Padfoot - The Fat Lady Ain't Singin' Yet.

Padfoot is alive. He withstood the operation and he is coming home to me in about an hour. I will write more when I can. Thanks to everybody (I will thank you all individually when I get past this) for all your lovely words and thoughts (and thanks to Fiwa for her post which prompted so many of her friends, previously unknown to me, to take the trouble to write) - it helped him pull through this at least.
Pad is still very ill..........but he's alive!!! X

P.S. The news is that they did not find any tumours in or around his gut - however, his organs were nearly all not where they were supposed to be (Christ knows how that happened) and his liver is enlarged. They did, however, find a large mass on/around his lungs. I am awaiting the results of a biopsy and we will then know how/if to proceed. We think it is a tumour and, if inoperable, we could try chemotherapy. He is virtually unconscious still - it has really taken it out of him - but he is comfortable. The other dogs are really down and worried about him (bless!!). I'm trying to get him to eat something. Well, it's now about 3am and he's asleep but I'm not. Sleep does not come easy these days.
P.P.S. I've found a month's work and so the wolf has been shooed away from the door for the time being at least. This is real Gloria Gaynor time for both of us!!!

Padfoot - The Last Chance Saloon.

Pictured in happier times - he used to like the smell of my shirt!!


My Padfoot is in hospital tonight - the first time he has been away from me since I had him.
He underwent X-Rays, blood tests and a scan in the hospital today and five vets examined the results. Between them, they "think" they have found two "masses" in/around his guts. There is also, apparently, a problem with his liver.
The only way forward is for them to open him up to see what is going on and so tomorrow he will undergo an exploratory operation.
The vets say that if tumours are found and they are inoperable then he should be put to sleep once and for all on the operating table. I have refused permission. I am going to the hospital at 8am tomorrow to be with him and make sure everything goes as I want it to go.
The first problem is Pad is 10 years old - relatively old for a pedigree - and so there is a big risk he will not survive the operation. If he does and there is something which can be done, it will be. If there is no hope I will be bringing him home to spend his last days at home with me.
I am sorry to bore regulars who tend to expect comedy on this Blog. It is appallingly self-indulgent, I know, but it helps to put this down in writing.
Many thanks to all of you for your kindness and supportive words. If everyone, here, in the States, in Australia, in Croatia - wherever - could just say a little prayer for him tomorrow - or, for us non-believers, a few words of hope - it would certainly do no harm.
Thank you all again. Fingers crossed for my beautiful boy.

Padwatch 3.

For those of you kind enough to ask after my beautiful boy, Padfoot, the news is not good, I'm afraid.
I am taking him to the vet's tomorrow when I will ask for a biopsy - but I am almost certain I know what the result will be.
Pad is continuing to lose weight alarmingly and he is getting weaker by the day. He has that dry, rasping cough which, in my experience, always accompanies cancer when it's grip begins to turn into a stranglehold. He also shivers at the slightest hint of a draft when all he ever used to do was pant at the slightest hint of sunshine. Finally, he has a raging thirst.
You don't need seven years' training at veterinary college to work out what is wrong - just look at his eyes!!!!! It is an awful, awful, awful disease. I had to watch my father-in-law die from it and it claimed the lives of all three dogs in my previous pack. The dogs were lucky - they were put to sleep when the pain became too much.
Pad, I am sure, is not in much pain at the moment. He still has his appetite and he is still able to move about by himself, in fact I took him for a little walk yesterday and while we could not go far I think he enjoyed being able to smell the grass, the trees and the calling cards of his pals. He is warm, I ferry the water bowl to him whenever he looks up at me to ask and I have taken to sleeping downstairs on the sofa with him so he is not lonely and I am there for him when he yelps out or wants a drink.
I am going to make sure he has the best it is possible to have until the time comes when he hurts too much. Then, the vet will come out to him and, like my other dogs, I will be there to hold him while he goes to sleep. I will then bury him alongside the other boys and girls in my garden and flowers will grow where he lies.
The first five years of his life must have been Hell on earth but, when he fell through the ice of a frozen canal and was on the verge of drowning, little did he know how special life was going to be from the moment he was dragged exhausted from the water by firemen.
He has had five fantastic years with me and I will miss him more than I can possibly put into words. God bless him.

In Which Pither Goes Ever So Slightly Poncey

"...a one...a two...a one, two, three, four!"


I went to the ballet last night. Yup, that's right, your read it correctly. Pither, the man who thinks culture is a posh name for yoghurt, went to the ballet!
The venue was once again Small Town Theatre, the freebie tickets once again came courtesy of the lovely Janey who works there and the production was The Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky.
All the local actors and actresses were apparently busy with panto season and so the performance was by some out-of-towners - namely the St Petersburg Ballet which, I am reliably informed, is probably second only to the Bolshoi.
Ballet has never really appealed to me - or so I thought - but, like Dickens, you can't really have an informed opinion unless you've been to one and so that's why I went.
I was all prepared beforehand for a dreary night which I was sure would see me in the pub over the road while the star of the show was still pushing out the Zs but, guess what?...............it was absolutely fabulous!!
The word "beautiful" kept coming to mind throughout the performance....(I know, I know, "Oh God, Pither's lost it. He's now a luvvie")....but that is the only word to describe the whole experience.
I could comment on the music - Jesus, but that boy can knock out a good waltz! - I could attempt to describe just how lavish the costumes were and I could even have a stab at telling you how hypnotic the dancing was.....but I won't. It will all sound as though I am taking the piss so I will stop here.
All I will say is that if you haven't been to the ballet before you should go. There, I've said it. Grantham shall not have ballet.

P.S. For anyone who suspects that I have "turned" completely and will take to wearing a cravat and using a cigarette holder there is nothing to fear - I stopped off on the way home for fish and chips!! Hurrah!!!

P.P.S. For those kind enough to have been enquiring about my beautiful Pad, his appointment at the vet's was put off from yesterday until Saturday morning. He is, in the meantime, soldiering on.

Shorts Don't Matter! 2.

The England team in confident mood before the big kick-off.


England lost at football tonight. That, in itself, was not startling but this particular defeat assumed some gravitas as it meant that the national side failed to qualify for the European Football Championship in Austria and Switzerland next summer.
Football supporters in England are very sad about this because, instead of travelling abroad next summer to watch their team play, bare their beer bellies and tattoos in the street, get drunk, throw chairs at police and fight foreign people, they will have to stay in England, watch other teams play on the telly, bare their beer bellies and tattoos in the street, get drunk, throw chairs at police and fight each other.
The whole thing, of course, was a fix. England is bestest at everything, as everyone knows, but it is incredibly bestest at football. England invented football - like concentration camps, the slave trade and Big Brother - and so should win all the time because only the English know all the rules. Everyone knows we have the finest league in the world, although very few English people play in it, and the rules are quite clear - games are decided by a panel of fashion designers and lifestyle gurus who sit down after each game and decide which team's players earn most, have the best haircuts, the most expensive clothes, the fastest cars, the most appalling, ostentatious houses, the most roasting/gang-rape convictions to their names, the most drunken attendances at China White's and the thickest, yet ironically thinnest, blonde girlfriends.

Well, Johnny Euro only went and changed the rules tonight, didn't he? For some ridiculous reason it was ruled beforehand that the winner of the game would be the team which got the footbally whatsit into the other team's goal-thing most!!! Talk about loading the odds against England. How the Hell are you supposed to get the ball into the net without touching it? I mean, were they seriously suggesting that our brave lads should mess up £500-a-throw pedicures by kicking it? Besides, kicking it would have dirtied their boots and bits of mud could easily have masked at least part of the name of the sponsors. Also, have you any idea what contact with anything other than hair gel could do to a Nicky Clarke hairdo? I suppose there could have been a way around that but Uefa only went and ruled that personal stylists and agents were not allowed on the pitch during the game. That was just madness.
Anyway, the ball is round, is it not? That means that it rolls along the ground, yes? So, how are you supposed to get near enough to it to blow it? The only way I can think it can be done is to run after the ball. Yeah, right!! How in the name of all that's holy can you pose for photographs, plug your latest line in sports casualwear or sign autographs if you're moving, let alone running?

England tonight played a team from somewhere foreign - I think it was called Croatia - and, while the players got the ball thing into the right goal twice, the Croatians went and put the ball in between England's goalsticks three times. Consequently, the Euro judges only went and decided at the end that Croatia had won because it had potted one more "goal point" than England. Big deal! So bloody what!! Croatia's haircuts were truly awful while the best car any of the players had was a mid-range Mercedes, and even that didn't have fuel-injection! As for their girlfriends, you wouldn't believe it! I spotted at least two in the crowd who weren't even orange!! There was also a rumour going around that the manager's wife didn't have plastic tits!! Not only that, ten of the eleven players they fielded hadn't written an autobiography!! Jesus Christ!!! Some of them were as old as 20 or 21!!!! What the Hell were they doing?
When the referee blew the whistle at the end of the game there was still a chance that England could qualify, however. That would have happened if Andorra (population 18 - number of people required for a football team 11) had beaten or drawn against Russia. Well, as you might expect, the foreigners ganged up against England and fixed the game so that the Russians won by one goal-thing to no goal-things. Typical!!
I know I am upset at the moment but think of the poor England team. Their agonies are not yet over. Radio Five Live said that two of manager Steve McLaren's hair extensions had worked loose during the match and so they will have to be replaced, Steven Gerrard was left with a bruise on his knee and he's supposed to be doing a fashion shoot for Pretty Polly tomorrow and the traffic was so bad that Sol Campbell's private helicopter couldn't land outside Stringfellow's until after 11pm, by which time all the members of the Football Association had drunk all the Krystal champagne! What a nightmare!!
I am really down about the game and how everyone is awful and we're brilliant and it's so unfair and we really deserve to go to Euro 2008 and how our poor players must feel.
Yeah - the England football team, and its alleged manager, can go to Grantham.

Padwatch 2.

I was going to post today about the lunacy which is the Common Agricultural Policy and the Thatcherite moves by our beloved, so-called Labour Government to block attempts by the EU to stop the current practice of giving the richest landowners in the country, including that parasitic bint at Buck House, annual, six-figure handouts from Brussels for doing fuck all with their acres!
I also toyed with the idea of ranting about those fucking Nazis at Coca Cola, following Mark Thomas's excellent documentary on the company last night.
Then I got deeply annoyed for a moment about the money-grabbing bastards who manage Amy Winehouse and are still shoving her on stage like some form of performing fucking monkey (or gilt-egg-laying goose) when the poor lass is an emotional, drug and booze-addled wreck with enough on her plate, including the plight of her husband, without having to dance to the tune of her puppeteer masters.
Finally, I thought I would try to be funny - there's always a first time - about something bizarre or offbeat in the news or my life...............but you really do have to be in the mood. The truth is, despite still drawing a blank in the job market and now being almost bankrupt, only one thing matters to me in life at this moment.

I am still nursing my beautiful dog Pad round the clock because he is in a bad way and his condition is beginning to really get me down.
I decided to try to do something positive and so today we actually left the house and went for a walk - well, a sort of stagger, really, but at least it was out!
We left the rest of the pack behind to spend some quality time together, just us two, and I think it bucked up Pad's spirits a bit.
We trundled around, we played hide and seek, we played football - a bit one-sided, it has to be said - and we said hello to all the birds. Then, when we came home, Pad had an orange (his second favourite thing in the world) and a carrot (his favourite thing in the world) and settled down for a nap before his tea.
It's back to the vet's on Thursday for a few more tests. He is losing weight dreadfully, in addition to his leg problems, and I have witnessed that decline before. I am pinning all my hopes on it not being cancer. I lost three dogs to that fucking illness 10 years ago!








Still, he's eating as normal and his conjunctivitis is clearing up and so it's not the end....it just feels like it.
Nothing for Grantham.

We're All Going To Die!

I'm worried about the would-be martyrs of the True Russian Orthodox Church - I just don't think they've thought things through.
You may well have heard that members of this breakaway church have barricaded themselves inside a cave in Russia and are threatening to blow themselves up if the authorities don't let them wait there until next May when they claim the world is going to end.
What sort of a bargaining position is that for budding activists?

Troglodyte: "Back off, pigski!! Don't come any closer! We're all going to die in May and if you don't go away we'll kill ourselves."
Fuzzski: "Sorry? Run that by me again."
Troglodyte: "Uurm, yeah, ok. Uurm, right, right, I've got it now. If you, right, come in here, right, we'll all kill ourselves. Yeah, yeah, I think that's it."
Fuzzski: "...and if we don't come in?"
Troglodyte: "Uuuuurrmm, uuuurrmmm......hang on a bit.....uurrmmm....if you, right, don't come in, right....ok, ok, just supposing you don't come in, right.....let's just suppose, right....like, that you don't come in, right....we're....uuurrmm.....we're......we're all going to die."
Fuzzski: "See you in June."
Troglodyte: "Ok, bye for now. Take care."

Pity the recruitment manager for this dickhead sect. How on earth do you persuade people to sign on the dotted line when all you can offer them is death, either now or in May? Opportunities for promotion must surely be limited?
Also, not content with failing to see the idiocy of their position, the members seem completely unperturbed by the fact that the bloke who started the cult, Pyotr Kuznetsov, is not with them. That hardly inspires confidence, does it? Not only that, old Pyotr is currently undergoing psychiatric tests!! You would have thought that might have given his followers the slightest inkling that all was not well with the cause.

Sorry, the True Russian Orthodox Church can go to Grantham.