A plague of Mary Sues upon thine head!

Anyone here heard of James Frey? He wrote an autobiographical account of his life as an alcoholic and drug addict in a “downward spiral of violence and destitution”. Oprah thought he was wonderful and promoted his book on her show. She wept over it, apparently. Frey appeared on her show giving a message of hope to all the viewers who “shared his pain”. Look at me now, I came good! Turns out it didn’t quite happen like James Frey said it did. He kinda exaggerated the truth. A lot. And maybe made some stuff up. A lot. Maybe.

Anyone here heard of J.T. Leroy? “He” is an autobiographical author who wrote a book about his life as a teenage boy prostitute. Hollywood stars practically fell over themselves in order to help the poor boy. Turns out “he” is actually a middle aged woman named Laura Albert, who also calls herself “Emily Fraiser”. Susie Bright wasn’t very happy about this whole thing as J.T. Leroy had fooled her too. She explains Laura Albert’s antics by comparing them to slash fiction: yet another female author living out the dream of being a gay man…

Slash fiction, if you really want to know, is a form of erotic fan fiction that is written probably ninety percent of the time by heterosexual women, and there to indulge the fantasy of famous male icons getting it together. It all began with Star Trek. For some reason female Star Trek fans get off on the idea of Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock in, well, ummm, bed together. The slash or “/” is the way it’s described on the page and depends on the particular coupling. Kirk/Spock “slash” fiction. Or Picard/Riker “slash” fiction. See? It’s by no means restricted to Star Trek. Highlander, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are apparently popular subjects too. In fact, Legolas appears to be extremely popular with the girls and the boys. But damn, he is nice to look at, isn’t he?

According to the Mary Sue Purity Test, Rickey is a borderline Mary Sue (he scored 46). I will not allow myself to find this discouraging, given that characters like Eugene Gant (Look Homeward, Angel) and Jack Torrance (The Shining) are probably also “Mary Sues” by this test’s standards.

PzB wailed defensively on her blog a couple of days ago. I’m amused by the thought that she may not have caught on to the fact that she’s spent her whole career writing original slash fiction. Mary Sue is an integral and inevitable part of slash and other forms of fan fiction. Mary Sue is all about wish fulfillment.

You see, there is a very special kind of character that’s sometimes written by a young slash writer, still on her training wheels. This is usually an original character, who becomes the star of the show. This character is beautiful (but in an unusual way), wise, kind, magical, creative – she may even have color-changing eyes or violet hair. She usually has a dramatic and traumatic past, but it has only made her stronger. She does marvelous things, saving the Starship Enterprise from blowing up, getting Methos to finally make a move on Duncan MacLeod. She is referred to, not terribly fondly, as Mary Sue.

Explains a helpful commenter Susie Bright’s blog. Mary Sue is so popular she has several fan sites of her very own.

Although storytellers have been rehashing Mary Sue since the dawn of time, she did not receive her current name until the early 1970s. The original was Lieutenant Mary Sue (“the youngest Lieutenant in the fleet — only fifteen and a half years old”) as immortalized in Paula Smith’s “A Trekkie’s Tale,” which she wrote and published in her 1974 fanzine Menagerie #2. (According to Katherine Langley: “Paula is still active in fandom and, to be sure, suitably bemused that Mary Sue lives on.”)

Mary Sue, as this archetype became known, was at first any brilliant, beautiful young Starfleet officer who joined the Enterprise crew to be the center of attention, set everything right, make off with the main male canon character’s heart (or several of them!), and/or die dramatically in someone’s arms. I’m sure you can make a similar analogy within your own fannish experiences. Mary Sues exist in every fanficdom:

  • the pretty new Immortal who stumbles into MacLeod’s (or Methos’) arms
  • the uberpowered kid who joins Generation X
  • the female bronzerider with her firelizard flock
  • the kitchen-drudge-cum-HeraldMage out on her first circuit
  • the notorious Marrissa Amber Flores Picard Gordon…

I’m sure you can think of more. And of course there are non-fanfic Mary Sues, characters who only exist in their creators’ minds, on well-worn RPG character sheets or in secret notebooks. There are even actual canon Mary Sues, though that gets hard to judge because they are canon. Good examples include Jean M. Auel’s Ayla, Michael Moorcock’s Elric, Anne McCaffery’s Menolly, and Anne Rice’s, well, anyone…

Says Kielle, author of The Official Mary Sue Society Avatar Appreciation Site. Did somebody mention Anne Rice’s name there? Well, that fits very well because not only does Rice have an irritating habit of creating new far-too-perfect characters (whom we all hate) that steal the show and the cannon character’s hearts in every book, her cannon characters are terrible Mary Sues too. Original fiction Mary Sues are all about wish-fulfillment and acting out your fantasies. They are about creating characters who are too perfect and beautiful, with tortured, secret pasts and particularly special psychic or physical powers. The author may have a Cinderella complex. The character usually has lavishly described outfits, and may even be based on someone that the author knows. Hmmm. Who does that sound like? And did you know Lestat’s character was based on Rice’s husband? Oh dear.

Anne Rice. PzB. Tanith Lee (her heroines are always wildly attractive, and they always suffer). Buffy (like a cheerleader and a vampire slayer?). Lisa from The Simpsons? All those Star Wars characters inserted into books since the start of Star Wars books. I’m thinking Mara Jade. Hey! Wikipedia list her as a Mary Sue too! Oh, and Alice from Resident Evil (and speaking of the gorgeous Milla Jovovich, who was LeeLoo if not the ultimate original fiction Mary Sue?). Let’s face it, the Brontes and Austen have also been guilty of some serious original fiction Mary Sueism.

The male version of the Mary Sue is frequently called the Gary Stu. The original fiction Gary Stu has spread himself around so much he’s invisibly common. Superman, James Bond, Luke Skywalker, every young Charles Dickens hero you ever heard of…

Suspension of Disbelief

[A]nyone who says “She’s so pretty that it’s like a disability because everyone hates her or wants to have sex with her” will be summarily keelhauled. – (The (Original) Mary Sue Litmus Test (for Gargoyles fan fiction))

If we contain Mary Sue to the fan fiction genre, she’s easy to define. But when we start talking about original fiction Mary Sues, we shortly discover that virtually every hero and heroine anywhere is a bit of a Mary Sue. Writers have a tendency to draw their heroes and heroines far too perfectly in order to impress their specialness upon others and fulfill their own private fantasies. Heroes rarely make mistakes, they are not human. That’s why Superman and James Bond can never be anything but clichés. Creating a Mary Sue is known as authorial intrusion. Authorial intrusion is when the author intrudes into their own fictional world to the point where the reader can no-longer suspend their disbelief. The whole house of cards collapses and the reader ends up laughing at the author’s poor writing.

The Plague of Mary

According to The Original Fiction Mary Sue Litmus Test, my deliberately hot-headed, selfish, self-involved, extremely flawed Lead Character actually has a number of very Mary Sue-like qualities. So does my Loveable Villain (even though he does some very bad things). I’ve also discovered that my main Romantic Interest (designed to be beautiful, obsessive, arrogant, hot-and-cold, and occasionally nasty), is so much a Mary Sue that I’m wondering whether I need to make her slightly more psychotic than she already is. But I guess this comes with the territory when one is writing gothic fantasy fiction about immortal witches and all. It’s all very illuminating.

Mary Sue Links

What cars do

The date was the ninth of December 2004, a little over a year ago. At the time we lived in Nottingham city centre above a main road, Upper Parliament Street, criss-crossed with a complicated and impractical network of pedestrian crossings.

I was just getting changed into my gym clothes to do a workout on my rebounder when I heard a crack like an egg being split open into a pan. The crack was followed immediately by the screech of tires as a driver slammed hard on his brakes, and then shouts and screams of horror from passers-by.

Sticking my head out of the window I could see that a car had braked in the middle of the busy junction, blocking the traffic. The windscreen of the car was undamaged. A boy – he couldn’t have even been twenty – got out of the car. At the front of the vehicle sprawled on the road was a balding, middle-aged man who might have been someone’s father. The man wasn’t moving.

He had been crossing the road where he shouldn’t have been crossing, where there were normally railings to stop the pedestrians from going. Currently there were no railings and instead an inadequate temporary fence because of the road works that were taking place at the junction. A hundred other people must have made the same sprint across two lanes of traffic the same day. People made this journey all the time because the pedestrian crossings were so badly designed that to follow the proper route took you a hundred yards out of your way. Indeed I was to give my boyfriend a sound dressing-down only two hours later when he automatically tried to take the same path.

It must have been twenty five minutes before an ambulance arrived. The ambulance station is only around the corner. I had my head stuck out of the window all of that time, on the verge of tears. “Where the HELL is the ambulance?” I kept exclaiming. I have been at the scene of a traffic accident before, and the ambulance took a similar amount of time. In the time it took for the ambulance to arrive, I heard sirens on at least three occasions and believed they were finally on their way. I even saw an ambulance drive past the scene without its emergency lights on. The whole of the time, nobody tended the man. Two men stood over him, talking, and someone who must have been a traffic conductor beckoned the traffic around the car. I thought I saw the man fitting, but the men who stood over him didn’t bend down. The boy leaned against the pedestrian railing with his mate, looking pale. Eventually he was taken away by a couple of police officers. When the ambulance did arrive, the paramedics loaded the man onboard and the ambulance didn’t move for another twenty minutes, and then it took off without putting its sirens on. My feeling was that the man was dead, though I can never truly be certain. There were never any signs put up or flowers laid out.

I had once held the hand of a boy who had been in a hit-and-run motorbike accident. They (presumably) got the guy who did it because he left most of his number plate at the scene. They also got the guy who killed my cousin, but he got off.

My cousin R. was killed as she sat in the back of a car after a night out partying. One of the other girls in the car was ill, so they pulled over onto the hard shoulder of the motorway so she could puke. A drag queen at the wheel of a van fell asleep and drove into the back of the car. R. had a brain haemorrhage and died in hospital a couple of days later. She had been a beautiful girl; willowy, attractive, popular, intelligent. She was a straight-A student and she was going to University. She was only nineteen. Yeah, we all still get upset about it now and then.

I wasn’t in the UK when my cousin died, I was in America, going through a bad time, without much money and no real chance of getting a flight, and I was an emotional wreck of a human being before I even got the news. I didn’t want to go home into this scene of grief and despair, so I cried myself out in Baltimore. I was desperately lonely and I did irrational things for weeks. Selfish, I know, and I’ve always regretted it, but always known what it would have done to me.

Now every time I see a car pulled over on the hard shoulder I shout at them, I get angry to the point that other people in the car think I’ve gone mental. If you break down and pull onto the hard shoulder and stay in your car, you have a one in eight hundred chance of being hit. You will be struck, on average, within ten minutes of pulling over. Two hundred and fifty people die each year. Frequently these deaths are caused by lorry drivers veering onto the hard shoulder and clipping parked vehicles. Motoring surveys repeatedly find that people still think staying inside their vehicle is the best thing to do. It is not.

On average, every person has a serious car accident every forty years of their life. I almost lost my best friend to two separate car accidents. That’s how frequent they are. My mother reminds me now and then that I almost didn’t get to grow up. When I was a baby, my parents were travelling in their car behind a lorry carrying planks of wood. Then one of the planks slid off. It went through our windscreen and stabbed the back seat, less than six inches from my head. I still sport a small white scar on my forehead from fragments of glass. My mother had to have her face reconstructed.

The bath fiasco

OH the joys of home improvement, and it’s only just begun. Did I tell you our shower broke the second time it was used? It looks about twenty years old. Then about a month after we moved in the downstairs lighting circuit exploded. Literally. Replacing the fuse wire (yes, I said fuse WIRE) didn’t help, it just popped every time we tried to switch the lights on. So we had the electrician in for a full rewire, which was a tiresome couple of weeks but well worth it considering the horrors he found. We should be starting on the bathroom very shortly, barring any more problems like those below. Read from top to bottom.

—–Original Message—–
From: PlumbWorld
Sent: 31 March 2005 08:36
To: Emma Davies
Subject: RE: breakage during delivery – eta for replacement?

Dear Emma,

Thank you for your email.

I need to know exactly what was damaged and the whereabouts of these goods now. Do you have a contact number so I can call you?

regards

Tracy

—–Original Message—–
From: Emma Davies
Sent: 31 March 2005 12:10
To: PlumbWorld
Subject: RE: breakage during delivery – eta for replacement?

Hi Tracy,

It was the clearwater eclipse bath (PWCL0021) that we ordered. The feet and the exposed kit were fine but he took these away again with him rather than split up the delivery.

Have the delivery company not yet reported this to you? He said he would do it immediately. The delivery guy basically shouldn’t have been working. He didn’t have any lifting equipment with him and asked me to help him lift it off the lorry. Then instead of waiting for me he tried to lift it by himself, by going under it and putting it on his back like a tortoise! I wondered what he was doing! Of course he staggered and rocked over backwards and the end smashed onto the ground and a big chip came off the rim of the bath. He almost ended up falling over into the bath. He was bent over double in agony with a really red face and did a lot of swearing, and I asked him if he was alright and he said “It’s all right, I shouldn’t be lifting, I cracked my rib a couple of weeks ago. I’ll be fine.” !!! I guess the reason he tried to carry it in that bizarre way in the first place was to avoid straining his ribs. I’m distinctly unimpressed with the delivery company for allowing it to happen!

My phone number is XXXXX XXXXXX.

Thanks

Emma.

The sun lounger incident

Well!

As today was a very nice day we decided we absolutely must procure a couple of sun-loungers in order to sit out in the garden in comfort. Jamie suggested a certain shop and I replied that “you know they will sell them for £17.99 each and be absolute tat.”

We visited Woolworths and Wilkinsons only to discover that indeed the sun-loungers they were selling were absolute tat, for £24.99 and £23.99 respectively. The hunt was beginning to turn into a bit of an epic when we at last found something decent at Yeoman’s Camping Store, and returned home victoriously with a couple of smart-looking, sturdy Marseille camping chairs.

Thus ensued a flurry of activity in preparation for an afternoon in the garden. A novel had to be chosen, my notebook had to be located, some tissue in case of sneezes as pollen season is upon us, a little coconut oil on the skin to protect from sunburn, sunglasses, a hat, a hair band, and a bag to put it all in. A jug of water had to be filled, a small table found on which to put said jug and two mugs, and finally I changed into my shorts.

Jamie was already settled in his chair listening to his iPod, in the only patch of shade in the garden. I set up next to him, having some difficulty with the reclining chair as I could see that the legs didn’t want to open fully. “Sit on it,” was Jamie’s helpful advice, “and then push the arms back and the legs will open.” So this is what I did, except the damned thing didn’t want to recline as far as his. My valiant attempt at correction suddenly propelled me over backwards as the chair decided to snap shut with me in it, and I was in the bushes with an earwig crawling in my hair. Jamie, of course, found this hysterical. “I could see that coming;” he said, “you hadn’t opened the chair legs properly.”

Former colleagues

M. got in touch through Friends Reunited. She used to work with me at Insight. I went up to Sheffield in the snow and had lunch with everybody. A., who I had felt had a blood sugar problem much like my own, has just started Atkins. I noticed she’s so much calmer, and doesn’t seem so pink. She’s lost a stone in a fortnight. I really hope she sticks to it; she will feel so much better long term. I’m feeling slightly self-satisfied as I think a (slightly drunken) throwaway comment I made to our former boss at an awards ceremony in Sheffield may have had an influence. All I remember is I was smoking a cigar at the time.

I saw R., who is one of the coolest and most intelligent people I know. I really rate her. She has a brain the size of a planet. I find her quite sexy and I like flirting with her. It sounds like a cliché that I’m repeating to be liberal, but it’s not. R. would be cool and sexy even if you took away her gothdom and dressed her in a sack. She has some hysterically girly traits that clearly haven’t been cultured; like the way she throws pathetically, and the way she collapses into giggles when she’s teased. She’s an MTF transsexual (transgenders seem to be ubiquitous to IT departments, she’s not the first I’ve known and won’t be the last). It’s something not even worth mentioning but for the story I’m about to repeat. I’ve never thought of her as being male, but then I don’t actually think of anyone as being primarily “male” or “female,” as I wouldn’t automatically exclude or include either in my love life or my circle of friends. For me sexuality is a decidedly blurry and fluid arena, and you just can’t scare me.

Anyway, a mutual acquaintance I don’t know very well referred to R. as “the thing.” I was shocked, really shocked, in the way I would be shocked by racism or homophobia. No one who actually knew R. or worked in the same department would ever think of her in that way. Maybe I’ve been isolated from the general mass of (intellectually impaired) society for too long? I guess I thought if I could grow up and move on from finding it “a bit weird” when I was twelve, everyone else would too. I’m still reeling.

Fern Cottage

It’s been snowing for three or four days now. Today it’s been melting. The river beside us will rise inevitably, but the flood defences are good these days. There was nearly a flood in the early nineties, the water was only inches from the top of the loch gate, but our cottage hasn’t been flooded since the sixties.

We ate at Riber Hall last night, a good meal, beside a crackling fire. I ate too much and drank too much, indulged in a jelly dessert, so it’s my fault I slept lightly last night.

Along with farm animals, we see pheasants in the fields. I was surprised to see lambs in the snow. Bakewell is just down the road; I go there on my driving lessons. So is Chatsworth. Stags haunt the Chatsworth grounds.

I’m very sleepy. The cottage is warm and the smallest bedroom, our office, is the warmest room. We’ve been in for a month, but it feels like more, much more. It’s so peaceful here. A thrush is always singing outside. Blackbirds cluck the twilight home. Fat squirrels steal the peanuts I put out for the birds. The cottage has a good garden with herbs. The previous owner, a biker chick and tattooist, seems to have been a clematis freak.

We’re just inside the walls of a park, opposite a stream that flows into the river. The cottage was built around 1700, and the surviving internal wood is pink, a hard softwood with few knots, probably yew like the trees that grow nearby in the park and in the church at the top of the cliff. Yew is an ancient, pagan tree, a symbol of life, and a protector against evil spirits. Yew is always found in graveyards. Yew is poisonous. Sitting under a yew tree on a hot summer’s day is enough to give you hallucinations, that’s why it was used in pagan rites. Apparently it’s a lucky tree for Capricorns too, so good for me if I was ever mystically inclined.

For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to muster the guts to start writing again. Moving house curtailed my novel a third of the way through. Coming back I can now see what I’ve overdone and underdone, and all the clichés are leaping out of the page. There are gaps, but not enough room to fill them if I want to stick to my word count. I’m having trouble constructing sentences. They seem to get tangled up, too flowery with too many branches, like clematis. My latest displacement activity is cooking. My repertoire of stews is broadening.

People keep contacting me out of the blue, mostly writers. First it was Andy Oldfield. I was inspired to get in touch with Paul Lathrope, who I’m working around to seeing again. Then Graham Joyce wrote me an email. I thought it must have been jungle drums from Paul, but no, he was surfing the web for fairies and out I popped in the results, pure coincidence, especially as I had just started reading his latest two books. On the other hand, Clare Littleford is proving elusive, and Kim Lakin and I are enjoying a mutual embarrassed silence whilst we struggle with our mutual house moving and mutual writer’s block. London is a long way away.

People I don’t know keep stopping me in the street. “Have you settled in now?” they ask. New neighbours make me flustered. I’m concerned about being judged for not being local. In fact, I imagine Tubbs and Edward from The League of Gentleman peering at me in the local shop with the interrogation “Are you local?” Parts were filmed not far from here at High Peak, to our amusement. Sometimes, self-mocking, the local radio station uses the catchphrase. I giggle my way through these encounters on the street, embarrassed, and I’m sure the neighbourhood must have come to the collective conclusion that I’m mentally impaired.

The cottage is on a hiker’s and dog walker’s route. Everyone who goes past glances up at the cottage and gapes. I’ve hung lace curtains to ease the goldfish-bowl feeling. I’ve done some gardening and a lot of DIY. I counted nine individual clematis in the garden, and spent last Sunday trying to cut them back to knee height as you are supposed to do. Sometimes I think the cottage belongs to everyone else, and they will be annoyed if I take out a plant or decide to move the greenhouse. What if the bikers come back and don’t like our changes? New boiler, new wiring, new bathroom, new kitchen, new floors, new carpets… so much work to do that I don’t want to think about it.

It’s so quiet here. Most mornings I’m woken by birdsong that lulls me throughout the day. I woke this morning to find a thick white layer of hoarfrost cloaking the front garden. Perhaps it’s just a tiny bit lonesome sometimes, something missing. All the neighbours are in their fifties and I imagine them popping round to one another’s houses for tea and cakes. I like to imagine that somewhere around here there’s another girl my age struggling to write a similarly Gothic novel. I imagine her popping around for a cup of tea and exchanging notes and sisterly advice. Then I remember she lives in London.

Dog look back in anger: Sam I evil? Yes I’m Sam!

The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part IV

Shoes. That’s what I think of when I think of Sam. Sam was our first and only boy Cavalier, and he was the last in the line of heirs to the Cavalier throne at Burton Road. This is possibly because after Sam, nothing could have persuaded us to get another Cavalier.

Sam arrived when Holly was still alive. He was probably a third of her size, though as they say, size doesn’t matter. My mother would apologetically refer to Sam as “a rescue dog” in front of visitors. This wasn’t entirely the truth of the matter. He was from a second cousin of ours, D., whose family had decided to up sticks and move to Spain. Sam was a pub-dog. He’d grown up above a pub and we soon learned that he loved curry more than anything else in the world. He was very attached to D., well trained, and would jump up on her knee and sit beautifully when she whistled to him. We don’t think he ever got over being left behind by her.

The Spanish move didn’t work out for D’s family. Apparently they got off the plane, started crying, and came back home again. But they didn’t ask for Sam back. In retrospect we should have forced the issue, but I think my mother was too charity-minded. She wanted to “help” Sam. Sadly, Sam was beyond any kind of help. We used to joke sometimes that the failed move to Spain was in fact an elaborate ruse to get rid of the dog, because Sam was Evil, with a capital E.

He seemed well trained and well behaved when D. arrived with him. Then she left. Sam wandered around looking a bit lost and confused. We talked to him gently, he was quite small and nervous and unsure of himself. He did the cutest thing, walking into the dining room with one of my sister’s Doc Martin’s held by the lace. He kept hold of that boot all night. At some point it became necessary to negotiate the replacement of the boot with another toy, so I stepped in and attempted a swap. I was unprepared for the roaring aggression I got in response. He bit my hand and drew blood. None of our Cavaliers had ever done that! I was shocked.

Over the next few days and weeks our peaceful family home became a war zone. Sam entrenched himself on the highest chair in the living room, dominating everyone. He barked aggressively whenever anyone entered or left the room, sometimes if we made eye contact, he’d come charging after us in the hopes of taking a chunk out of a hand or a leg. Why we kept him, I just don’t know. He made our life a complete hell.

He would get so wound up about guarding his chair that he would almost puke when anyone approached him. His eyes would go wide and his head would go back and his ears would quiver and start to spread like a gremlin and he would make a quivering little growl just under his breath. He refused to eat and would guard his food for days until he was so starving he had no choice. We were forced to put the food on his chair, or else the aforementioned fat freak Holly would eat it. We really didn’t know how to deal with him, and we did a pretty bad job of it. We even took to growling back at him when we went in or out of the room, and I guess that made him twice as mad.

“Sam I evil?” We would chant, paraphrasing my sister’s Metallica. “Yes I’m Sam!”

Shoes. God, that dog was embarrassing. He started humping our shoes. Not on our feet of course, but no shoe left around the house was safe. He’d sneak upstairs, pee on the bed, then steal a shoe for dessert. He made the most horrible straining sound when he humped shoes. So we had to have him done: snip, snip. Apparently he bit the vet. I think my parents regarded having him done as some sort of revenge. Sadly, it did not curb his aggression.

Sam’s defining moment was when he bit my sister’s boyfriend. Said boyfriend turned out to be a shit, so perhaps Sam was on her side after all. At the time, my Dad was so furious with Sam that he kicked him out the back door. Literally. Picked him up, removed him from the room, took him to the back door and kicked him up the arse. Sam remained completely unfazed and immediately headed off on a major “border patrol” around the garden, barking his crazy little nut off because he’d seen the fox. Sam chased the fox around the entire length of the garden then fell off the front wall. It was a three-metre drop to the road. How the little dick managed it, I don’t know. Said boyfriend’s father found him at the front gate looking dazed and confused. “Is this your dog?” A lesson in humility perhaps.

It took years for us to learn how to handle Sam. The little bugger wouldn’t die either. All our other Cavaliers died young, but Sam just hung on and hung on to spite us. Perhaps it was because he turned his nose up at biscuits. Towards the end we had generally made our peace with Sam. He would still try to bite guests and could turn on any one of us unexpectedly, but gentle words and tactful placing of a dog bed on the living room floor did wonders, so he eventually gave up his throne on the Queen Anne chair in the corner of the room.

Sam’s death was the most slow and painful of all the Cavaliers. He developed some sort of horrendous skin disease. His skin turned red and his fur started falling out. Nothing the vet gave us worked, the poor little bugger was on steroids and all sorts. His skin became huge and loose and wrinkly, and no longer was he a pretty dog hiding an ugly personality. Like Dorian Gray, his sins became etched on his body.

The disease spread from one back leg to another, and down his side to a front leg. He looked a wreak. By this time I’d moved out. I came home to visit one Sunday, and I was shocked when I saw him. He was breathing heavily and seemed in great discomfort. He was exhausted and wanted to lie down, but it seemed he couldn’t breathe when he was laid down and kept having to sit up again. I ended up on the floor with him trying to support his body so he could get some relief. “Dad, this dog’s going to die, he needs to go to the vet’s.” The strange thing was, they’d become so attached to him that they put off the appointment until the next day, in the hopes that he would recover. Sam passed away the following morning in my sister’s arms, thus ending the reign of the Cavaliers at Burton Road.

Dog but not forgotten: Holly the hellishly hungry hound

The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part III

Holly had serious problems right from the start. She was just not normal. We bought her from a family who lived somewhere around Ilkeston or Long Eaton that had had a litter of puppies. We saw her mother – a loveable but insane Tricolour who ran around and around the room over and under the furniture like a mad thing, with Holly in tow like a dingy tied to a motorboat. We took her home and she sat in my lap on the way back and as I stroked her I noticed that her fur was full of bits. The bits bothered me. That evening I was still bothered about the bits and as I stroked her I took a closer look, and discovered they had legs – Holly was covered in lice. Thus began an intensive disinfecting and cleansing routine to remove the offending creatures, which she didn’t really like much and whined and cried throughout.

We bought Holly while Muffin was still alive and well. My first experience of Holly’s appetite was being told to make sure Holly didn’t eat Muffin’s food while my parents were out. I swear I saw Muffin eating her own food, but when my parents came back, Holly was discovered rolling around on her back unable to move with a belly the size of a whale and some serious indigestion. We just couldn’t understand it: when Annie and Muffin were full, they simply turned their nose up at what they were given. Holly, on the other hand, had real appetite control problems.

Holly was a very stupid dog in general, but sly when it came to food. She eventually learned how to jump onto the dining chairs without skidding off the other side (with her size and weight, she had a lot of momentum), and from there she would jump onto the table and gobble anything and everything that remained on there. We could not leave crockery on the dining table, and we could not leave the chairs pushed out from the table.

She was a nuisance at meal times – obsessed by every opportunity. Unlike sweet, polite Muffin, elephantine Holly would bark gruffly and thunder around the table, so heavy she rattled the china in the sideboard, plonking herself down at the side of someone and looking up expectantly as if she was brandishing a written legal right to demand food. When that didn’t work, she’d thunder around the table again and pick on the next person. The funny thing was, she had an obsession about going around the table anticlockwise. If the person clockwise from her position called her, she’d thunder anticlockwise all the way around the table again to get to them. Her brain was one dimensional, it didn’t work backwards.

Holly rapidly outgrew the full-grown Muffin, dominating and bullying her at one and a half times her size. Holly had a lot of aggression when it came to food. She would snap for Muffin’s biscuit, so eventually the only way we could give Muffin a biscuit was to throw one for Holly half way across the room and hope Muffin crunched hers down before Holly thundered back and swallowed it whole.

Holly’s first piece of legislation was “Toilet Tax.” The dog biscuits were kept on a shelf in the downstairs toilet. Holly’s trick was to listen out for when people used the toilet and go and stand in front of the door and block the way out. Believe me, she was big enough to manage this quite effectively. The only way to get her out of the door was to give her a biscuit, thus, “Toilet Tax.” It’s a wonder the peasants never revolted.

Hunger was not limited to proper foodstuffs either. She used to make me wretch by dragging snotty tissues out of the bin in the living room and eating them. We soon replaced the bin with a closed-lid affair, which she would manage to tip over and break into like a fox raiding a dustbin. We used to chase her into the dining room, where she would hold out, growling and barking and guarding her disgusting theft, suddenly able to run both ways around the table in order to escape from us. If ever she threw up (which she did frequently, from eating inappropriate things), she would growl and guard it and manage to gobble it back up before we could get to clear it away.

She was such a dumb dog. We always knew when she was up to mischief, because she’d go quiet and we’d call her name, at which point she’d growl guiltily and ferociously, pinpointing her location and incriminating herself in one fell swoop. She was usually in the dining room, having either got onto the table or was somewhere underneath it eating tissues or other disgusting items from the garden.

Maybe Holly was brain damaged. During her first Christmas I made the mistake of leaving my presents box unguarded. Holly clambered in and rooted out my two hundred gram bar of Bournville chocolate. Half dog, half pig, she scoffed the lot, foil and all, and we only caught on when we found tiny bits of debris left in the living room. That much chocolate should kill an Alsatian, and Cadbury’s is barely fit for human consumption, let alone hound. However it had very little effect on Holly who didn’t even appear to get ill. But I’m certain it contributed to her general state of mental retardation.

When she was a puppy she was stupid enough to eat a stick and get it stuck in her throat – Darwinism in action. Evolution would have wiped her out for the good of the Cavalier race, but the vet saved her with a surgical operation. For weeks on end she had stitches in her throat, which she scratched and managed to unpick, spewing cascades of clear body fluids from her wound all over the floor. Her bulging neck eventually healed, leaving her even more hungry and obsessed than before. I guess the throat operation could have damaged her thyroid, which would probably explain everything. It would explain her immense size, immense hunger, and even her stupidity.

We did manage to teach her a few tricks though. My horse-obsessed little sister taught her to jump over an obstacle course in the back garden. Holly panted so much I thought she would keel over, but she didn’t seem to mind it too much. Undoubtedly she got a biscuit or two out of the deal.

Then I did something wicked. I taught Holly to growl. She would sometimes do it by accident at the table or if there was food on the off. One night I was alone in the house, and the devil got in me, so I encouraged her. It only took that one evening to teach Holly to growl for food, which she did from that night on with great gusto. She didn’t mean it in an aggressive way, just in a hungry way, but it scared the willies out of guests. What a hoot.

In later life Holly developed bowel problems. Unsurprising really, considering a lifetime of eating tissues, plastic wrappers, garbage, chocolate and wheat biscuits. I guess that’s karma for you. The vet put her on a chicken and rice diet, but it didn’t seem to do much good. I believe she developed ulcerative colitis, or something equally nasty like Crohn’s. She had a very painful couple of months. One day I found her collapsed in the kitchen doorway, breathing badly, and couldn’t get her inside out of the cold. She was just exhausted. The parents took her to the vets a couple of days later. In spite of her many flaws, we loved her dearly, and we cried for her.

Dog leave me this way: Muffin the mooing mule

The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part II

Muffin is perhaps the most underrated of our Cavaliers, because she didn’t make a big statement. She was a gentle, sweet-natured tan and white Blenheim with long silky fur and short brown ears. When you spoke across the room to her she’d pop her ears up like a Mogwai. When she was a puppy she was so cute she looked like a squeaky teddy bear. It was hard not to scoop her up in your arms every time you saw her.

Muffin was simply beyond provocation. She would have been wonderful with small children. She was larger than Annie, with a pear-shaped rear, so we used to think she was fat. How little we knew: she was a sylph compared to our next dog, Holly. Muffin was so cute. She wasn’t very agile and often had trouble scrambling on to chairs. She’d set her front paws on the settee and turn her appealing teddy bear eyes onto passers-by in the hopes that they’d give her a boost up.

Because she was a very good dog when she was small, sometimes we’d let her sit at the dinner table. Her head was only just high enough to see. She was very polite and would never take anything from the table, not even if it was inches in front of her nose. We’d have to push it right up to her. She’d sit and watch every morsel of food going from plate to mouth. When she got frustrated she’d rest her head on the edge of the table and let out a lugubrious little whine: “mooooo….” Of course, we thought this was hysterically funny. Muffin always got very sleepy at the dinner table. She’d sit and sit, and her eyes would slowly close and her head would rock forward when she started to doze. Once she fell asleep so heavily and so fast that she lost her balance completely and I had to catch her as she fell off the chair.

The only time Muffin really got excited was when Annie wound her up. Annie would go outside and bark just for the hell of it, and Muffin would think there was a fox or a cat in the garden and go insane. She’d go on what we called “border patrol,” barking her way around the entire fence and doing double circuits around the garage where the undergrowth was thickest.

When Muffin was very small, one day the newspaper boy shoved the newspaper through the front door at a great speed and it hit her on the head. She never forgave the newspaper, and every day thereafter at four o’clock, without prompting, she would go and sit by the front door and wait for it. Every day we used to have to rescue the newspaper from her before she tore it to shreds. Mostly Muffin would savage the newspaper and leave it intact, but one day we went out and when we returned the newspaper had been torn into a thousand tiny shreds like confetti that covered the hall carpet, the kitchen and the living room. Not a single sheet was left. It must have been a very victorious day for Muffin.

Muffin’s cutest quirk was her ability to attribute life to inanimate objects. One time we heard all manner of whining and yapping and growling in the hall and went to see what was wrong. There was a dried honesty seed case on the floor, with two seeds stuck to it like eyes, and Muffin was stood growling and watching, hackles-raised. She was absolutely terrified of it.

Muffin’s other habit was “speculating.” She had very good eyesight and liked the taste of flies. Unfortunately, she couldn’t distinguish flies from tiny specks of dirt. Whenever she saw the smallest speck, she would pounce on it with a grunt and gobble and lick away in the hopes that it was tasty. The kitchen tiles had a speckled pattern on them. We’d point to little specks and she’d leap at them enthusiastically. She had hours of endless fun, pouncing and grunting and licking away. I remember there was a tiny dried speck of water soluble blue ink on the wallpaper above the settee. Muffin scrambled up the settee back and pounced on it, leaving a big blue smear across the wall for the guests to wonder at. Muffin was obsessive, from the newspapers to the honesty seed faces, to the invisible flies in the window. Apparently this is a Cavalier trait, called Fly Catching Syndrome, and it may be a form of epilepsy.

Sadly, Muffin didn’t live very long either. She was only about four or five when she died of leukaemia. Looking back I can’t help but feel a dog is meant to eat raw meat and bones – not overcooked tins of dog food and wheat biscuits, and I wonder whether it would have made a difference. Muffin lived for quite a long time when she was ill, she didn’t seem in too much pain though towards the end it was apparent she was becoming weak and exhausted. Our parents took her to the vet and she was put down, and when my Dad came back he just sat down and cried.

Dog today, gone tomorrow: panic stricken Annie

The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part I

Annie and Muffin were our first two Cavaliers. Annie was named after Anneka Rice. Don’t ask me why, that’s one of the mysteries of the universe and I fear I may have been to blame. Our parents bought Annie and Muffin from a Cavalier breeder when they were very young. Muffin was underage, only five weeks old (puppies are not supposed to leave their mothers until they are at least six weeks old), and Annie was only a couple of weeks older than that. Annie was a Tricolour – black, tan and white. Tricolours are supposed to be patchy, with a white stripe down the middle of their noses that forms a spoon shape on their foreheads. Annie was more like a screwed up Black and Tan. She was almost completely black apart from her white socks and tail. She had a black face with two furious Scotsman-ginger eyebrows. She was also completely nuts.

Annie was a literal stress puppy. We used to know a woman we called Wailing Aileen, because all she ever did was panic at the top of her voice and wring her hands. That’s what Annie was like too. I’ve never met a dog with a worse temperament. She was in a constant state of nervous panic. She was a complete biscuit freak. The dog needed Valium. She expended so much nervous energy she was as thin as a twig.

Annie’s developmental upbringing with my sister and I was a downward spiral of provocation/reaction. Muffin was as staid and calm as a miniature Buddha, but Annie could be wound up like a spring and shot off in any particular direction we chose. Because she was easy to tease with such rewarding results, we played with her constantly using sticks, balls, and bits of rope. Our favourite game was tugging-ears-and-paws. Tug the left ear, then the right, then the left paw, then the right, make the pattern random and continue ad infinitum. It drove her absolutely insane. She was a gentle creature and she’d yap and growl and mouth our hands as she tried to catch our moving fingers, getting more and more excited until she flipped and gave us a gentle bite. When we tried to play that game with Muffin, she’d just sniff our hands and look bemused.

They say dogs look like their owners, well Annie looked like King Charles II himself. Though the rest of her coat was short and wiry she had the longest black curly ears. They almost reached the floor, and they were always filthy from her dragging them in food and charging around the garden – sticky weed, what a nightmare, and in the winter she used to gather little snowballs in them. My dad took to giving her a haircut every couple of months to keep them under control. It gave her ears a lot of volume; she looked like a dog with a permed bob, late eighties style.

Because Annie was so excitable, the only way she could escape from herself was by hiding under the settee. Of course we tried to drag her out from under there, but she got very adept at manoeuvring away from us at top speed by crawling on her belly. Sometimes she’d steal my sister’s dummy and chew it under there, but when we tried to catch her, she’d turn upside down and propel herself away by pushing her feet against the bottom of the settee. Other times, she’d fall asleep and be so quiet when guests came around they never knew she was there, until she let out a huge rumbling snore that sounded like a fart and ruined any pretensions of class in our household.

Annie talked too. When people came to the door, she’d get so excited and yappy you could barely hear above her noise. Visitors would greet her with a “hello,” and she’d reply in a bow-wow: “haw-oooww!” usually followed by an excited sneeze.

Annie’s defining moment was at Colwick park. My sister and I were playing on the lake edge, and I walked out onto one of the corners of a T-shaped jetty. Annie was bounding around on the grass and I called to her. She came racing over at ninety miles an hour in typical fashion. I expected her to stop at the bank, but instead she leapt – sailed through the air, and damn her she almost made it. But only almost. She executed a resounding belly flop into the lake and swam out to meet me, howling and wailing in astonishment, before turning back and struggling up the bank. I was bent double in stitches. The amazing part was, she’d never been swimming before!

Annie didn’t live very long. She was only around two years old when she died. A classic tragic figure, it was the flaw of her own nervousness that killed her. She’d never been a good traveller. In fact, she wailed constantly and tried to hide under the back seat of the car and it made family trips extremely tense affairs. We went on holiday to Wales, and the journey back was on a hot day. She seemed fine at the motorway services; she drank water and walked around cheerfully enough, wagging her tail. But back in the car, Annie wailed and wailed and stuffed herself further and further under the back seat. The stress must have been too much for her. When we got home she seemed distressed and shaky, my mum carried her up the drive, and she says she just felt her go.

My mum laid her down in the hallway, and she didn’t know what to do, she was just panicking, I came in, Annie wasn’t breathing. I took hold of her and just shook and shook and smacked her back in a terrified attempt to shock her to life, and then my dad came in and told me to stop. He tried giving her CPR. Nothing made any difference. She’d shit herself. She was already dead. A heart attack, an embolism, we weren’t quite sure. We buried her in the back garden the same day. It was like losing a person. For two weeks we were in constant tears, grieving, simply couldn’t believe what had happened.