Flâneur Gardening

No, it’s not another kitten, don’t worry. I have my hands full with just the one, thank you very much!

Rather, it’s a little bit of my family history I’m buying into.

I’ve bought a small (12 litres) fruit press!

The largest juice producer in Denmark, Rynkeby, was founded in the village of Rynkeby in the 1920’s. It had started a few years previously when a widow and her daughter started a little cottage industry in juicemaking and it became such a hit that they turned it into a real, industrial production. In the early 1930’s my great-grandfather bought the first set of industrial machinery (partly hand-powered, partly electric) from the factory, and ever since then my family has been meeting up during the autumn school break to make apple juice.

Funnily enough, when my great-grandfather’s farm was expropriated to make way for a huge housing estate of concrete blocks (Vollsmose), my grandfather ended up buying a farm in Rynkeby, and this is where we now meet up at my aunt and uncle’s place and make some 1,200 litres of apple juice every year. We still use that machinery to this day.

Well, I have a glut of apples in my garden – more than I could possibly eat – so I need to find uses for them. And why not make juice? I mean, I’ve done it since I was barely able to walk, so…

I have a while before the apples are ripe enough – which is great, since I need to work out how to preserve it. Back on the farm we bottle the juice, cap the bottles and pasteurise the juice so it literally keeps for years, so I’ve just ordered a small bottle-capper gadget (nothing like the sturdy ones we use to the larger-scale family operation, but it should do the trick) and a load of caps. I can do pasteurisation in the ovens (I have three) and recycle various bottles, so while it will take absolutely ages to get it done on my own, at least it’s feasible.

I’ll test it tomorrow with grapes (I have a glut of those, too), just because… I mean, a man and his newest toy =/= patience! Though the grape juice can only be frozen since the bottle-capper won’t arrive until next week… (And no… I’ve tasted enough attempts at making wine that turned out really bad! Not going down that road… But I know how to make juice!)

The Flâneur Garden is in mourning these days. The little cat that car-jacked me two months ago had an accident on Monday evening while they were mowing hay down in the meadow by the lake, and around midnight he came limping into my sitting room.

One of his paws was badly injured, so I took him to the nearest 24-hour vet for an X-ray that confirmed that… Well… My little hunter was to go no more a-hunting.

He would never be as happy as a three-legged cat, so I asked the vet for a hug and then told her to go ahead. He was already sedated because of the X-ray, so he didn’t even feel the needle.

I brought Punto home with me. Around 2am we were home again, and I pulled a spare mattress into the sitting room and slept on the floor next to his little carrier box.

On Tuesday morning I took Punto for our last walk into the garden and buried him in the corner with the best view of the fields and meadows where he used to roam. Yes, I know… I’m terribly sentimental by nature.

He came into my life by accident – but he came to matter a great deal to me. A very great deal. He was such a friendly, adorable little creature, and he completely stole my heart.

We had two great months together. Sometimes you have to take the happiness you get and accept the grief when it is lost.

A friend planted this white lavender in a pot in her back garden in London as a memorial to Punto. That’s really silly. Really silly, like falling for a strange cat that stows away in your car at a service station. I like it a lot. I like that my little guy managed to make ripples across the North Sea; that’s pretty well done for such a little cat.

Have you ever been beaten up for leaving a specific bar? Have you ever been beaten up for holding another person’s hand in public? If not, then maybe that’s why you don’t understand how deeply this has affected me. I – and lots of my friends from all corners of the world – am still coming to terms with the Orlando shootings.

I’ve taken my beatings. I’ve goddamn earned the right to be deeply impacted by such a hate crime as this. I’ve held my arms in front of my face so they could only hit my body. I’ve taken my bruises and I have grown to accept this as normal. Yes, accepted it as “normal” that if I hold someone’s hand or go as far as kissing them, the consequences might be very concrete and unpleasant.

There was a weird thumping noise coming from the attic, so I went up to investigate and found nothing. Then when I went outside to check I saw the above sight.

No, that’s not an owl on my roof.

Yes, that was the cat on my roof this morning. No worries; the cat is just on the roof. Nothing to stress about or anything. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen. Oh… Hrm… Here, kitty-kitty! Come down, please?

Eventually he did come down, though. Or, well; he made it down to the gutter and then sat there confused as I tried to lure him over to the garage roof so he could jump down onto the old pig pen and down to the ground. After that adventure he wisely took refuge in the greenhouse – one of his favourite hang-outs on chilly mornings.

It was 7C / 45F when I woke up this morning, and though it is now (6pm) only just under 20c / 70F the sun is out in full force, so it has been hot enough for me to bask on the lawn in my underwear while the cat has been wise enough to hide in the shade of a shrub. And yes, I did fall asleep, but fortunately not for long enough to get burnt – and I have now retreated into the shade.

This summer living? I can get used to it… Fresh strawberries with breakfast, lunch and dinner, days where “mowing the lawn” is the only item on the to-do list…

The cat wasn’t chipped, doesn’t have an ear tattoo, and none of the major animal societies in Denmark have a report of a similar cat missing in that region, so…

I’ve gotten the motorway service station where he jumped in my car to put up a poster with his picture, and I’ve posted him on the major Danish “lost animals” websites, so I’ll give it a fortnight before I close the deal and take him to the vet to get him chipped and registered.

I promise, he doesn’t normally look as evil as in this photo, but whenever I kneel down to take a photo of him he runs to me and starts rubbing his head against my hands, so it’s very hard to get a decent shot of him…

If nothing else, this picture proves that not all Scandinavian homes are furnished entirely by IKEA.

Sorry about the title of this entry. It will be explained…

So, I was sitting in my car on the motorway, doing 120 km/h and generally being a bit bored, when suddenly my car made a strange noise. Well, I say “noise”; it was more of a “meow”. Very confusing, but then the car meowed again. Now, I don’t know much about cars, but they’re surely not supposed to meow!

Suddenly a cat jumps up from behind the passenger seat, across me and decides to sit on the dashboard. In front of me. On the motorway. Not, as you can imagine, an ideal situation. Especially as I’m pretty sure I don’t own a cat – or at least I was. I tried shooing it away, but the result was that it chose to lie down – which meant I could look over it so that seemed a workable compromise.

It must have jumped in the car when I was taking a break at a motorway service station. But what do I do with it? As far as I can see it has no ear tattoo, so today I’ll have to find out how to get checked if it’s chipped; it’s clearly a domestic cat, because it won’t leave me alone for a second – hence the title of this entry that was finished off by a cat walking across my keyboard!

Actually it’s kind of adorable… Kind of too adorable, really, because its behaviour indicates that it’s been used to a lot of human contact before it ended up jumping in my car at a petrol station – so clearly there must be an owner somewhere missing the cat. Hopefully they can be reunited soon, because god help me… SO ADORABLE!

Anyway, there we are. Me and a strange cat that car-jacked me. Or did I inadvertently cat-nap it? Who knows. For now it’s sitting on my desk, purring away merrily, when not walking across my keyboard or, indeed, myself.