ON THE button, same time every morning, the crows fly over, squawking their heads off. Where are they going?
"To a meeting somewhere downtown," says my husband, like he's in on the plan.
"They come from the trees over by Belvoir forest and they fly in and, later, they'll come back and take a break and stop over by the trees at the Co-Op."
A large group of crows is a murder of them. They murder the silence with their shrieks. "Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep".
They are raucous creatures. But it's a welcome intrusion in the icy silence of a November morning. At 4am, the only ones tripping the light fantastic are our spider, who lives in the gas fire grate, and myself on the sofa under a blanket.
Google is your friend in the witching hour and it tells me that the creative types all had insomnia: Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin. The latter makes for dreary company.
"Waking at four to soundless dark I stare...
"I see what's really there,
"Unresting death, a whole day nearer now."
He also wrote of the 'toad work, squatting on his life' and of the 'old fools in the nursing homes' – he had a keen if cruel eye for old women with moustaches.
"It's being so cheerful as keeps us going," I tell our house spider. She's a wary one, that one. In a long ago childhood, somebody surely versed her in that old playground game One, Two, Three, Red Lights. It was a game where one person kept their back turned and everyone lined up at a distance and tried to edge up on the caller.
But as soon as that caller whirled around, everybody had to freeze. Anyone caught moving was out. Our spider edges forward out of the fireplace and along the floor. She watches me with all eight of her eyes and as soon as I look up from my google, she freezes, stock still, like she's not really there.
It is November – the world is wearing a frosty coat and the black dog, misery, slinks into our icy kitchen, hunting for scraps. My friend cheers me with tales of alternative happy lifestyles in warmer climes. She knows a man who has a winter job helping rich people look after their fancy homes in the south of France. He overwinters in style and for nothing.
"All he has to do is turn over the Lamborghini, mow the lawn and walk the dog," she says.
"You've got me at turning over the Lamborghini," I tell her.
"His employer likes to cook and my friend says he will be sitting by the pool after he's turned over the you-know-what and there'll be a call: 'How do you like your steak?'," she says.
Now that's a winter and a half, I tell her.
I've already been on those websites: you can have a fortnight for free looking after a flat in the middle of Paris, so long as you give the diabetic cat his insulin injections.
"What if the cat dies?" asks my friend.
"No-one knows when their allotted time is up," I reply, nodding gravely and referring her to Philip Larkin.
"Still, a week up close to the Louvre, dandering down the boulevards, sipping wine at a pavement cafe... I'll take the chance with the auld cat – just pass me the hypodermic," I tell her.
While winter is creeping into our bones, our adopted cat is jumping onto the windowsill and staring in like the ghost of Christmas past, waiting for me to dole out the fish crunchies.
She is a "he" in temperament – quite the hunter and never, ever a lap cat.
It's all strictly on his/her terms. She'd kill to get a nosy into our house but we keep her at the back door.
She lives up the street, she already has a home, but hey, she is fond of us so long as we don't pet her or call her 'diddums'. Only there's something about the way her belly sways these days that has me thinking. In fact, I could have sworn she was a he, but her current situation suggests otherwise.
"Do you think our cat is with child?" I ask my husband, the fish crunchie king, beloved of the cat.
"Strictly speaking, she is not our cat," he points out.
And this is true... but hey, I can't wait to tell our house spider about the kittens.
