Skip to main content

Things I say to the Cat I'm Sitting




  You're always so quiet crunching your dried food and you never gnaw it with your side teeth.
  Actually, is it dried food?
  Oh, it is. 
  Maybe I could have done that with a between-fingers test and not with my teeth. 
  Mad Max eats cat food.

  Isn't that sound of chains we can hear like Marley's ghost coming up from the cellar in Scrooge's house? 

 You can't go outside now, sorry, it's dark.  And I saw the dog fox. It was enormous! Looks like it's had extra midsectiony bits grafted onto it.

 'Oscar ran to the door!' Sorry, I used to shout that when the doorbell rang at Lady Cave's when I was housesitting, and her sheltie had made his usual dash for it to bite whoever it was. 
  You don't tend to do that, no. The most I've noticed from you when the doorbell rings is a slight turn of your head. 
  Talking of which: when I put the TV on, your head was right near the edge of the blind you were hiding behind; interesting that you reversed right back all the way along the window sill and come out bum first to watch Ibiza Weekender.

  What are you watching now?  I was only getting another glass of stout. Look at these people. They're the kind of gay who adopt because they know they're too old for Disneyland themselves. 
  
  Have you eaten your breakfast?  Yes, I know I can get up from here and go and see for myself, but the last time I did that it was only semi-dark, so I didn't bother switching the light on and fell over the garden timber stacked ready for the next day. 
  Yes, you did indeed find that hilarious.
  But have you eaten your breakfast?

 Here's the nice gardener man come to see you. Yes, he's going outside. He has to because that's where the garden is. And it's daylight. 
  If he works until it gets dark, I promise to reassess the going outside boundaries I've set for you.   
  I know foxes aren't strictly nocturnal. There was the one at South Villas who used to sit on the picnic table underneath the music room when I was doing my singing practise. 
  But that fox was mangey, infirm and scared of next door's Burmese.
  He would probably have even been scared of the mice when the Bulgarians in the basement caused the infestation. 
  Who puts chocolate in traps in the food cupboard and then leaves for Bulgaria for all of Christmas and New Year? 
  I had two mice in my bedsit during King Kong
  To be strictly fair, it was the remake so much longer than the original, which would affect the ratio of sightings to timescale. 
  But you're still not allowed outside when the fake-middle-section fox is in the offing. 


  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

     I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media:   We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden.  He's between tour dates of  The Bodyguard,  and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements.  The latter, he says, being all about making his product better.   Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February.  I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters.  That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world.  That's why you've been noticing the combat photos.  I've been going for tr

Some Favourite Books - But Please don't Lesbify Dame Agatha's Denouements

  I'm too tired to read anything new so have been round the libraries taking out my default-setting books to read over Christmas. These include:    The Pursuit of Love , Nancy Mitford.   The blood-stained entrenching tool displayed above the fireplace, child-hunting over Shenley Common, Jassy traumatising the local children telling them the facts of life.  The scene at the Gare du Nord where Linda sits on her luggage to cry and meets Fabrice always takes me back to the first reading of the novel, sitting wrapped in my Welsh Tweed shawl, in a tiny bedroom on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise in Kennington.   The Pursuit of Love is romantic, hilarious and bleakly eccentric.    Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady , Florence King. When I entertained troops on the American base in Kandahar, four South Carolina army captains made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Madame Galina, they said, in all her unreasonable, high-blooded, simpering flounce reminded them of the girls

Where Babies Come From...

Haberdashery Girls... An excerpt from my forthcoming book of interviews:   Where Babies Come From. I asked people, ‘How were you told the facts of life?’ And, ‘What information were you given?’ Here is Belinda, who used to be an escort.  She is now in her eighties. My sister read about Dutch caps.  We looked at Old Masters paintings and wondered how having those funny big white hats on their heads would stop women getting pregnant. In British Guiana, we had native servants who would do the deed al fresco au natural.  From the age of five, I was playing 'sex' with my dolls.  They’d have their dolls’ tea party, a recitation lesson, then I’d have them mount each other. When we came back to England, I had a nanny.   Katrin was fresh from the convent. She was all mummy could get for me.  I expect it was a time of general strikes.  Mummy would send Katrin for breaks back to the convent meanwhile sending me for remedial elocution.  This would happen when I’d said one too many ‘tinks’,