Juniper berries

“Of course they’ve brought forth juniper berries; they’re juniper bushes – what do you expect?” – so goes one of the funniest lines from ‘The life of Brian’.

Juniper berries - note the cone 'structure'

The juniper bushes which are dotted all over the hillsides round here don’t seem to have any problem bringing forth juniper berries either.

Although called berries, they’re actually small cones with fleshy, merged scales.

They’re bitter when raw but the mature purple ones are cooked in wild game dishes to give them a sharp, clear taste, and the young green ones are used to flavour gin.

An incredible range of health benefits is claimed for the plant, every part of which can be used although the berries are the most useful. Among other things, they are good for

• urinary tract infections
• arthritis
• digestive problems
• lung disorders

and they even have antiviral and anticancer potential.

Of cherries and fairy lights

I often say that the best thing about our doctor is his cherry trees.

Our very few cherries

Unlike our trees with their miserable half-dozen bird-pecked specimens, his trees fair drip with fruit, like something out of a painting of paradise.

Maybe his are a different variety to ours, or maybe they’re sour.

Of course this time of year there’s nothing going on with his cherry trees, plus it was dark when we went to his home surgery this evening. There were fairy lights all round the porch.

He had the usual words of cheer to deliver:-

“There’s nothing to be done for arthritis. It  never gets better; only worse.”

“Do you realise how much these pills are costing the National Health Service?”

Ever since we started going to see him, there’s been a frond of shrivelled leaves draped over one of his pictures. This evening I made conversation.

“Is that an olive branch?”

“Yes. It’s been there for a long time.”

“For peace?” I asked innocently.

“There’s not much peace around here,” he said.

Nor much good will toward men, I dare say, either.

An elderly Golden Retriever

We sometimes say, tongue-in-cheek, about some particular behaviour on the part of our dogs: “Cesar Milan wouldn’t approve of that”. But I doubt even he could help with our oldest dog, Newton, a thirteen-and-a-half-year-old Golden Retriever. 

Newton

He was never an obedient dog. He was zany, often acting against his own interests, like when he strenuously dodged the lead despite longing to go for a walk. He had Retriever instincts all right – I can still see in my mind’s eye the diminutive fuzzy puppy struggling down the stairs with the bathmat – but he only ever took things away; he never delivered them to any particular destination other than the bottom of the garden or some out-of-the-way part of the house where no-one could find them. 

Lack of training, I’m sure, although I did my best at the time.

It’s a quite different scenario now, though. For starters, Newton is deaf. How deaf I’m not sure. An “Oy!” shouted close to his head elicits a reaction, but call him from a few feet away and he doesn’t even stir. The only sound he can hear from any distance is the clatter of food going into his metal bowl.

I wonder if he can hear the sound of his own barking. Actually it’s more like yelping. We call it ‘yipping’- a high-pitched, bitten-off sound repeated endlessly for no apparent reason. If he’s telling us he wants to come in, why is he doing it beside a wide open door?

He also has cataracts. I can see their ghostly shine in his eyes at certain angles. They obviously affect his vision so that when a morsel of food is held out to him, he sometimes lunges for it in quite the wrong direction.

His worst health problem is arthritis in his spine, the back part of which is welded together in a solid mass, and his back leg, which sticks out rigidly, almost totally paralysed.

The unfortunate consequence of the arthritis is firstly that he has difficulty in getting up onto his feet – quite painful to watch. We are giving him homeopathic medicines which seem to help. They are certainly more efficacious than the standard remedies.

The other problem is that he is incontinent, by which I mean defecation; (urination is not affected). He goes to the toilet, or rather thinks he goes to the toilet, then comes back in the house and out it falls. It also happens in his sleep – “like a train coming out of a tunnel” as I described it to our cleaning lady. He gets up and there it is.

This would be less of a problem if he were not so darn prolific. When he was a puppy, I asked an experienced friend how many times, roughly, he should be passing stools in a day.

“Oh, four or five times,” she replied.

I counted over the course of a day for Newton. He didn’t have diarrhoea; there was nothing unusual about the state of his bowels. Fifteen. Yeah. Scale it down a bit for the fact that he’s an adult but you’ve still got a serious increase on the normal.

Ah well. He’s asleep behind me now and I know that if I go and have a nap in my favourite chair he will move over to be close to me. Things would definitely not be the same without him.