Maybe Something Nice Will Happen

 

It began when I made khlea, or specifically it began when my wife and myself ate the final batch. Khlea is a Moroccan dish. You fry minced lamb in oil and beef suet with a ton of cumin on a low heat for a couple of hours until it's dark, dark brown and almost crunchy, then store it in an airtight jar. The idea is that it will keep for months without refrigeration if done right, which doubtless makes a lot of sense if you happen to live in Fes. You spoon it into the skillet from the jar, crack a couple of eggs over the top, and serve it once the eggs are done. It's delicious. It's also very filling so a decent size jar of khlea should be good for several servings spread out over a couple of weeks.

Anyway, I'd come to the bottom of the jar, and the last lot of khlea still looked good, smelled good and tasted fantastic, but was probably past its best. We ate it on Friday. On Saturday we both had stomach cramps. Bess was fine by the afternoon, but mine endured until Monday. The discomfort was actually pretty mild, but my bum lost all interest in doing a poo for the duration, and I wasn't able to eat much either.

I was okay by Monday evening so we went out to eat at Laguna Madre. The food was great except that I seemingly lost a filling while eating it. The strange thing was that at no point was I aware of anything small, hard and dental going suddenly free range in my mouth. If it was a filling, I still have no idea where it went and think I would have remembered swallowing or biting down on it. I was eating battered cod and became suddenly aware that a lower rear molar had a sharp edge which felt wrong against my tongue. I had assumed I'd moved beyond the point of those teeth I still have falling out or breaking in half; so that was depressing.

Then the weather turned colder with skies so grey as to remind me of how much I used to dislike living in England.

I went to the dentist on Tuesday, hoping it would be a straight in and out sort of deal. I hadn't lost a filling, but rather a piece of the tooth had broken off. It seems this tends to happen with the molars at the back once you pass a certain age. It bothered me because I'd assumed, following a pretty rigorous course of dental treatment undertaken when I first moved here, surprises of this sort were mostly behind me, but no - I need a new crown and he'll start work on that next week. Never mind.

At some point we found out that Stacey's father had died of coronavirus. Nearly a year into the pandemic and the numbers don't seem to be going down. Stacey is a neighbour, one of the good ones.

Another neighbour is Justin who thankfully seems to have quietened down of late. Someone was broken into on Monday or Tuesday, front window smashed opposite Justin's place and two doors down. It didn't really seem like the sort of thing Justin would have done, for once. He might just happen to turn up in your yard, trying doors in case one should be unlocked, or he might just happen to try the trunk of your car - as he did with the one parked in our drive about a month ago - but actively smashing a window seems like it would require more planning than he could handle; plus most of his glass breaking activity is limited to bottles in the road in front of our house. To be fair, he hasn't smashed bottles in the road in front of our house in over a month, although there was what I assume to have been the stem of a crack pipe just last week - glass tube, broken at one end, brown staining. I'm not sure what else it could have been.

On Tuesday morning I got up to discover that Muffin, one of the cats, had been trapped in the rabbit hutch all night. Tony, the rabbit, roamed the house during the day, and cats - being nosy - will be in and out of his hutch which is in our front room. He got on fine with the cats so it wasn't usually a problem, but he may not have been too thrilled to spend eight hours in such close proximity to Muffin.

He didn't eat all day, and neither did he leave us the usual scattering of cocoa puffs, which seemed out of character. I assumed it was the stress of having spent the night with Muffin and that he would recover. My wife was less confident and made an appointment to take him to the vet on Wednesday evening. On Wednesday morning she was still sufficiently worried to make an emergency appointment and take him there and then. They kept him for observation. We lost the two previous rabbits the same way - digestive issues leading to complications, and all within the previous six months, Charlie in October, Maisie in December. It couldn't happen again so soon - surely? Tony was a young, healthy rabbit.

The vet called Wednesday evening. It wasn't looking good.

It may have been stress induced, or it may have been something he ate in the garden. She couldn't say for sure but it was the same deal as with the previous two - constipation, insides getting knotted up as happens with cows, and not much chance of recovery.

We drove to the vet and she bought Tony out to see us for one last time so we could say goodbye. He twitched his little nose at us but didn't look happy. He probably wasn't going to last the night, she said.

We brought his body home in shock beneath dark grey clouds which made it seem as though we were driving through hell. Tony was barely six months old. We still hadn't quite got over the shock of losing Charlie, then Maisie so soon after.

Today it's been raining, and raining so hard that I can't even dig a hole to bury him in the garden.

Both Bess and myself know bunny people on facebook who routinely feed their rabbits with pizza or lettuce after lettuce after lettuce or those stupid yogurt coated bunny treats which the manufacturer claims are just fine for a vegan animal with no means of digesting lactose. Since Charlie, and especially since Maisie, we've been pretty strict about our rabbits having the right diet - mostly just hay - and yet somehow we just can't seem to keep one alive. It feels like we've been cursed in some way. It feels as though 2020 continues to cast its foul fucking shadow across the present - each day bringing some fresh kick in the teeth.

It's too fucking much.