Dem bones, dem bones

Maddie, Penny & Beau

The rain’s gone and the sun is shining, the sky is that perfect Mediterranean blue with the odd powder puff of cloud here and there - and the dogs – well, most of them (we won’t mention Beau) have stopped peeing in the house. All is well in my world. Time to see if my bones have healed.

My neighbour drives me to the x-ray clinic. It’s seven weeks since I fell two metres and landed on my back on the edge of a stone step. You can read about that stupidity in the posting called ‘Gardening can seriously damage your health.’ As we drive down the Route de Gorbio it’s as if I’ve suddenly landed on a film set – lights, action, music. Seven weeks is too long to be stuck in one place. Every bend in the road brings a new vista: the sea, the port of Menton, the blue leaves of the olives glinting in the sunlight, the colours, the smells, it’s almost overwhelming. What must a guy newly out of prison feel?

The x-rays show the fissure in the pubic bone has healed but the four broken bones in my lower back (spurs off the spine) haven’t and each one is now floating at least an inch from where it should be. The doc at the clinic says provided there is no pain, it won’t matter. But it is painful. I wear a corset and that helps a little - it also gives me a nifty waist. I walk from the clinic to see my doctor who gives me an ordonnance (prescription) to see a back specialist.

Zak

I really like Dr. Lamas. She’s always to the point, and always smiling. One of the most difficult things when moving to a new country is finding a doctor, a dentist and a hairdresser, not to mention a bank and a garage you trust. It all takes time. And it isn’t just difficult in a country with a different language. I don’t remember problems when I moved to America but then I was young and probably didn’t think about it too much. Later, when I emigrated to Australia and wore my hair curly and piled up with wispy bits floating about my ears, a bit à la Brigitte Bardot (as if!) every hairdresser was appalled. ‘You’ll not want your hair like this in Australia,’ they said. I kept changing hairdressers and stuck it out for about three years but then they were right: once I moved from Tasmania to Far North Queensland, it was all too much in the heat and I had the lot chopped off.

One day, earlier this summer, Dr. Lamas paid a home visit. I was too sick with a stomach virus to drive down the valley. The fee was peanuts considering the length of journey to me. I offered her more money. She refused but said she’d love some boutures (cuttings) in the autumn. Now, I’ve a couple of dozen young plants ready for her. They need planting in her garden before the autumn rains arrive and she’ll be up soon to collect them. My sort of lady.

She shares the surgery with her ex-husband and so one or other is always on duty for home visits. One time, when my best friend Candy was visiting from America, she fell sick. The husband came on a home visit and she nearly swooned with joy. ‘Oh my,’ she croaked in her fevered state, ‘a Jean-Claude Killy look-a-like with a voice like Maurice Chevalier.’ Candy got better pretty quickly after that visit. Amazing what a dishy French doctor can do for one’s spirits. I quite expect her to fall sick on her next trip to France and I’d best make sure it’s Jean-Claude himself who comes to tend to her. Candy had a poster of J-C Killy in her room at college and she has it hanging in her garage even now. I was just happy for the brownie points I gained in offering such a service to a visiting American.

A week or so later, I get to see the back specialist who tells me that no operation is necessary, indeed possible, but that I need six months balnéothérapie. I call into the clinic in Menton where I’m directed to a dingy basement which has that very distinct swimming pool smell. Funny how smells more than any other sense, can transport you back to the past. Suddenly I’m eleven years old and shivering on the diving board at the St. Alfred Swimming Pool, an Art Deco building in Hove, Sussex, where I used to take diving lessons from Maire Hider, a competitor in the 1948 Olympics. Back to the present and to Menton and to the very sympa doctor on duty who tells me that the balnéothérapie clinic is closing at the end of the month. I ask him why and he gives that familiar French shrug. He directs me to his own office in Carnoles and tells me that rééducation (rehabilitation), without water, will be just fine. I’m not sure what to do. I know water therapy would be good but I know the nearest clinic for that is much further away and it’s often so difficult to leave the dogs for more than an hour or so.

I walk toward the address I’ve been given, ring the bell and the door is opened by a good-looking young man who is the kinésithérapeute (physiotherapist) on duty. What am I saying? He’s not just good looking, he’s a vision of perfect manhood. I look at him, a beautiful slim Frenchman in blue jeans and decide to go no further. I think of Candy’s recovery with her Jean-Claude Killy look-a-like and know I’ll be just fine, thankyou, with this gentleman. In fact, Bruno is a brilliant kiné and trés sérieux, which is how the French say 'responsible.' He’s teaching me exercises to help support the damaged area. I work hard on stomach and lower back muscles and it’s damned painful at times, but when he praises me for doing an exercise correctly, I positively purr with pleasure. And when he massages my back, I wonder what could possibly be wrong in falling two metres onto the edge of a sharp stone step.

A Day in the Life

Beau, formerly known as Bimbo

‘I’d love to run a dog hotel like you,’ they say. I smile and nod. ‘Just feed the dogs twice a day and then play with them – nothing else to do.’ I nod. ‘You’re so lucky,’ they say. ’What you do is my idea of heaven – you spend all day long with dogs and you get paid for it.’

Beau in the garden

It’s six in the morning, still dark: I let the dogs out. Beau won’t go down to the garden. It’s raining, the third day of rain. The garden is grateful but I’m not sure I am. Beau, the Bruno de Jura who came to live here from the refuge doesn’t ‘do’ rain. Here is a dog who has had four homes before coming to me, who lived for several years in a run-down refuge and who is now living in the lap of luxury. The biggest decision in his day is whether to sleep in my chair or make a mammoth effort and move to the sofa, and now I discover he doesn’t do rain. I try to understand him: after all, he lived in dreadful conditions in the refuge, but Beau, this is not a dog kennel and you don’t pee in the house! But I can’t get mad at this dog – he’s obviously been beaten. If I pick up a broom to sweep the floor, he cringes. I’ll need to put on my dog psychology hat but for the moment, there isn’t time.

Maddie & Zak on the daybed

I go into the study. Zak, one of the Hungarian Vizlas who is staying has peed on the daybed. Zak and his sister, Maddie, always sleep on the daybed so what’s this? I strip the bed – fortunately there is a rubberised sheet underneath but the replacement protective bedding still isn’t dry as this is a repeat performance of yesterday morning. The study smells like a pissoir: a combination of Zak’s pee and bad smells from Rox, the old crossbreed, who has cystitis. The room smells of rotten fish: quite appetising just before breakfast. He’s on antibiotics so the cystitis should clear up shortly. So, that’s good, then.

Digby

I check out the bathroom: Happy, the young Lakeland terrier, has chewed a lump out of the wooden doorframe. She has Nylabones, toys galore, she plays with Digby, the dachshund all day but of course, chewing a doorframe is far more interesting.

‘I’d love to run a dog hotel like you,’ they say. I smile and nod.

Happy

Café Milou

A client is sitting across the counter from me. ‘Another coffee?’ I ask. She passes me her cup: ‘Just one more and then I really must get going.’

When clients bring their dogs to Pension Milou, they often stay and have a coffee or a glass of wine. Clients become friends, of course. The nature of my metier means it's often difficult to leave the dogs and so I love it when the world comes to me, if only for a coffee and a quick chat. The kitchen, a cuisine américain, as it’s called in France, opens onto the living room so we sit either side of a wide terracotta tiled counter. Wooden beams frame the opening and hanging from the crossbeam above us are bamboo chimes given to me by Youdi, a Chinese/Dutch artist friend who lives in Nice. Next is a wooden goat’s bell from Nepal and further along, a yak’s milk container from Tibet: both bought from a traveller in Menton market. There’s a large brass bell I bought in Spain and a small Lautrec print on glass hangs at the end. It all looks rather 1960's, I suppose.

When clients collect their dogs and stay for a while, their little darling, who up till then, had been playing happily with the other dogs, suddenly becomes a dervish of mock ferocity. ‘Don’t you come near MY Mum.’ Yes, we dog people refer to ourselves as Mum and Dad – and why not? Our dogs are part of our family – in some cases, dogs are all the family we have.

Charlotte (Tessa and Hattie's owner) - sitting at the counter with Pixie

We are chatting and the client asks me if I’ve ever had a dog die whilst staying here. She makes the comment that it must be something to worry about. I agree. I tell her I have a friend up the road who looks after dogs in her home, much as I do, and she won’t take old dogs for that very reason. Personally I like looking after old dogs but yes, there is always the risk one could die whilst here.

‘When I lived in Wales,’ I tell her, ‘I used to board cats: The Valley Hotel for Cats, it was called. Lordy, how original I was! I eventually built kennels to board dogs but never added the word Dog to the sign post at the top of my valley. It hardly mattered anyway, as the Welsh Nationalists defaced any signs written in English. One morning I went down to clean out the cats. In one cage were two cats from the same family and one of them was as dead as the proverbial dodo. I didn’t have a telephone number for the owners and had to wait two weeks before the family returned from their holiday. I asked my vet if he’d do a post-mortem but he said he couldn’t do that without the owners’ permission and suggested I put her body in the freezer to await their return. I barely slept for two weeks worrying about how I’d tell them, how they accept it. How do you tell a family that their adored pet has died and worst of all, in your care? The day arrived – they drove down the valley. I showed them in, took a deep breath and told them their black and white cat had died. ‘Oh, that’s OK,’ the wife said, ‘she was very old and had a heart condition and we knew she could go any minute. So sorry, we forgot to tell you.’'

I make myself another coffee. Riff, was a very old Jack Russell who had been to stay at Pension Milou three or four times. On this occasion, she arrived for a three-week stay. Her owner told me she’d not eaten for a couple of days but that this happened sometimes and anyway it was probably because she was so old. I asked if I could take her to the vet if I was worried and he said he’d be pleased if I would but again, he felt she was just a very old dog, nearly 17. That day she ate a little chicken but she couldn't keep it down. That night she slept OK but the next day she was not a well dog. Once the rest of the dogs had been fed and had a run around the garden, I sorted them out: put some in the bedroom, a couple in the study, left some in the living room and bundled Riff into the car and off we went to the vet.

The vet examined her, tested her heart, felt her stomach, looked in her mouth and told me he suspected a liver or kidney problem probably caused by her very dirty teeth and inflamed, infected gums – he didn’t think she’d last very long. Dirty teeth result in infected, bleeding gums and toxins get into the blood stream. Riff’s certainly needed cleaning but you couldn’t put a dog that old under anaesthetic, not even a light ‘calmant’ as they give here in France. I remembered another old dog I used to care for: Tigger, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. He’d exhibited the same symptoms as Riff, the vet had given massive doses of antibiotics and happily he’d got over the infection. Later, he had his teeth cleaned, some rotten ones removed and went on to live another two years, dying when he was 16: a great age for a Cavalier. The vet gave Riff a shot of antibiotics, gave me more antibiotics in tablet form but told me he didn’t hold out a lot of hope.

When I got home, I made her comfortable in a little bed in my bathroom – she was very listless and not interested in food or water. I called her owner in London to tell her what the vet has said. ‘Oh Jilly, I don’t want her to suffer. Please take her back to the vet and have him put her to sleep.’ I told her about Tigger and asked if we could just give her 24 hours in the hope the antibiotics would fight the infection. She agreed. That evening though, little Riff took a turn for the worse. I’d been giving her water by syringe, as she wasn’t strong enough to drink. I so hoped the antibiotics would kick in as they had for Tigger. Now she started having difficulty breathing - she wasn’t long for this world. I called her owner and told her I had some sedatives for dogs who travel badly. I told her that if I gave these tablets, it would be likely Riff would never wake up but at least her suffering would be over. ‘Oh please, please, Jilly, please give them. I can’t bear to think of her suffering.’ I couldn’t either. I crushed a couple of tablets, mixed them with water and syringed the mixture gently down her throat. She lay in her bed, covered by a soft blanket, gasping for breath. I sat and stroked her till she fell asleep. She never woke up. In two hours her heart stopped beating. By then it was two in the morning.

Riff's last day

Her owners had asked me to call them, whatever time it was – of course they weren’t sleeping anymore than I was. They were so kind, so considerate of my feelings yet I knew they were devastated by the loss of their old dog. They wanted to bury Riff in their garden in Menton but they were not coming back to France for three weeks. What to do? ‘I’ll put her body in the freezer,’ I said. Well, you need to know that I didn’t have a big freezer here as I’d had in Wales. I had a small freezer compartment on top of my refrigerator. The next morning I tidied the freezer as best as I could. I put Riff into a black plastic bag and up she went into that cavern of chilled air to share space with bread, pasta and last year’s home made tomato sauce. Sometimes, over the next three weeks, after I’d taken out a slice of bread for toast, I’d have to push a leg back to get the door closed.

Three weeks later, Riff was buried under a favourite tree in her Menton garden.

Another coffee?

Forbidden Fruit?

Zak

The terracotta-tiled floor in my study is normally awash with dogs when I’m working at the computer: fluffy dogs, smooth-coated dogs, large and small dogs but always exceedingly lazy dogs. Yes, the door to the garden is open all day but as we know, dogs need people, and people – well, right-minded people, that is – need dogs. So these lazy canines lie at my feet and wait for me to go into the garden and then they deign to follow me.

But not for the last few days. I sit here and there’s not a dog to be seen in the house - and why? I get up, look out of the window, and there they all are – scavenging under le figuer. Some sit there waiting patiently for a fig to fall and fall they do because I can’t reach the top of the tree to gather the ripe fruit. One dog even jumps up and pulls the fruit off the lower branches.


This fig tree is magnificent, probably over a hundred years old and is one of the many joys of life here. I love everything about this beautiful old fig – the bare twisting winter branches, that first bursting bud in spring, the leaves, which once they appear, you can almost see grow bigger by the minute until you have shade aplenty to protect you from the burning summer sun. And then August comes and with it the fruit, swelling and changing colour, softening and suddenly, one day you notice a perfect fig, ripe for the picking. As Dickens wrote, ’Train up a fig tree in the way it will go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.’

Noria, Rosie and Maddie searching for fallen fruit

The land here belonged to my neighbour, Agnès, before it was sold to the people who built what is now my home. More than anything, she and her mother missed the fig tree and so we all get excited as we get into August and know it won’t be long before we’ll be scoffing the first of the luscious fruit.

If it rains when the figs are ripening it can cause the fruit to split but this year, with almost no rain, the fruit is perfect. I worried we’d get no fruit this year because we didn't even have spring rains, but this tree never lets us down except when it takes a rest every three or four years: its roots are so wide and so deep it’s probably not affected by lack of rain. What a wonder the fig is – as is the olive - my two favourite trees in the Mediterranean. Only this year, archaeologists discovered cultivated figs in an 11,400-year-old house in Jericho, leading scientists to believe that the fig was the first cultivated crop, 1000 years before wheat and rye.

Funny how trees summon up a place. Figs and olives say ‘Mediterranean’ to me. The gum or eucalyptus tree is Australia: how I loved those trees when I lived in Tasmania, and later Queensland - but that’s another story.

And there are less cicadelles this year. These look like tiny moths but are in fact a type of cigale (cicada) whose larvae cover plants and trees with a sticky froth – in fact, their spittle and excrement – charming, eh? The adults and the larvae suck the sap and will eventually weaken any plant or tree. Some people spray against it but the cicadelle only flies off to the next tree or the next garden, so what’s the point? Anyway, en principe, I never spray. If a plant or tree can’t manage on its own, then, tant pis, plant something else that can. Normally, so long as a tree or plant has sufficient food and water it will withstand the cicadelle. Perhaps not true for vines but then the only vines I have produce a few paltry bunches of very tiny grapes and they get eaten by the birds or tree rats long before I get near them. The best non-toxic deterrent against the cicadelle is to spray the insects and larvae with a sharp burst of water from the hosepipe – of course they come back but it helps.

Rox ever hopeful

I used to think the dogs would get upset stomachs (read diarrhoea if you need more specifics) but they don’t, so I’ve stopped trying to beat them to the fallen figs: after all, they are full of vitamins, good for us and doubtless good for dogs too.

It’s time to go down to the garden and pick today’s crop before even more hit the ground with a soft splosh...

Chiot-Chiotte!

Nicolas and Shadow

One of my favourite blogs is French Word a Day. It's written by Kristin, an American, married to a Frenchman and living in the Var with their two children. Every few days Kristin sends out her blog featuring a French word and its definition, along with notes on her life and always a beautiful photograph. Highly recommended whether you are a beginner in French or have been living here for years. You can even listen to one of her children speak the word. And she's also the author of the recently published, 'Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language from the south of France.' I love it. You can buy this from Amazon. com or Amazon. co.uk.

Recently the family bought a puppy, a golden retriever, so the word of the day was chiot (puppy)…and also chiotte. You can read that particular entry here.

We all know that un chiot is a male puppy, so une chiotte must be a female puppy – n’est-ce pas? After all, un chien is a male dog and une chienne is a female dog. Logical, yes? NO!

Reading Kristin’s blog reminded me of the day, some years ago, when I judged a prestigious dog show at Le Blanc in the centre of France – no less a show than the National Elevage of the Old English Sheepdog Club of France. I had to take the microphone after each class to explain my placings and to this day no one in the Old English Sheepdog world in France has ever told me that chiotte doesn’t mean female puppy.

I discovered my faux pas about four years ago when I went with my neighbour, Agnès, to help her choose a puppy – also a golden retriever like Kristin’s - to be called Shadow. We were talking about puppies and I noticed that Nicolas, her teenage son, was smirking in the background. He couldn’t stop and eventually I asked Agnès why he was giggling. ‘Be quiet, Nicolas,’ she said, ‘stop that.’ But he didn’t and I asked again and she explained that chiotte is rather impoli (rude) and she'd not wanted to tell me. 'So what does it mean?’ I asked. Rather sheepishly she said it was a rude word for the W.C. Later I looked it up in the dictionary and see the exact translation is ‘bog’ or 'john.' And now I learn from Kristin that it also means that wonderfully refined word 'crapper.'

From then on I made Agnès promise to tell me when I made a mistake in French…let’s hope she has…

Not another rescue dog!

The dogs are barking, not that there are many here at Pension Milou at the moment, as I’m still recovering from my fall and Doc says - NO dogs. Of course I’m not obeying her but I only have a few small easy ones. I’m doing OK, lying flat on my back for much of the day and with Lou, the French bulldog, playing Nurse Fuzzy Wuzzy on the bed with me. The dogs don’t stop their noise so I put on the support belt the doctor prescribed and walk slowly to the gate. The daughter and grown-up grand-daughter of my neighbour, Monsieur Cocular, are standing there and with them, attached to a piece of rope, is the thinnest pointer I’ve ever seen. Marie-Christine is trying to hold onto a bag of dog food and the dog is tearing into it as if she’s not eaten in weeks.

Marie-Christine tells me she found the dog stuck in thick brambles, unable to move, under the autoroute. She tells me how difficult it was to get her out and points out the scratches and dried up drops of blood on her arms and legs. She asks if I know to whom she belongs. I don’t. ‘Perhaps she’s one of the hunters’ dogs,’ I say but looking at her again I think she’s probably too old. Marie-Christine says she doesn’t know what to do with her and asks if I can help.

The pointer looks like an abandoned dog to me and she too is scratched from her ordeal in the brambles and has what looks like a large tumour on one side. I well know the refuges are full: indeed, there isn’t a Menton refuge anymore. There should be. It’s a law in France that any town over a certain size – certainly Menton is well over that size - must have a refuge. We used to have one way up in the Fossan but it was closed down because neighbours complained of noise, which is a bit rich when you know that the refuge and the dogs were there long before anyone bought land and built on it. Since then there has been no land available for a refuge. No one wants a refuge near them.

The Monaco refuge, the SPA de Monaco, has a similar problem. It’s located in Eze, which is in France - between the Principality of Monaco and Nice but is funded by Monaco. You’d think all good and proper, wouldn’t you? Well, no, the dogs, whilst well cared for, live in very cramped quarters and are never ever taken out for walks. This is because anything that causes more barking than the basics of cleaning and feeding has to be avoided. The place isn’t big enough for the number of dogs incarcerated there and there is no way they can expand on the present premises due to lack of space and again there are neighbours who complain. This refuge was built many years ago, it’s has out-of-date facilities and it’s simply overcrowded. There is money to build a new refuge but every time the marvellous Jan, the Scottish lady who runs it, manages to find a piece of land, permission is refused by the commune that owns it. Princesse Antoinette, sister of the late Prince Rainier, started the refuge all those years ago, and you’d think land could be found with that sort of influences. But no. Jan found land in Castellar, a village above Menton, and permission was refused. They found land above Gorbio, my village, and permission was refused. It was felt that when the runs were washed down, there would be urine run-off into the water system. Indeed, someone went up to the hills above the village and put a dye into the water table and it did indeed filter down into the water supply. Sounds a bit like Manon des Sources, doesn’t it? In fact, plans have been drawn up for a new refuge for Monaco which include a completely sealed water run-off that goes back, via a pump, into a tank to be cleaned and re-cycled but nothing would convince the Mayor and his team and so a large fat NO came back.

So, no refuge in Menton and an overcrowded one in Eze and a needy dog standing before me. The last thing I want is another Rescue dog. I had three and then Columbo had to be put to sleep. Now I have Bimbo (re-named Beau) and Rox – all three came from a refuge and believe me, I sure don’t want another one at the moment. But what can I do? I look after dogs - that's my metier and my conscience is working overtime, dammit. I take the rope lead and tell my neighbours I’ll let them know what happens.

I take the dog downstairs (I don’t want her mixing with the others in case she has a disease or perhaps has fleas or ticks). I get her a big bowl of water and put down a dish of dog food, which she scoffs in an instant. I’ve a feeling I’ve just taken in yet another unwanted dog. Oh dear.

Nevertheless I call the police and they tell me that yes, there is a dog missing from Gorbio village. I call the number I've been given and it turns out it is the owner of the bar in the village but no, it’s not his dog. He’s lost a male dog. The one I have here is female. I ask if he knows about a pointer missing from the village but he doesn’t.

Maybe Carla, who looks after dogs like me, will know what to do? She lives in the commune of Gorbio too. I call her and she tells me she’s seen several notices for missing dogs way over on the back roads that lead to Weldon, a big hard-ware store in Menton. She also tells me there is a notice in the Weldon store itself for a missing dog but she hadn’t noted the breed. I call Weldon, it’s almost closing time, but they tell me they threw out the notice two or three weeks ago and no, they don’t remember what breed of dog it was.

I want to go and find the notices Carla saw on the back roads but I’m not allowed to drive until my back is healed and that’s a long way off. Carla tells me she is really busy but will go and look in the morning. I call my neighbour, Agnes, who lives in the house below me and she says she is happy to go and look at the notices right away. What a star she is. When she gets back, her news is no better - no, none of the dogs fit the description of the thin pointer. Someone has lost a shih tzu, someone a German shepherd, someone else a Brittany spaniel. Goodness, where on earth have these dogs disappeared to?

I wonder if perhaps the pointer has a tattoo. It's the law in France that all dogs must be tattooed or micro-chipped but not all are. Success! Why didn’t I think of this before? It’s hard to read the number and she won’t keep still. I probably wouldn’t either if I’d been stuck in brambles, frightened and with no food or water for goodness knows how long, and a stranger is trying to look at the inside flap of my ear. Anyway we get there eventually: 5 of the 6 letters are legible, one is debatable. I note down the probable letters and numbers.

I call my vet and Sylvie, her assistant answers. She tells me I should call the afore-mentioned SPA in Monaco and they will look up the owner of the dog on their computer. It’s now way past closing time and I assume I won’t get an answer but Sylvie said there is always someone in charge at this refuge and indeed there is. The lady takes my name and number and says she’ll ring me back.

Only 15 minutes later the phone rings and I have a name and phone number. Whoopee! I call the number I’ve been given and a female voice answers. She sounds familiar but I can’t quite place her but she recognises my voice – well that’s not difficult with my accent when speaking French. It’s Crystelle, the factrice (post lady). I know she lives in the village with her husband and baby son but I never knew she had a dog. She says she’ll drive down right away.

Crystelle arrives, takes one look at her dog and bursts into tears. ‘She went missing last night,’ she tells me, ‘and we’ve looked everywhere in the village for her. ' I tell her my neighbours fed her and so did I and venture to ask why she is so thin if she only went missing last night. ‘Oh you mustn’t feed her,’ she tells me. 'She is diabetic, epileptic and has cancer and because of the diabetes we have to keep her thin to keep her alive.’ I apologise of course but say she looked and acted like a starving dog. She tells me she is always hungry because of the diabetes.

So, a happy ending and accomplished very quickly too. I have to say I’m relieved. I’m simply not ready to take in yet another Rescue dog. Not yet anyway…

Shadow and Bulldozer Need to be Adopted!

These two sweet little puppies still need to find homes!