Cat Talk

I'm sitting at the dining room table, finishing off my breakfast. First one cat comes to beg for cheese, then the other one does.

Cats aren't supposed to like cheese but ours do. The finest "Farmhouse Mature Cheddar, crafted in Somerset", no less.

They come separately because they hate one another. If they meet there is protracted eyeballing as at the climax of a spaghetti western followed by hissing and spitting and yowling and I have to break it up with a water pistol. They're quick to learn some things. For instance they know the sound the water pistol makes when I'm pumping the trigger- and run for cover before ever they get squirted. What a pity then that they haven't also learned to knock off the ruckus that brings the water pistol into play.

We've had multiple cats before. There was a time when we had eight or nine in the house together (not this house, the one in Oldham) and they didn't always co-exist in perfect harmony but there was never this kind of bitter, undying antagonism.

Pickles is sitting beside me as I write. She's watching the door to the kitchen in case Marlowe comes through it. Eventually she goes upstairs. Marlowe comes in from the kitchen, pauses at the foot of the stairs and looks up in case Pickles is waiting in ambush. This is how they live their lives...

Gaia In One Of Her Moods

I don't think it's any coincidence that we get the most tremendous wind storms at the very time the trees are doing their best to lose their leaves. Everything in Nature works together. If it didn't it wouldn't work at all.

The wind howls, the rain pours, the leaves go streaming across the sky like... like the ships of an alien invasion.

Boy On Boy

A win at the rugby world cup would have made the English happy for an hour or two. As it is we'll have to make do with the amusement afforded by the up-coming general election.

They tried to make me play rugby when I was a kid. I hated it. It was a game for nasty rough boys- and while I was happy to play at killing vast numbers of people with my plastic rifle- shooting some- then getting to work with the "baynit and the butt"- I shied away from actual, physical boy on boy action.

My father had a business buddy who still laboured under his wartime title of "brigadier" (lots of men in that age carried on being colonels and captains and what not long after they'd stopped wearing uniform) and I thought brigadier was a glorious word and so in my genocidal play I took that title for myself. I also sometimes- in emulation of the actual brigadier- wore a moustache- a piece of brown cloth cut from my cowboy trousers because cowboys were so last season...

How did I attach it to my upper lip? With Sellotape, I suppose.

"The brigadier"- my version of him, that is- was once accused of treason- unjustly of course- and defended himself by running away, blasting at his pursuers (my mate Stephen) with a wind-up toy machine gun that made a most satisfying noise. The pursuers however (though blasted long and loud) refused to fall over- which was most unfair of him...

I eventually broke with Stephen. He got a new best friend and they froze me out. Unsurprising, really; both us wanted to be last man standing and there was no "give" in either of us.

How did this all start? Oh, yes, rugby. Nasty game. Leave it to the South Africans....