Week four

Kittens and embroidery

Curiously enough this has been a good week. By good I mean a week in which I have felt contented. I put the News on BBC and witness the chaos of the ‘outside’ world. Yet here, at home, life is calm and quite beautiful.  Two factors seem to have contributed to that this week and they are kittens and embroidery!

When I bought my cat, Winnie, last summer she had not been spayed so I  decided that before I subjected her to this I would let her have a litter of kittens. I explored the idea of purchasing the services of a ‘stud cat’  (only the best!) but it soon became apparent that this could be complicated, involving car journeys, which she could find distressing, together with the necessity for accurate timing. So I decided to let nature take its course and on one Thursday in October she was courted in the back garden by quite a large black and white local tom cat and the deed was done. In fact it was done five or six times which I now understand is normal procedure for cats. Pregnancy for cats is about 63 days so a quick calculation revealed that these kittens would be due on or around Christmas Day. 

Thanks to lockdown I spend every day at home at the moment but the one day I was due to be out was Christmas Day which was to be spent with family.  So I was slightly anxious when Christmas Eve came and went without any sign of these kittens being born.  I left a key with my neighbour and asked her to pop in on Christmas Day afternoon to check all was well. At 4.00pm there was just the one cat in the house.  When I arrived home shortly before 10.00pm there were six with the last kitten clearly having only just arrived in the world.

These kittens are now five weeks old and provide an endless source of entertainment. Most of the time they stick together in a little group with ‘Mum’ but they will respond to a call of ‘kittens!’ and follow me. I have an upstairs study which is now their ‘base’. So when I am reading, writing or sewing I have the delight of these tiny creatures using my legs as tree trunks up which to climb and watching them cavort and sleep. Oh, and they do seem to have mastered the litter tray in recent days which is a relief.  

Perhaps the most amazing thing in all of this is the extent to which all these behaviours are inbuilt. Winnie is a wonderful Mum.  At every point she has just ‘known’ what to do; feeding, washing, protecting. It reminds you of the deep ‘knowing’ in nature. I have coaching clients some of whom are, sadly ,wracked with anxiety. They spend  much time in their heads worrying about life and trying to work it out. There is a lesson to be learned from observing the ease with which animals can go about things. You can think too much!  Sometimes it is wise to let go and trust to the deeper knowing.

I read in The Times earlier this week about the large rise in sales of various kinds of sewing and craft kits in the last year. It would seem that, as valuable as technology has been, in all this locked down world we can weary of sitting in front of screens of various types. There is a desire to engage with the physical world and some of the most obvious ways are gardening and crafts.  I have dabbled in various crafts over the years and love attending the Knitting and Stitching Shows every year at Alexander Palace.  There is something so enticing about wools, threads and fabrics with their infinite range of colours and textures and the invitation they hold for being creative in some way. I have a small collection of these at home and recently brought them out with the intention of ‘being creative’. The activity proved frustrating and relatively joyless so I put them all away. 

However, last week I took a book down from my shelf which contained a collection of patterns for a variety of flowers and plants in what is called ‘stump work’ or raised embroidery. This can involve creating leaves or petals on wire and then cutting them out to add to a flat background.  I have done this kind of work before and thought I would try again. One advantage was that each design was relatively small and simple so would not take weeks to complete. So I have embarked on an olive branch and I am loving it. As I write it is almost complete. The stitches are tiny but there is a deep satisfaction in the process. It truly is meditative as it absorbs your full attention as you focus on getting the needle to go in and out at just the right point. All other thinking ceases and you ‘lose yourself’. But what to do with the finished product? I have realised that it is small enough to be made into a greeting card which then gives the added delight of sharing what I have made with someone else - and handing them the burden of what to do with it!!!