Saturday, July 28

 

 

We woke up late this morning, exhausted from our failure to see an epoch-defining lunar eclipse. We noticed immediately that the weather has changed: clouds filled the sky and huge, hot winds swept across the garden to the point where Sunshine ran out and hid under one of the wooden buildings. The word sirocco came to mind.

After breakfast we both went swimming. The winds had emptied all the algae out of the bay. I cut my leg on something mysterious jumping into the water. I suspected the broken stalk of some sea hay, but Irma claimed none existed. Whatever caused it my left leg ended up cut from the knee to the ankle.

Sunshine seemed odd in the morning, and again when he reappeared. He refused to eat, and simply collapsed on the floor and did nothing. We came up with three possibilities: he had started dying of old age; he had caught an illness or disease; or the heat had affected him badly. We googled “cat fur heatwave” and various similar combinations, and we decided that he had almost certainly embarked on Option 3; the one we can most easily do something about.

Irma force-fed him water and, eventually, he leapt out of her arms and trotted outside. Either he felt better or he interpreted the treatment as a form of torture.

Later in the afternoon Sunshine emerges from some bushes and I photograph him when sits on a rock in the shade of a tree, watching some vehicles in the distance.

Irma makes him drink some more water and he appears to quite like it. She fills a teaspoon and dribbles it into his mouth and at least some of the water gets swallowed in this process.

We have got two small plastic vodka bottles (from making Toomey) that Irma has filled with water and frozen. We use these to keep the fridge cold, since it seems to work inefficiently for reasons we occasionally spend time theorising about. Irma will take one of these and give it to Sunshine. He immediately likes the vodka bottle, and will sit for the rest of the evening wrapped around it.

We will take this as proof that he has overheated in the endless days of blazing sun, and simply needs cooling.

In the evening we will hear thunder in the distance. It will get closer and we will get two minutes of loud thunder and one minute thirty seconds of rain. The wind will rise again: hard and hot and Mediterranean.

We will go to bed early. Sunshine will finally put the (now melted) ice bottle away from him and fall into a deep sleep.