You‘ll believe a cat can swim…

Day 130 

General status update

FEC cycle 6, day 16 

Fatigue/weakness: Am trying to get out and walk a bit every day; after every outing, I’m still completely exhausted. It looks as if building up my strength again is going to be a rather slow process.

Nausea demon: I stopped taking the tablets, and he reasserted himself. It’s TWO WEEKS since the final dose of FEC. This is unsporting, and ungentlemanly, and I told him so.

Anxiety level/insane euphoria (+/- 1-10,000): I’ve just remembered that I’m going to have my semi-root-canalled tooth extracted next Wednesday, which is starting to make me very anxious indeed. I truly feel as if my body has taken enough punishment for now, but I don’t think I dare delay it. Oh, God.

Despair Demon: he’s focusing on the whole tooth extraction issue now – needles, injections, pain, possibility of infection – there’s plenty to play for.

Chemo Muse: I shouldn’t overdo the resting, in her opinion, as the Devil makes work for idle hands and the Despair Demon IS Satan’s ranking representative here in my chemo- and drug-addled mind, after all. Yes. Good point.

Chemo Brian: he’s happily occupied reading guidebooks to the north Aegean at the moment.

State of mind: moving on, thinking ahead – forgetting about chemo, thinking about my cat.

Before I moved to Turkey in 2006 I lived in Oxfordshire, and had the best, most euphonic, address in the world - Cricket Cottage, Church Lane, Charlbury. It was just as lovely as it sounds: an old cottage made of honey-coloured stone, 200 yards from the church, and overlooking the cricket pitch down at the bottom of the hill, on the other side of the River Evenlode.

One day someone knocked on the door and, as I went to open it, my cat Ollie performed his party trick, which was to take a flying leap at me from behind, and land on my right shoulder; this was rather startling when he first began doing it, but I soon learned to recognise the little squeak he emitted just before landing, and could now withstand a flying feline scapular landing a tergo without breaking stride, which was why I answered the door to the man from Thames Water with Ollie perched, parrot-like, on my shoulder.

Just why the man from Thames Water was calling is lost in the mists of time, but his main point of interest turned out to be Ollie, anyway.

‘That’s a beautiful cat’ he said ‘It’s a Turkish Van, isn’t it?’

‘I’ve absolutely no idea’ I replied. ‘The vet gave him to me a few weeks ago; he was a stray in need of a home. What’s a Turkish Van?’

When the vet rather forcefully rehomed Ollie with me, he hadn’t been beautiful at all: he was scrawny and sad and howled a lot, and all his fur had been chopped off because it had got matted while he was a stray. It was some weeks before the fur grew back and he metamorphosed into an extraordinarily beautiful creature with long, silky white fur and a sweeping auburn fox brush of a tail.

‘Turkish Vans are swimming cats’ he said. ‘They’re pedigree cats, and they like to swim.’

I laughed, as he was clearly having me on.

‘What do you mean, ‘swimming cats’? Cats hate water. Everyone knows that.’

‘Turkish Vans love the water. They come from Lake Van in Turkey, and they swim using their tails as rudders. I’m not joking. Look it up. And your cat is definitely a Turkish Van.’

Later, I looked it up, and he was right. Turkish Vans do swim, and Ollie was very definitely a Turkish Van – he looked exactly like the one in the photo used to illustrate the breed.

And the reason that I’m telling you this story is because yesterday someone posted on Facebook this wonderful photograph of a Turkish Van going for a swim, and pretending to be a Retriever -

- which reminded me that Ollie still hasn’t been for a proper swim, 16 years later. He did get into the bath and splash about one day, when there were just a couple of inches of water in there, but I never got round to taking him down to the river for a dip; there were always people walking their dogs down there,  and it might have been a bit stressful for him.

When I first went to live in Turkey in 2006, to teach at a university in Ankara, I left Ollie behind for the time being, in the hands of a house-sitter, as I didn’t know how things would go. A year later, it was clear that I was going to be in Turkey for some time, and I persuaded the long-suffering BigSisFo to bring Ollie out to join me in Turkey, his ancestral home.

It is a thousand times easier, and cheaper, to export a person than a cat, and the difficulty of organising the vaccinations and permissions and inspections and certifications defied belief, but eventually BigSisFo and Ollie arrived at Istanbul airport (cats couldn’t be flown into Ankara, of course, so I had to hire a guy with a minibus to drive me halfway across Turkey to collect them).

BigSisFo was clutching a big fat folder of Ollie-related documentation, and it is entirely characteristic of the Turkish approach to customs and excise that she was able to walk through the ‘Nothing To Declare’ channel – by mistake – pushing a trolley loaded down with a great big cat carrier plastered with labels saying ‘LIVESTOCK’, without being stopped and asked to show a single one of those hard-won certificates.

Ollie adapted well to living in a first floor faculty flat in Ankara, but when two years later we moved to the Aegean and the Camel Barn, he was happier still: not only do the house and barn offer a great deal of space, but there is a sunny courtyard with an olive tree which serves both as scratching post and means of access to a sunny balcony and the roof terrace, the sunniest place of all. The place is also protected by high stone walls, which makes it difficult for the nasty street cats to get in and bother him, so Ollie is king of all he surveys.

After we’d been there for about a year, I remembered the whole swimming thing, and had a brilliant idea: it was July, and exceedingly hot, so why not provide Ollie with his own little swimming pool in the courtyard, and see what happened?

I went off to the hypermarket to see what I could find, and this is what I came up with:

Pretty nifty, no? And a little diving-board for him, and everything.

Would Ollie go in it?

Would he b***ery.

You can lead a cat to water, but you can’t make him dip a paw in it, much less jump in. Maybe he was too old – this was four years ago, but he’s 18 now, so he was pretty ancient for a cat, even then. Or perhaps Turkish Van cats have to learn how to swim as kittens – who knows.

After seeing that photo of the swimming cat yesterday, though, I think we might get out the paddling pool and give it another go on the upcoming trip to Ayvalik.

Very gently.

Ollie is very, very old now, although he’s still fit enough to climb the olive tree every day to go and lie in the sun. Bridget, who’s looking after him, says he’s getting thinner and more fragile, although he’s still eating, and healthy. He’s one of the main reasons I’m making this trip to Ayvalik, and delaying my radiotherapy treatment so to do. I haven’t seen him for a year, and I miss him so, and if I don’t go now it might just be too late ever to sit on the balcony with him in my lap again.  

Ollie’s too old to bring back to the UK and endure quarantine, and he’s very, very happy where he is, so I have learned to live without him (and I've got R now, obvs, although he's WAY too big to sit in my lap).  But I’m going to get spend a couple of weeks with him now, possibly for the last time, his warm weight in my lap every day as I read and he snoozes, in the dappled shade of the olive tree, or on the balcony, or high up on the roof terrace beneath the heat of  the Aegean sun.

                               And here is Ollie keeping R company as he reads, on our last trip to the Camel Barn