It’s not every day you get your cat’s breakfast in bed.
You get the remains of a cat’s breakfast sometimes splattered all over the hall – in the form of dismembered moles, mice, marmosets and, in one memorable case, some years ago, even a terminated macaw. You get it in the form of sicked-up cat food, mostly inside your slippers. You can get bits of it in your hair, in your first (hello, what’s that?!) cup of tea, on ‘wish-you-were-here-haha-no- we-don’t’ postcards, or on angry letters to the lonely hearts’ editor of the ever faithful morning paper.
There’s many a place a cat’s breakfast can end up, including, I dare say, inside the cat itself.
What you don’t see that often is that the cat’s intended breakfast hops on your bed, sits down at the foot end of same and then, in a rather offended tone, asks you what the Hell you’re staring at.
“Er, at you, actually.” I admitted.
“So, what’s your problem?”
“Well…”
Where to start? It was small. It had a beard. Its dress & colour sense were a bloody ‘Give me a woodpecker in the eye any time of day‘ disgrace. I could see why the cat might have attacked it on general principle but why it would have wanted to drag the eyesore home was quite beyond me.
“Where’s your whatchamacallit?” I asked; “The wheelie thingie…?”
“I threw it at that cat of yours!”
“Ah.”
“It was stalking my betrothed.”
“Oh?”
“She could jump in the pond just in time.”
“She didn’t sink?”
The little pest threw me a look that said it had rather had something else to hurl at me.
“Why would my beloved sink, you fool?”
“Well…; she wasn’t made of stone then?”
“A stone stork?! Why would I have a stone stork as a girlfriend, you idiot?
“Because… Well, I thought… Oh, never mind.”
“Racist!”
“Now what?!”
“Why can’t I have a normal, flying, flesh-and-blood stork as a girlfriend? I’m not good enough, huh? Too small? Too working class perhaps? You don’t like beards, maybe?”
Oh, bugger and blast. Here it was… what?!... 6.24 in the bloody morning and I was getting an earful from a frigging…
“Is there any reason why a hard-working, law-abiding, church-attending person like me couldn’t have himself a stork for a girlfriend?”
Right, I really had enough now. I was even vaguely hoping the cat would return to finish its botched breakfast job.
“No reason whatsoever. For all I care you have Marlene Dietrich’s dancing bones as your girlfriend, or the head-banging, tear-away daughter of Pinocchio, president Pinochet’s stuffed poodle…”
“Racist! Racist! Racist”
“Right!”
“Admit it: you hate our kind.”
“I wouldn’t put you in my garden, if that’s what you mean.”
“Aha!”
“Not that I have a garden.”
“Racist! Racist! Racist!”
“I wouldn’t mind a bit of fried stork though, to be honest.”
“Aaaarrgh…!!!”
And off it ran, through the huff side of the cat flap. Minutes later the cat walked in through the hug side of same contraption.
Prrrt, went the cat.
“Yeah, right.”
Prrt.
“Next time you catch one of those…” I said.
Prrt.
“Just kill it – and the stork it rode in on.”
Prrt.
“Now, piss off and go kill something else – quietly!”
“Yes, boss.”
Then the cat went off again. Divine, hark-the-angels-have-shut-up quiet ruled.
Hmm…! Time to sleep – perchance to dream of the girlfriend. Anything but storks really.
Or any more bloody garden gnomes, of course.
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