Seriously Mum, How Many Cats?

by Alan Parks

  Reviews of The Seriously Mum series by Alan Parks

  "What an engrossing read! Leaving England and moving to Spain, I know from personal experience, is tough and certainly life-changing. But this brave couple, not only uprooted themselves, but set up an alpaca breeding farm in rural Andalucia. I laughed and cried, sharing their highs and lows, willing them to succeed. An inspiring and fascinating story" - Victoria Twead, Author of NYT bestseller Two Old Fools on a Camel and the Old Fools series.

  "As you can imagine, their stories of adjusting to life in Spain just keep getting better, and in comparison with Driving Over Lemons, Alan and Lorna's tales seem more contemporary, and still as true of expat life today as when they arrived in Spain.

  This really is a ripping tale of authentic Andalucia, from a family known and loved within the expat communtiity, precisely because they chose to remove themselves and breed alpacas. If living the expat life appeals to you, or you are already doing it, then Seriously Mum, Whats an Alpaca? should be considered a must read." - Ronda Today

  “I really enjoyed reading Alan's account of his brave and adventurous move to Spain. Despite the many challenges - both emotional and physical - that Alan and his wife Lorna face, there is still a genuine feeling of happiness and almost childlike excitement about the whole experience, which shines through in the narrative. I'm almost tempted to pack up, move abroad, and try something similar myself. Nah, I'll just read Alan's sequel instead.” George Mahood, Author of the bestselling Free Country.

  “What a great read, I could not put it down until I finished it!”

  "Absolutely delightful. Humorous, well written. Well done, Mr. Parks."

  “So good - looking forward to the sequel!!”

  “A rollicking story of British ex-patriots in Spain.”

  “These books are hilarious, funny and entertaining. At the same time educative. Easy to read.”

  Seriously Mum,

  How Many Cats?

  Alan Parks

  The sequel to

  Seriously Mum, What’s an Alpaca?

  and

  Seriously Mum, Where’s that Donkey?

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 ~ Seize the Day

  Chapter 2 ~ A Date with Santa

  Chapter 3 ~ A Change of Fortune

  Chapter 4 ~ Dentistry in the Garden

  Chapter 5 ~ Segway Slalom

  Chapter 6 ~ The Greyhound Man

  Chapter 7 ~ Semana Santa

  Chapter 8 ~ It’s a Bloody Business

  Chapter 9 ~ Death of Zumba...Long Live Sevillana

  Chapter 10 ~ Stranger in the Night

  Chapter 11 ~ Expats

  Chapter 12 ~ New Arrival

  Chapter 13 ~ Diego

  Chapter 14 ~ Wintertime

  Chapter 15 ~ Eye Eye

  Chapter 16 ~ A Challenge

  Chapter 17 ~ Shearing Time

  Chapter 18 ~ More about our Cats

  Chapter 19 ~ Beards and Trunkies

  Chapter 20 ~ Home Again

  Chapter 21 ~ Geri

  Chapter 22 ~ Cats, Cats, Cats

  Chapter 23 ~ Lorna’s Lumps

  Chapter 24 ~ Shopping for Chickens

  Chapter 25 ~ Trouble in Paradise

  Chapter 26 ~ Equine Pandemonium

  Chapter 27 ~ Helicopter Display

  Chapter 28 ~ Our Little Miracle

  Chapter 29 ~ Bottle Baby

  Chapter 30 ~ Rollercoaster

  Chapter 31 ~ Deeply Sad

  Chapter 32 ~ The Eyes Have It

  Chapter 33 ~ A Happy Ending?

  Contacts and Links

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Stay at The Olive Mill

  Introduction

  When we arrived at The Olive Mill in January 2008, I distinctly remember Caroline, the previous owner, telling us something.

  “There’s a black and white cat here, but if you stop feeding her she’ll soon disappear,” she said.

  We hadn’t planned on keeping cats and Geri, our dog that we had brought over to Spain with us, wasn’t very good with them anyway, so we tried not to show the black and white cat any encouragement, thinking she would eventually disappear as promised.

  We didn’t see much of the cat around. Sometimes we’d see a flash as something ran out of the barn, or under a pallet of building materials. She was probably living off thin pickings, like little lizards and mice. She was our live-in pest control.

  “I’ve just seen the cat with a kitten in her mouth. She shot under the pallet of bricks at the back and now I can’t see her,” I said to Lorna one day.

  This continued and occasionally one of us would see something out of the corner of our eye, but she never let us get close.

  That first year was a blur. We had gained four dogs, had health problems with the alpacas after they arrived and eventually sold our house in the UK and began work on The Olive Mill.

  We didn’t have time to be chasing around after a stray cat, but we didn’t know then what was in store.

  Alan

  Chapter 1

  Seize the Day

  As I write, the year is 2014, and my mind can’t help casting back ten years. 2014 is the tenth anniversary of the year my Dad died.

  I remember being about 12 when he first came home and said he had to go into hospital because he had internal bleeding. It turned out that he had something called oesophageal varices, which basically means varicose veins in his oesophagus. He also had liver damage.

  Sometimes he would have what we would call a bleed, a pretty severe haemorrhage that would mean he ended up in hospital, sometimes receiving pints and pints of blood. I clearly remember one time he was in hospital for weeks and we came close to losing him, but they managed to stop the bleeding by inflating a balloon in his stomach and he recovered.

  Throughout his illness he always kept his chin up, and never seemed to let it get him down. To show you how his sense of humour worked, for his 37th birthday (I would have been 14), he threw a big party and called it his ‘In case I don’t make it to 40’ party.

  Dad’s life went on like that for a while; sometimes he would go a few months being OK and other times he would have a bleed every month or so. He always tried to carry on and not to let it affect my brother and I.

  One time, when we were on holiday at a Pontin’s Holiday Camp in Camber Sands, he insisted on playing table tennis with us, and those who knew my Dad would know he didn’t play for fun. He always wanted to win. So he played hard; harder than he should have done. The day after we got home he was back in hospital and I blamed myself for ages; but that was the way he was. Once he knew he was ill, and how serious it was, he wanted to live life to the full, not just sit and watch as it passed him by.

  When I was 17, just after Christmas, Dad left my Mum, and moved in with another woman. That was unexpected; no-one had seen it coming. At the time I was so angry with him for abandoning Mum and us that for months I didn’t want to see him. My brother Mike was the first to re-establish a relationship with him.

  Looking back now, I think that Dad did it almost as a way to let Mum (and maybe us) off the hook, as though it was too much pressure always having his illness hanging over us a family.

  I later christened the woman that he moved in with as ‘The Bitch from Hell’ (not her real name). She did everything she possibly could to stop Dad having anything to do with his family; not just my brother and me, but also his sister and his mum too. One day she even turned up at my auntie’s house, threatening my uncle with a knife.

  I didn’t find out until much later on that having a liver disease can seriously unbalance your brain. It is something to do with the toxins in th
e blood, as the liver is supposed to cleanse you and remove these toxins. If it doesn’t work properly it can slowly poison you.

  Over time, Dad had started making notes of the things he was doing, so he could refer back to them if he needed to. He probably shouldn’t have, considering his state of mind, but throughout his illness he continued to drive himself around.

  Eventually he was put on the list for a liver transplant at Kings College Hospital in London. By this time we were meeting up once a week, Mike, Dad and I, to play snooker and go for a burger. We didn’t want anything to do with the new woman in his life, so we always met on neutral ground.

  When he was summoned for his transplant, we knew very little about it. We got one phone call from her, to say that he was out of the operation and was in ITU; she would let us know more later. Mike and I went to visit him in the hospital, where we had to exchange pleasantries with her while we waited to be allowed in to see him.

  Once again it was touch and go whether or not he would pull through as he had contracted an infection; but pull through he did, and boy what a difference it made to his life. It was like he had been given his life back. He even went on holiday to Thailand (albeit with her).

  Sadly, after about 18 months, the transplant failed, and he started to get poorly again. His new relationship ended and he moved into his own flat. For us, his mum and his sister, this gave us a chance to renew our relationships with him, as these had all disintegrated during his time with her.

  When the time came for the second transplant, I was his next of kin and we had a trial run of the drive to the hospital, so I would know where to go.

  Patients on the transplant list are basically waiting for a phone call to say someone who is a registered donor has died and their organ is a match for their blood type. Someone has to die in order for you to live; not an easy thing to accept.

  The night I got the phone call I went into autopilot mode. I remembered the route to the hospital, although at 3am it looked decidedly more scary than it had done during the day. I remember passing through an area that looked full of gangs and I quickly locked the doors of the car.

  When I arrived at the hospital Dad was already there, having been collected by ambulance and rushed to London. I was there when he got undressed for the operation; he looked so thin that I was shocked.

  As he got ready to go down to the operating theatre I could tell he was scared (when he first got ill he was scared of doctors and hospitals, but he overcame that, he had to) and he hugged me before being wheeled away on the trolley. We were never really a ‘huggy’ family, so I knew he appreciated me being there.

  That night was one of the worst I can remember. I went to a waiting room, curled up on a sofa and pulled my hoodie over my head and tried to go to sleep. I remember people coming in and out all night and me pretending to be asleep. I also remember being called by the nurse the following morning when he was out of theatre and in ITU.

  The first time he opened his eyes I saw a look of relief and tears welled in his eyes, like he thought he wasn’t going to make it this time. Looking at him before the operation, I don’t know how long he would have had.

  After the second transplant, again he had a new lease of life. We even started a stoolball team. (Stoolball is a Sussex game that looks like a cross between cricket and rounders; Dad had played it before he got ill all those years before.) Life was good for a while.

  After a few months, Dad had a nagging cough and sore throat that just wouldn’t shift. He kept going to the doctors and telling us they didn’t know what it was. Whether or not he was trying to protect us, I don’t know, but after a while he revealed that he had throat cancer.

  One of the drawbacks of the anti-rejection pills that you have to take when you have a transplant, is that it reduces your immune system and makes cancer more likely, and Dad had always liked his cigars. If I picture Dad in my head, he has always got a cigar. They tried chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but in the end I think his body had just had enough.

  One day, when I was at work, I had a phone call from my uncle telling me I needed to get to Dad’s flat. I knew what it meant. One of Dad’s friends had been concerned the night before when Dad had not shown up for a drink at the pub, and when he couldn’t get hold of him the following morning he broke down the door of his flat. Dad was sitting on the sofa, with a cigar in the ashtray in front of him and a glass of orange squash on the table, like he had just settled down to watch TV. His body had just given up.

  I like to think that he died happy; right up until the few days before he was meeting up with friends for drinks at the pub. Thankfully, he never got so sick that he had to be looked after, as he would have hated that.

  One of the things Dad always used to tell me was that I should ‘live life for today,’ and when we lost him, I think that was when I truly understood what he meant.

  Would Lorna and I have made the move to Spain without those words ringing in my head?

  Probably not.

  Chapter 2

  A Date with Santa

  So much had happened since my father passed away and our move to Spain to breed alpacas. We’d thought then that breeding alpacas would be so easy, but of course it wasn’t.

  Last summer Lorna and I had a number of discussions about what we should do regarding the female alpacas. All of our bad experiences had scared us into avoiding mating them, so that we wouldn’t have to deal with the heartbreak if any of the cria, the babies, didn’t make it. Veterinary knowledge of alpacas here in Spain (although we love Manuel and his compassion for animals) is still very limited, and of course getting supplies can be difficult.

  However, we also knew that it wasn’t fair on the girls. Alpacas are at their happiest when they are pregnant and when they have a cria to raise. That is their life. So we made the decision to let the girls mate with the boys, and have some new alpaca cria in 2014. We’d had a few tentative enquiries over the last few months about the availability of animals to buy, so we decided that if we went into it thinking that these babies were to be sold on, then it might make it easier for us when the time came.

  It was almost as if the boy alpacas had been listening to our discussion. The following day, we heard the dogs barking loudly.

  “What’s going on?” asked Lorna.

  “It’s Santa and Rafa! They’ve escaped into the girls’ paddock!”

  I rushed out and managed to put a stop to it before any mating had occurred.

  Later the same night, our dog Arthur had been going ballistic, trying to warn us that something was up. I ended up in the paddock in just a pair of boxer shorts, once again trying to separate the boys and the girls. This time it looked as though I was too late and the deed had been done.

  A few weeks later we decided that it was time for the next stage - the ‘spit off’. A spit off is a very primitive, and not wholly accurate, way of doing a pregnancy test. Alpaca females are induced ovulators, which means that they release an egg for fertilisation during the mating process. The noise the male makes, called orgling, encourages this to happen. In theory, it should only take one mating for a female to become pregnant, and if they refuse to sit down or they spit at the male, we call that a ‘spit off’ and we assume the girl is already pregnant. In our remote area of Spain, Manuel does not have a mobile ultrasound machine for us to do a pregnancy scan, which would usually be the next step. Using this method allows you to be a little more accurate in your planning.

  We haltered up Rafa and took him around to see the girls. Lily started spitting almost immediately; not the green, fluid type spit, but enough to tell us she didn’t want anything to do with Rafa. We ushered Lily into the adjacent stable and led Rafa towards Bermuda. She gave him a good look and a bit of a sniff. She had a look of contemplation in her eyes. Then she threw herself to the ground. She wanted him. Now!

  “Oh,” said Lorna to me, “that was a bit unexpected. What do we do now?”

  “Why don’t we let him have a go and see what happ
ens?”

  “OK, why not?” Lorna said.

  So we guided Rafa behind Bermuda, and the orgling began. For those of you who don’t know what an orgle is, I googled it. This is what came up on the Urban Dictionary website:

  An orgle is a guttural vocal sound produced by a male alpaca or llama during copulation. Orgling helps induce ovulation in the female. The male will typically orgle for the duration of the mating, up to twenty minutes. Can be both a noun and a verb.

  “I knew that the sire had finished with the female when he ceased to orgle.”

  “The orgling was the strangest sound I ever heard, like a horse trying to hum, scream and gargle all at once.”

  Now, if you have ever been (lucky enough to be?) present on an alpaca farm when mating occurs, I think you’ll have found yourself pretty surprised to see the farmer getting quite hands on with the male to ensure that the stud alpaca is in the right place and, to put it bluntly, that the alpaca penis is in the alpaca vagina. Now, I hold my hands up to this, I have always thought this a quite unnecessary and intrusive action. Surely, nature can organise it so they can manage on their own? After all, we’ve had accidental pregnancies here, so somebody knows what they’re doing.

  A few minutes passed by and Rafa was very fidgety and looked as though he just couldn’t get comfortable. He was making all the noises and his body was in the correct place, but it was easy to tell he was getting frustrated.

  “I think we need to check it is ‘happening’.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this.

  “OK, go on then; be my guest.”

  I knelt down next to the amorous couple and tried to peek in between the two of them to see what was going on. I couldn’t really see anything, Bermuda’s tail was in the way. “It’s no good, I’m going to have to move her tail.”

  I reached under them and pushed Bermuda’s tail to the side and I found the problem straight away. Rafa’s penis was waving wildly, but wasn’t ‘in the target area’. Those of you who have seen an alpaca penis, and I am sure it’s not a huge percentage of you, will agree with me that it’s not a very attractive weapon. Long and thin, rather like an uncooked sausage and with a scary ‘hook’ at the end. It moves in and out of its sheath while the deed is being done.