay is a good ‘un.
So that may be what’s going on. But no-one has a solution. Time? Dandelion extract? Zinc? I picture a toy gun that can fire ball-bearings and knock Covid off my receptors, if they are clogged. Or a Taser that can restart them. None of that is available. No solutions are available. I must do what millions of women must do: muddle through.
Fancy that
Because of my mood these days, I rarely socialise. It’s hard to have fun or feel joy or sparkle. But even with all that, even with my mood in my boots, I decided to join in with my running club’s mass fancy dress for the annual Auld Lang Syne fell race. This is run over six miles of Haworth moorland. In fell runners’ terminology it is usually “boggy as.” Road runners would call it “brutal,” but road runners think puddles are brutal. Runners are piped out of a quarry by a bagpiper playing Auld Lang Syne, and fancy dress is encouraged.
I have never liked fancy dress. I’m not a dressing up or showing off kind of person. (Although weirdly I like giving talks.) But a few years ago I thought the solution to me disliking fancy dress was to dive into it, as I dive frequently and accidentally into moorland bogs. So far I have done the Auld Lang Syne race dressed as half of Noah’s Ark, carrying a cardboard box holding inflatable animals, like a mad cinema usher.
I have dressed as a suffragette, with home-sewn and written ribbon, and a heavy ankle-length skirt. And a flowered hat.
I have dressed as Norah Batty and carried a rolling pin the whole way round, and ruined my partner’s best kilt socks.
And for the past couple of years I have, along with other women in my club, dressed as Santa and his reindeer (I was Donner), all of us roped together for the duration, and last year the Six Dwarfs. One was ill. Of course I was Grumpy.
This year the men decided to join in, and Ann devised a Nativity scene complete with a portable stable. I was Melchior, and given self-imposed fancy dress rules that I have inherited from my partner (purchases from charity shops only, tiny budget, some crafting involved), I bought a £2.99 shower curtain from a charity shop, a tasselled curtain ring pull and some bling ribbon for my robe. My studio neighbour Andi, a textile artist, kindly gave me a couple of metres of sparkly material for my turban. Truly, I had no idea there were so many instructional videos on Youtube telling you how to tie various types of turban. They are entrancing. Here is a Prince Ali:
I love everything about this: the total earnestness of the young man, the leopard-skin backdrop, the unsmiling turban tying. Someone in the club worried about us being accused of cultural appropriation. To which I said, Prince Ali is a made-up character and you can’t appropriate Biblical costumes. And, pish and tosh. I studied many of these videos and thought I’d got my turban right, then on the day, I left myself only five minutes to do it and it was amazing it lasted one mile. Actually it lasted five, and I bet Prince Ali’s didn’t. I can now add to my skills list “re-tying a turban while trudging up a steep muddy field.”
So we turned up to Penistone Hill near Haworth, which as usual has its own microclimate. It can be sunny in the valleys but it is always blowing a hoolie on Penistone Hill. We were: the guiding star, Angel Gabriel, three shepherds, Mary and Joseph, baby Jesus, the three wise (wo)men, a sheep, a donkey and a rat.
A rat?
The rat (actually Mike, who runs a pest control business): “have you ever encountered a barn that doesn’t have rats?”
OK.
We carried the stable, but we also carried a photo of Sam, a young club-member who died last week after a run with his family. Many thanks to everyone who joined in the minute’s silence at the start to commemorate him and, if you passed us and said “well done Sam,” thank you. It’s much appreciated.
There were occasional thoughts expressed about abandoning the stable, on the steep downhill, or going through the beck, or the steep uphill on the other side. But no. We were in for the full haul. We took it in turns to carry the stable, though I didn’t do my fair share, as I had a shin splint which I made far worse by running six miles on it. Now I can’t run at all. Don’t do that.
It was a great craic, we made lots of people smile, we didn’t come last and we won the fancy dress prize: two boxes of shortbread, two bags of chocolate and six beers.
Also in the race: an inflatable T-rex (rumoured to be Jonny Brownlee), a two-man donkey (who beat us), and Vivian from the Young Ones, all of whom you can see in Adam’s video of the race:
And that is (partly) why I love fell running. It takes itself seriously, but not always.
Animal hero of the week : Prison cats
I loved this story in the New York Times. In Chile’s largest prison, there were always stray cats, because there are always stray cats in prisons because there are always rodents. Slowly slowly, the cats became not pests but pets: prisoners have adopted them. And lo, the prisoners’ mental health has improved, and violence has been reduced, because the prisoners love their kitty cats.
“They’re our companions,” said Carlos Nuñez, a balding prisoner showing off a 2-year-old tabby he named Feita, or Ugly, from behind prison bars. While caring for multiple cats during his 14-year sentence for home burglary, he said he discovered their special essence, compared with, say, a cellmate or even a dog.
Hell yes to this. Anyone who says cats are not affectionate does not live with a cat. My cat senses my moods and acts accordingly. Sometimes she is standoffish, usually when I’ve been away for a couple of days, but she has been my menopause soother and I’ll not hear anyone say dogs are better than cats for affection. It’s not true. And you’d have all those Chilean prisoners after you.
Here is Carlos with Feita:
Prisoners informally adopt the cats, work together to care for them, share their food and beds and, in some cases, have built them little houses. In return, the cats provide something invaluable in a lockup notorious for overcrowding and squalid conditions: love, affection and acceptance.
“Sometimes you’ll be depressed and it’s like she senses that you’re a bit down,” said Reinaldo Rodriguez, 48, who is scheduled to be imprisoned until 2031 on a firearms conviction. “She comes and glues herself to you. She’ll touch her face to yours.”
I see those little houses (actually, I don’t, because there are no pictures of them, dammit), and think of the hammocks that seafarers constructed for ship’s cats.
Of course prisons and animals are a great combination. Affection and fluffiness, and improved responsibility and even just the novelty of caring for a living creature. In twelve US prisons, prisoners can volunteer to care for and train a Leader Dog (what we call Guide Dogs) although when the dog arrives it’s a Leader Puppy. Another organization, Puppies Behind Bars, lets prisoners train puppies to be first responders. So you can train a dog that might get you arrested when you re-offend: brilliant!
If I used print calendars, and because my friend Tom has not yet sent me his annual gift of the calendar produced by the firefighters of Paris (because they are HOT), I could be tempted by the Puppies Behind Bars calendar for 2024, available for only $15. Do not expect actual puppies behind actual bars though. It’s more Andrex than Shawshank.
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