Jardin du Luxembourg

Well, we are home. I'm sitting in the living room as a quiet rain falls outside, drinking a big mug of American coffee -- always a blessing after those dainty little café crèmes on the continent. I need about 12 of those things just to stay alive.

We had a good day yesterday. Unlike Tuesday morning, when I was up and about early, I slept in -- so Dave and I left our hotel at the same time and made our way to the same cafe beneath the shady locust trees on the Rue Caulaincourt where we'd had breakfast the day before. We got a front-row table for watching street life and were amused by a guy sitting across the street having a lively conversation with himself -- until he crossed over to have a lively conversation with us. His name was Vergilio, and that was one of the few things he said that I understood, as he was from Portugal but he was speaking French and he was missing a fair number of teeth. Of course he wanted some coins and I had none on me, but he was pleasant about it.

Our train wasn't until 2:40 p.m., so we decided to go to the Jardin du Luxembourg on the Left Bank. I've spent very little time south of the river in Paris, except for the area immediately around the Eiffel Tower. So this was new grounds for exploration. I was amused to find a fancy-looking cafe near the Odeon called The Editors (above) -- editors are used to being mostly nameless, unsung figures in the background of the publishing world, so I'm glad we got our due.

Dave decided to take a seat in the park while I wandered around. The gardens, built by Marie de Medici beginning in 1612, are laid out around a central pond and formal garden overlooked by the Luxembourg Palace. I passed the sculpture above, Arthur le Duc's "Harde de cerfs écoutant le rapproché," or herd of listening deer.

Here's a video showing some more scenery, including the large formal garden, the palace, the pond, Charles-Arthur Bourgeois' sculpture L'Acteur Grec (Greek actor), and the Medici Fountain:

We left the gardens and headed for the train station, where we caught our train without incident. It was very full and it arrived in London around the same time as another Eurostar from elsewhere, so there was a bit of a mob scene trying to get off the platform and through customs, but we eventually managed.

I mentioned the train ticket prices yesterday and my surprise at how high they were. But we did choose midday trains at the height of the summer tourist season, and we bought our tickets not even a week in advance. I guess £180 per person each way, under those circumstances, isn't too terrible. I'm telling myself that, anyway.

Also, you may be wondering why we made the trip so short. Why not stay in Paris a few more days? Well, Dave is going to the states on Saturday, so we had to come back in time for him to get ready for that adventure. I'll be staying behind, no doubt missing Olga, but I'm planning to do some short trips of my own.

When we got home, Dave and I had to move all the furniture out of the dining room because I have carpet cleaners coming this morning to steam clean the carpet. Of course we're also having rain today and tomorrow, so the whole house is going to be damp. Zut alors!

Sexy Pompiers and Gigantic Tiramisu

Now that my location has been revealed -- and it is indeed Paris, not Blackpool -- let me tell you a little about what we're doing here. Dave and I both thought a short break away from home would do us some good. After Olga's decline and death, we needed an escape. So in the midst of my grief I bought a couple of Eurostar tickets and made some reservations.

Looking at the receipt later, I saw that I paid about £720 for these tickets, which seems insane to me. I didn't even realize it at the time. Fortunately we're staying in an inexpensive hotel -- the Hotel Flore in Montmartre -- that has long been a favorite of mine, so that balances everything out.

We got here Monday afternoon and wandered up to the Place du Tertre for some cafe-sitting and people-watching. The place was mobbed with tourists, as you could see in my photos yesterday. But I love this part of town, its scenic streets and steep stairs, and we had a good time.

Yesterday morning I got up early and went back to Sacre Coeur, and it was a much better experience. There was virtually no one around, the sun was shining, and I bought an almond croissant and some coffee and ate sitting on the steps overlooking the city. A group of hunky guys wearing matching running clothes went by (top photo) and I realized they were members of the Paris Fire Brigade. I suddenly felt in desperate need of resuscitation but sadly they were too busy exercising to notice.

After walking along Rue des Abbesses and peeking inside a neighborhood church, I came back to the hotel, collected Dave (who was sleeping in) and we made our way to the cafe above, where we had coffee and croissants beneath the shady locust trees along Rue Caulaincourt. Then we headed into town to see some sights on the Ile de Cité.

I wanted to see the newly refurbished Cathédrale Notre Dame, and Dave wanted to take another look at Saint Chapelle, which he visited with a school group but was unable to see well because of renovations and unruly students. We did Saint Chapelle first -- and it was indeed beautiful with its acres of stained-glass windows depicting scenes from the Bible. (It's still under renovation, though.)

Notre Dame was remarkable (above). You'd never know there was a fire. Some of the walls and ceilings look fresher than they did, but not jarringly so, and the windows and the art are intact and displayed as usual. I'm sure there are differences that people intimately familiar with the building would notice but I was just happy to once again see the rose window I photographed back in 2013.

Here's another view. Pretty amazing restoration!

We had omelettes and wine in a cafe across the street (as you can see there's still scaffolding on the exterior of Notre Dame). This cafe is one that my father photographed on his own trip to Paris as a college student in 1957:

It was much quieter then! (And it had a different name.) Dave insisted I show our waiter this photo. "She's not going to care!" I said, knowing that French waiters are notoriously busy and somewhat curt, but I tried anyway -- and indeed, she did not care.

We walked over to the Left Bank and had a coffee in a cafe with a view of a busy roundabout on the Boulevard Saint Germain. I ordered a tiramisu that proved to be as big as a baby's head. I couldn't begin to eat it all.

Afterwards we went back to the room for a rest. I did some blog reading. I know I'm behind on responding to comments but let me just say THANK  YOU to those of you who identified my mysterious moth on Monday as a common footman! I'm so glad to know what it is.

Last night we had a bit of a fiasco. Soon after booking this trip, while still in London, Dave made a dinner reservation at a restaurant he'd read about online called Benoit. When we checked the location yesterday on Google Maps, I simply typed in Benoit and showed the results to Dave, who agreed that was our restaurant. So we hopped on the Metro and made our way there, arriving just in time for our 7 p.m. reservation. The place was completely dead, and when I said we had a reservation the host simply gestured to the acres of empty tables and told us to sit anywhere. We sat and looked at the menu, and Dave said, "Is this the right restaurant?"

And sure enough, it wasn't. We were expected at a different restaurant Benoit a mile away. So Dave and I bid our host a hasty adieu, explaining we were in the wrong place, and once again hopped on the Metro. We got to the correct Benoit a half-hour late but they seated us and we had a fine dinner and a good laugh.

Back to London today!

Here's Where I Am

I'm going to give you a rare, almost wordless post today, with just a series of photos (in increasing order of obviousness) to reveal where we are. Enjoy!

A Mystery Moth and Desuetude

I found this oblong white moth while walking on Hampstead Heath Extension a little more than a week ago. I'm not familiar with it and I can't seem to readily identify it online.

It's a mystery -- admittedly a rather plain one. I think its elongated shape caught my eye more than anything else. Anybody know what it is?

I returned to the Tate Britain yesterday to see the Ithell Colquhoun exhibit, a sort of companion to the Edward Burra show I saw a few days ago. I didn't enjoy Colquhoun's art as much. She was an occultist and experimented with methods of painting that were supposed to channel the subconscious or universal rhythms or whatever -- some of them seemed frankly gimmicky to me. What she often wound up with were compositions akin to Rorschach blots. Even her earlier, more representative works of flowers or mythological scenes were weirdly fleshy and unappealing, I thought.

Here's one little work I did like, "Diagrams of Love: Marriage of Eyes" from 1940-42.

From the museum I walked up to Westminster and caught the tube back home again.

Not much else of note happened yesterday. I spent the morning reading Guy Trebay's memoir of life in New York in the '70s, "Do Something." I'm enjoying his stories about life in a world of artsy decrepitude during the years of "Ford to City: Drop Dead." In one sentence I read yesterday he used a word I don't recall ever seeing before: "Mostly these are places that, like the city itself, are slumping toward desuetude."

From Oxford Languages: (Desuetude: noun (formal), a state of disuse. "The docks fell into desuetude.")

Speaking of books, I enjoyed this article in The New York Times about a man who habitually kept a list of all the books he'd read over the years -- almost 3,600 of them. When I was young I kept book lists of my own, usually in the back of my paper journals, and in 2003 or so I started keeping one on my computer. It's up to about 830 books now. I occasionally consult it if I can't remember an author or title or (rarely) if I'm not sure I've already read a certain book. In one of my lamest blog posts, in 2008, I published the whole thing. (It was much shorter then.) It's kind of a silly habit but it's interesting to look back and see how many of those books I do or don't remember.

Dave and I are off on an adventure today -- a very brief one. We both need a change of scenery and thought it would be nice to get away. So I'll be coming to you tomorrow from somewhere other than London! Stay tuned!

Couch Drama

I spotted this Jersey Tiger moth the other day, perched on one of our bedroom windows. They're hard to see in foliage but occasionally they sit out in the open, and if disturbed they fly away in a colorful flutter. (Their underwings are bright orange.) Right after I took this picture, this one flew up into our mock orange and it took me a while to find it again.

Apparently these moths used to be scarce in London but are more common now. I see them pretty much every summer.

I wound up staying home yesterday and getting involved in some household projects. I upended the bed in our bedroom and cleaned beneath it, which is a bigger project than you'd think. It requires lifting both the mattress and bed frame and leaning them agains the wall, running the vacuum through the wilderness of accumulated dust, cobwebs and dog fur under the bed, and then repositioning all our shoes (which Dave in particular stores under the bed). I always feel better after it's been done.

I finally put away Olga's leash, collar and toys. But I haven't thrown anything out. Yesterday I came across that silly Christmas sweater we bought her in Whitstable last year. I started to put it in the trash, because we'd pretty much demolished it cutting bigger holes for her front legs, and we never intended it to last beyond the season. But it smelled so much like her that instead I put it in a baggie and put it up in the "dog cabinet" where I've kept all the rest of her stuff. I'll get rid of it eventually.

Little by little.

I only cried once, when Dave advanced the idea of shopping for a new couch. We do desperately need a new couch. We purchased the one we have from the previous renters of this flat, another teacher from our school and her husband, who had recently bought it new. I've never loved the style and it's now 12 years old, with a hole in one of the cushions and various signs of wear and tear. But of course it's where Olga spent all her days. Pretty much any time I looked in on her via our home security camera, there she was, sound asleep on the couch. "I don't think I'm ready to get rid of it," I told Dave, blubbering like an idiot.

I really am, though. We're going to couch shop very soon.

We went to Waitrose and Dave talked me into getting three new dahlias -- including the two varieties in the lower right corner of this picture. The feathery salmon-colored blossom is called "Iron in the Fire" and the pink one is called "Poodle Skirt." The third one, a deep purple called "Dalaya Dark Aruna," isn't blooming at the moment -- but as you can see, most of our other dahlias have finally burst into life. I can't complain anymore about having too many of them -- I've done it to myself. (We have 11, which isn't a problem until it becomes time to put them in the shed over the winter or repot them for spring.)

I mowed the lawn in the afternoon and beat back more of the wilderness. I reclaimed the grassy area around the teasels after "No-Mow May" and I think the teasels themselves will come down within the next few weeks, so as to limit their re-seeding. I'm looking forward to opening up the garden once again and being able to more freely move around.

We're still watching "Bewitched" every evening -- a silly show but a healthy dose of comforting nostalgia for both of us.

Influencers

Well, I was right about all my neighbor's cardboard boxes. The bin men evidently looked at that unwieldy assortment of flattened and baled cardboard and decided it did not meet their exacting standards for collection, so much of it was left behind. Aaaargh! I have never lived in a place where the trash collectors retain such veto power over what we're allowed to discard and how.

They did empty our bins, though, so I then flattened and folded as much of the remaining cardboard as possible and shoved it into one of the empty bins. I'll let the neighbor (who is away at the moment) deal with the rest. I have a feeling it will take a couple of weeks to get rid of this glut of boxes. And they haven't even completely moved in yet!

After that morning adventure, I decided I needed to get out of the house. I texted my friend Chris and we made plans to meet up at the Tate Britain to see the Edward Burra art exhibit. I'd never heard of Burra but the show was fascinating -- it begins with his lively and energetic paintings of Roaring '20s nightlife and moves into much darker territory with paintings inspired by the Spanish civil war and mid-20th Century environmental degradation. Burra's sexuality seems to be an open question -- he painted queer-coded images of sailors and androgynous figures, and hung out with a theatrical, Bohemian set, but there was no mention of much of a personal life.

At one point, struggling with depression during the restrictions of World War II, Burra wrote to a friend, "The very sight of peoples faces sickens me I've got no pity it realy is terrible sometimes Ime quite frightened at myself I think such awful things I get in such paroxysms of impotent venom I feel it must poison the atmosphere."

I turned to Chris and said, "Gee, he sounds just like me in the library!"

We skipped the adjacent Ithell Colquhoun exhibit but I may go back today for that.

After the show we walked to nearby Page Street (top photo), with its distinctive checkerboard council flats designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. (Remember him? I found a monument to him on Apple Tree Yard several weeks ago.)

Our goal was the Regency Cafe, which may be the closest thing I've seen to a diner in London. The menu is wide and varied, with breakfast all day, the food appears quickly and it's the kind of no-frills place where you eat and then get the heck out to free up the table for the next person. It is not haute cuisine. I had a Cornish pasty with cabbage that I'm pretty sure emerged only moments before from a microwave, but I loved it overall. I'd go back.

Then we walked across the river and down to the redeveloped Battersea Power Station, where we came upon a throng of young women lined up in a gigantic queue. (Can you see them all beyond the far side of that white fence, above?) Chris and I were mystified about what was going on. Turns out they were there to see a couple of social media influencers -- these two -- who were in that yellow truck. Apparently they have launched a new line of clothing.

Like the old farts that we are, Chris and I discussed the pros and cons (mostly cons) of influencer culture, which we don't really get. As Chris said, "It's just product placement!" But clearly we aren't the target audience for these products anyway. So we moved on, had a cup of coffee by the river, and then made our way back to our respective flats.

It did me good to get away and I managed to get through the day with no tears. Though I still feel squeezed by heaviness and doubt, grief is slowly, ever so slowly, lessening its grip.

The Glass Pheasant

I was walking past our local Oxfam charity shop on Wednesday evening when this item in the window caught my eye. It's a faceted glass pheasant bowl, not especially fine or exotic -- in fact, kind of grannyish -- but I loved it. So I took a picture to show Dave, and he agreed it was pretty cool. The next morning I was at Oxfam's door when the shop opened and bought it right away -- only £15, which I thought was very reasonable!

I hand-washed it and put it in our front window. There's not a knick or chip on it. I'm not sure we'll ever use it as a functional bowl but you never know. It's pretty great standing on its own.

I spent yesterday finishing "The Hotel Avocado," which I enjoyed, and doing some other stuff around the house. I helped our new upstairs neighbor break down and bale a bunch of cardboard boxes for recycling, which is supposed to come today. The neighbor apparently decided not to move his stuff here from Israel, where he's from, and instead bought all-new stuff so he has loads of packaging to discard. I have a feeling the bin men (are they still called that?) are going to balk at collecting all these boxes, but we'll see.

I thought I was going to get through the day with no tears, which would be a first since Olga died a week ago. But I felt a heaviness in my chest all day, and finally in the afternoon -- when my book was finished and I'd read everything online and I'd already taken a walk and Dave was napping and I had nothing to do -- I let the sadness wash over me once again.

And then I just wallowed in it a bit, watching recent Olga videos like this one, marveling that she looked so good just days before we put her to sleep. But her condition was so wildly up and down -- the morning after I took that video she was panting and could barely stand, and it's those low moments that I couldn't bear to watch.

So, anyway, I'm still adjusting, and reminding myself that there are people in this world with real, critical problems -- like in Gaza where they're literally starving. Or like the parents of those poor girls from Camp Mystic in Texas. As I said to Dave, marveling at my own paralysis, "How do people lose a child?" I'm trying to keep some perspective -- not that my mourning is invalid, but Olga was, after all, a 15-year-old dog.

It's the responsibility I still struggle with most. Will I ever stop asking myself if I did the right thing? If she'd died naturally I'd be sad but I'd also feel that it was out of my hands. That would be a relief for me but it would undoubtedly have been worse for her. So, yadda yadda, my brain is still thinking it all through.

Our friends Lisa and Natalie sent us a beautiful bouquet of flowers to brighten up the flat. We really appreciated their generosity and thoughtfulness.

The night before she died, I fed Olga half a can of dog food, which she would not eat. The other half was left behind in the refrigerator, covered with cling film. On Tuesday evening I took it out, put the food in a plastic take-out container and set it in the garden for the foxes. I rigged up the garden camera to catch them in action. On Wednesday morning, alas, the food was still there. I left it all day thinking I'd throw it out if they didn't come that following night, but on Thursday morning the bowl was empty.

I got some really good footage of a fox eating. It's a rather delicate eater -- it seems a bit perplexed and uncertain about what it has found -- and yet, those teeth! I would not want to have to fight a fox.

Feeling Guilty for Feeling Better

Here's the brand new housing development that was built along Potteries Path, a narrow, graffiti-lined brick corridor where I used to occasionally walk Olga. The path has been opened up, the bricks glazed and new apartments built where once there was a giant building materials yard and a vacant Camden Council office building. After years of looking decrepit, the offices were torn down and as far as I can tell, the area's regeneration is now pretty much complete. It looks so much better, apart from the dubious-looking planters in front of Five Guys (which are still there).

Dave and I went over to my co-worker Staci's house yesterday for lunch. Her husband Max made Vietnamese pork bánh-mì sandwiches on the grill, and I brought the ingredients for some refreshing summer Pimm's cocktails. We sat out in their garden for a couple of hours and talked about books and summer traveling and some other stuff. It was a nice diversion.

When Staci and I nipped out to get some ice from a shop on the high street, we ran into former co-worker Lindsey again, with her husband Gav! You may remember I just met up with Lindsey on Monday. They're staying near Staci's flat so it was just coincidence that we crossed paths. I haven't seen Lindsey in years and then I see her twice in a week?! Life is weird sometimes.

Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet day. I had a few more tearful moments about Olga but I can tell the pain is easing. I actually feel a little guilty for feeling better -- which I think is also a normal stage in the grieving process.

As I was looking back through past posts to find the links above, I kept running across pictures of Olga. Of course she is everywhere on this blog -- and on my phone, and in our flat. She's my wallpaper on my computer. She's my Google profile picture at work. The memories are dense. I remember when my erstwhile blog pal (and now Facebook friend) Reya lost her dog Jake many years ago, she actually deleted her entire blog. I don't quite remember her rationale, but I think she felt her life had turned a corner and she was on new territory and needed a new start. I am NOT going to delete my blog, or purge my phone or change my computer wallpaper or profile pic -- but I kind of understand the impulse.

As I walked through the housing estate yesterday morning I passed the door where Olga always looked for cats. In fact, there were two cats behind it! Olga would have loved having a beneath-the-door skirmish with them. The door has been recently decorated with these football motifs, which reference the World Cup trophy "coming home" to England. I don't really follow football so I'm not sure what prompted this display of fan fervor now, but there it was.

I also ran into the estate's caretaker. "Where's your dog?" he asked me.

So I told him my tale of woe, and we commiserated over owning old dogs. His dog also died within the past few years and he is still enjoying the freedom he and his wife now have -- to travel and that kind of thing. I told him Dave and I plan to do the same for a while. I'm sure we will get another dog, when the time is right, but I'm thinking that since I have another year of work it would be best to wait until that's done. That will give us time to get over Olga and see some sights, and then I'll be home and better able to care for a dog during the day.

Our pink lobelia is blooming once again. We only have one flower stalk this year. After getting so big that I divided it into two pots, it has now dwindled away to almost nothing (and one of the new pots has died). It was never one of my favorites, so I'm not heartbroken, but funny how it seemed so robust and then hit a wall. Maybe it has its own life span. (We've had it eight years or so.)

Here are a couple of good dog stories I've come across in recent days:

-- The Washington Post had a story about a woman who adopted a shelter dog that looked very similar to her former pet, only to find the shelter dog was her pet's father! I'm a bit skeptical, but apparently DNA analysis tells the tale. (That link should be a gift article that gets you around the paywall, but I make no promises.)

-- The New York Times had a nice obituary for Maddie the Coonhound, an apparent Internet sensation thanks to her talent for balancing on things (and her owner's talent for photography). (Also a gift article link, hopefully.)

Teasels and a Tearful Moment

Our teasels are blooming like crazy now. The purple ones come slightly earlier and they're pretty much done, but the white ones are at their peak. Don't they look like spacecraft when seen from the end like that? Like Apollo and Soyuz, about to dock in mid-flight.

The insects love them, both the hoverflies...

...and the bees. Look how dusty with pollen that bee is!

They are such durable, versatile plants, too. We even had a purple one grow up in the middle of the patio.

You can see it there, sticking out of a crack in the concrete to the left of our potted geraniums. I let it grow because I was so impressed with its determination, or whatever the unconscious plant equivalent of determination would be. Life force, I suppose.

I'm sitting at our new patio table now, in the almost chilly morning air. (It's 59º F, or 15º C, but will get to a perfect 72º F, or 22º C, by midday.) I sort of made myself stay home yesterday. I have to learn to live in this apartment again, how to be surrounded by all these haunted spaces. I can't just go out and wander around the city every day like a rootless nomad.

Plus I had some things to do here. I wanted to finish cleaning up some dead brush that I cut out of the trees at the back of the property on Friday. I filled a large yard waste bag with all the cuttings of ivy and cotoneaster and rambling roses. I realized as I cleaned it all up that I inadvertently cut some living roses as well, but it doesn't matter. Those things are tough as nails, and my mind was all over the place that morning. I was paying attention to the dog, not the plants.

I answered blog comments, and even sat on our back garden bench and read for a while. I missed the constant presence of Olga at my feet or sunbathing nearby, but I was able to do it. (It helps that the book I'm reading, "The Hotel Avocado" by Bob Mortimer, is funny and diverting and not too mentally challenging.)

I only cried three or four times, briefly. So I consider that progress.

I've found that it helps to maintain some routines, even if they were meant primarily for the dog. For example, I've been walking each morning after I blog, which is normally when I'd take Olga out. She'd snap to attention the minute I closed my computer and, when she was healthy, we'd take a lap around the high street or through the nearby housing estate, and it feels good to keep that up. (It's funny how quickly I can walk those routes by myself, without her sniffing every smell and shoving her nose in all the garbage bags.)

I still haven't put away her leash and collar, or her Kong toys, which are all sitting by the front door as if waiting for her. It feels too final.

Oh -- I want to tell one final Olga story from Friday, because I don't want to forget it. After the vet put her to sleep in the garden, someone from a pet crematorium came to collect her. He came with a basket, almost like a dog bed, and some blankets. We lifted her into the basket and the attendant positioned the blankets with her head out, as if she were sleeping (and it looked for all the world like she was). We then carried the basket down the garden steps and through the house out to the van waiting in the street. As we left the garden, we brushed past the Crocosmia "Lucifer," and it dropped about two dozen red blossoms all over her, littering the blankets with flowers. It was like the garden bidding her farewell. Even the attendant commented on how appropriate that was.

(I'm crying again. Oh well.)

Medieval Humor and a Night Cruise

Things are getting better here. I'm getting out of the house and doing some exploring, which is helping me manage my grief. I promise I'm not going to write a great deal about Olga today because you all need a break from that subject as much as I do!

But I did have a momentous realization yesterday that has helped me a lot -- my "theory" about her medication causing her more severe symptoms cannot be correct, at least not entirely. I realized yesterday that I wrote on July 9 about her being quite ill the previous day -- and yet we didn't get her medicine in the mail until the afternoon of the 9th. So in other words, she was having breathing and walking problems before her first dose. This is important, to my mind anyway, because it means I am not responsible for making her health worse with medication. It was already happening, and stopping the drugs later would probably not have made any difference.

You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.

So yeah, yesterday I needed to take a long walk and get the heck out of this house. At some point I have to learn to spend time in the flat and garden again, but right now it seems incredibly confining and suffocating. I walked all the way through Primrose Hill and Regents Park and down Tottenham Court Road (above) to the British Museum -- about four miles. I wanted to visit some beloved British artifacts like...

...the Tring Tiles! I've written before about these medieval tiles (c. 1330), which depict scenes from the life of a childhood Jesus. They are frankly hilarious in their depiction of a boyish Jesus who tries to play with his friends and winds up striking them down for minor offenses, only to reanimate them after being scolded.

The museum caption for the above panels reads: "(Left) A boy playfully leaps onto Jesus' back and then falls dead. (Right) Two women complain to Joseph on the left, while Jesus restores the boy to life."

Here we have: "(Left) Corn is being reaped in midsummer. (Right) Parents shut their children in an oven, to prevent them playing with Jesus."

And: "(Left) Jesus makes pools by the River Jordan. A bully destroys one and falls dead. (Right) Jesus restores the boy to life by touching him with his foot."

The Tring Tiles are perhaps my favorite artifact in the whole museum. I wonder how accurately the stories are interpreted, but they are supposedly taken from apocryphal Biblical writings describing the childhood of Jesus -- so perhaps the stories are more fully fleshed out there. (You can read more about the background of the tiles here and here.)

And don't forget the Roman-era pottery beaker featuring penises with wings! Those crazy Romans.

After a couple of hours I took the tube home, and met at a nearby pub with my former co-worker Lindsey, who I haven't seen in a couple of years. (She's been working in Myanmar and Ghana, and is about to move to Brazil.) Long ago, back when we first got Olga, Dave and I met up with Lindsey, her husband Gav and dog Nell for an outing to Hampstead Heath. I wrote about it at the time. Well, Lindsey had to say goodbye to Nell last year, so she and I compared notes on pet grief. When I expressed any reservations about the timing of our decision, she said that it's better to take action a month too early than to wait too long -- which she felt they did with Nell. I guess all of us who make these decisions second-guess ourselves, as some of you have pointed out in comments on my previous posts.

Finally, Dave and I took a dinner cruise on the Thames last night because it was the 15th Anniversary of our Civil Union in New Jersey (back in the days before gay marriage was legal there). We boarded a boat on the Westminster Pier and cruised downriver past Canary Wharf while we had salmon salad, tomato soup and a chicken breast with potatoes and veg. I thought the dinner was perfectly acceptable but Dave (with his chef training) was not impressed. We did have some spectacular views from the boat on the way back, though, which you can see here:

I just left the natural sound on that video, so you'll hear the wind and people talking (including us, occasionally). The first clip shows us passing beneath Tower Bridge and then past the Tower of London; the second shows what appears to be some kind of party atop the Walkie-Talkie building, before zooming in on the Shard and the Monument and passing beneath London Bridge; and the third shows the colorful lights of Southbank, the London Eye and Waterloo Bridge.

I realize I have packed an awful lot of stuff into this blog post, so thanks if you've stuck with me this far! It was quite a day.

Another Snapdragon and a Theory

Remember the yellow snapdragon that re-seeded itself in a crack on our front porch? The one the Russians pulled out just before they moved? Well, I just discovered that we have a second, larger one growing in a crack in the brick wall beneath our front steps. Hurray! It's a sort of "nature's revenge" against the hyper-neatness of the Russians. If it sets seed, I'll collect some of them and try to keep them going next year.

Yesterday was slightly better, emotionally. I'm still prone to fits of spontaneous weeping but they are fewer and farther between. It helped that Dave and I got out of the house and went down to Borough Market for lunch. We didn't even eat at the market itself -- we stopped at a nearby pub -- but just being somewhere else felt better. I spent a lot of time in this flat last week, staying with the dog, and I'm a bit stir-crazy as a result. I just want to get out. Fortunately we have a somewhat busy week coming and we've planned a quick trip for the following week, which will help.

Our orange dahlia

I've developed a theory about what happened to Olga. (If you'd rather not investigate the medical aspects of her decline, you can skip the next five paragraphs! I won't be offended!)

You may remember that when we got back from Pevensey Bay, we took her to the vet because of her dizzy spells and her unsteadiness. The vet said she was in good overall health for her age and prescribed a vasodilating drug, Vitofyllin, to increase blood flow to her brain, hopefully improving her energy levels and reducing dizziness. I specifically asked whether this drug had side effects and was told no.

But almost immediately, her health really began to slide. We noticed she would sometimes sort of collapse rather than lie down, and she lost all desire to walk. (The day of that vet visit, we went for a walk along the high street, pretty much the last walk she ever wanted.) Her breathing became more erratic and labored. She mostly just slept. Her appetite, already reduced, basically vanished and when she did manage to eat she sometimes vomited.

I am obviously not a veterinarian, but I think the Vitofyllin, by relaxing her blood vessels, gave her abnormally low blood pressure. Hypotension and vomiting are listed as symptoms of Vitofyllin overdose, and although she was dosed correctly, she was at the low end of the weight range for the size of tablets she was given. That would explain the sudden onset of many of those problems, which Dave and I took to be a sign of further overall decline.

I sort of panicked when I was by myself with her and she could no longer walk and had trouble keeping food down, but if I had it to do over again, I'd have stopped the Vitofyllin and watched for any improvement. (Which, in my opinion, the vet should have suggested when we visited the second time.) She would still have had all the problems that pre-dated the drug -- the masses in or near her lungs, the coughing, the vestibular dizziness, the reduced appetite. But I suspect her sudden decline of the past two weeks may have leveled out, and she may have lived at least a short while longer.

Weirdly, this theory doesn't upset me too much. If anything, it helps me understand what happened. I wish I'd made the call differently, but it all happened so fast and I was by myself and the vet was astonishingly vague about everything.

I'll leave you on a happier note. These are photos I rediscovered a few days ago showing me in 1981, age 14 or so, with our English bulldog Meatball. Check out those groovy shades! (At the time my stepmother was a distributor for Foster Grant, a brand of sunglasses, so we had lots of samples lying around.)

Meatball had evidently just had one of her litters of puppies -- or maybe she was pregnant. As you can see she was definitely lactating!

Anyway, funny pictures -- a blast from the past.

The Woods Are Still There

Oh, me.

Most of you already know this -- you've said it in comments -- but losing a pet is hard. I have been through this before and yet I'm still surprised how hard it is. As I've told several people, I didn't cry this much when my parents died. I loved my parents, but there's something about animals -- their complete devotion, their dependence on us and our decisions, their lack of emotional baggage. We project so much onto them, and when they vanish it leaves a vast empty chasm in our lives and our hearts.

Dave got home yesterday morning, and that has been a huge balm for me, having him here to hug. It helps to talk to him and share my periodic bouts of tearfulness. It's been so long, I wasn't sure I could still feel grief like this. The physical sensations are almost like a panic attack -- pressure in the chest, a gasping feeling of airlessness, a sudden rush of tears at a particular sight or sound or thought. Dave is much more reasonable and sensible than I am, as it turns out. I keep thinking, "What if we had done X differently?" "What if we hadn't given her this drug, or had given her that one?" But Dave doesn't second-guess and doesn't seem prone to these crushing tidal waves of emotion.

By the way, I've got to thank all of you who have commented here. You've done me a world of good, and it's been amazing to see that Olga had dedicated fans all around the world -- including many people I've never seen comment before. I appreciate all of you helping me over this hurdle.

You're going to think I'm a glutton for punishment, but I took a long walk on Hampstead Heath yesterday -- specifically the West Heath, Sandy Heath and the Extension. These are areas I used to walk regularly with Olga. She wasn't able to go that far in recent years, so it's been a while -- I think April 2023 is the last time we went to Sandy Heath, and November 2023 to the West Heath, and even longer to the Extension (though she went there every day in a van with her dog walker).

It was comforting to be back in the woods, to see that it's all still there -- even the little pool of water in the roots of the Lulu Trees where Olga would always stop and have a drink. There weren't many people out because it rained pretty heavily all morning, but I did see other humans with their dogs and that was comforting too. It gave me a sense of permanence -- a reminder that despite our personal traumas and transience, there will always be wonderful dogs out there, having wonderful experiences with their people.

Despite that, toward the end of my walk, I realized that all the photos I'd taken of the familiar Heath landscapes were utterly empty. I was photographing absence.

This, for example, is the same vantage point where I photographed the foggy winter scene of Olga watching for squirrels that I posted yesterday. It looks so different with leaves -- and without dog.

I did sleep last night, which was a relief (after sleeping just three hours on Friday). Still, going to bed, I missed hearing Olga's toenails clicking down the hallway and the soft bonk of her head against the door, nosing it open to join me.