PET FOOD AND OTHER DELIGHTS

Supermarkets always make me cry. The reason being that I no longer have to buy copious quantities of pet food and this somehow makes me sad !!

Ever since we got married way back in the dark ages, HeeHoo and I have always had doggies and kitties, and when the kids were little, we had the regulatory bunnies and hamsters and rats and mice !! It has not been easy being married to HeeHoo for all these years I have to confess to you in confidence.

HeeHoo has always been an animal person, in fact if life had gone the way he had planned, he had always wanted to become a vet. He even applied to Gerald Durrell once to work on his zoo in Jersey.

As a child HeeHoo had an impala called Josephine, a guinea fowl called Clarence and hawks of all descriptions. His favorite hawk was Kelly and he and his brother David, and the inimitable Chris Hallamore, would take their many hawks, kestrels and various birds of prey, along with several pointers, and spend weeks in the Magadigadi Salt pans in Botswana, flushing duck and living on tinned fruit and biltong.

My animals prior to marriage had comprised an obligatory cat and a dog, and I found it difficult to come to terms with his birds of prey at first. It was those shooting explosions from the back end of a bird that I could not cope with. A hawk on a good day, can send a stream of foul excrement from one end of a carpet to the other without batting an eyelid !

Happily for me the hawks went to where hawks are wont to go, but HeeHoo still kept up his steady stream of adoration for birds and Mayers Parrots, African Grey parrots and Conjurs parrots have continued to somehow found their way into our home over these very trying 35 years of marriage.

Now birds and I have little in common, they try and peck off one's earrings and I am convinced they have mites which will undoubtedly somehow find their way into my hair, but the good book says "For better or for worse" I suppose .. Its really just that I feel so sorry for anything in a cage.

At one stage we were a very complete and contented family - three children, four dogs and four cats. The usual family pets were augmented over the years when various offspring sent various animals back safely to Mom and Dad from universities world wide. But as the children grew up and left for their various paths in life, so the doggies and kitties became old, doddery and incontinent, and one by one they passed on to that big kennel in the sky.

Our last remaining animal is a cat called Little Black, she thinks she is the Queen of Sheba she is so indulged and spoilt, but Mean Old Mother has firmly resisted all pleas from HeeHoo to rebuild the family menagerie. His last valiant attempt at trying to persuade me to allow another doggie into the home was in the guise of a guide dog after I mentioned I was having trouble seeing properly !!

I have tried to placate him by telling him about the money we are saving by having no animals. those cats who arrived via Lufthansa used to eat mountains of expensive imported sachets of friskies daily and the dogs were never satisfied with anything but the finest cuts of meat !!

I wonder how long I will be able to resist those big sad green eyes, but all I am prepared to concede to at this stage is a couple of silkworms !!