Tuesday 15 March 2022

of times

 




It was the best of times, it was the worst of times mused Pocket from the comfort of his arm chair.
Oh you've been reading Charles Dickens I said. He rolled his eyes.
  "I don't know what you're talking about," he said, examining a feather on the chair and wondering if it came from the cushion or was one of his conquests.



"I'm writing a new book called A Tale of two Cats."
Sounds a bit like Dickens's A Tale of two Cities I said. 
He scowled. 
"It'll be a best seller like my last book Bleak Mouse."
Anyway, I said what are the worst of times?
"You, sitting in front of the News at 6 on the television and weeping.
And the best of times? I ask.
"When you leave me to sleep instead of asking me stupid questions. You're just like that person from Porlock visiting and interrupting my flow of rhetoric and hyperbole."


"This is one of the worst of times," Rocket told me in confidence. "Pocket taking over the bed and threatening to scratch my other eye out if I complained." 
I told Pocket that he showed no sign of experiencing guilt or remorse or struggle to better himself. He replied in no uncertain terms that cats don't obey commandments and have no ideals. 
"Talking as a top predator, a highly developed sense of empathy would be most dysfunctional to us cats. How do you think we could catch anything if we felt sorry for it? Now leave me alone I'm writing my magnum opus. 
I asked him what he was calling it and he told me No Time to Die. 
He ignored me when I suggested that was the title of the new James Bond film.
 "Do you say that to your prey as you are about to pounce on them?" I asked.



And this was not one of the best of times for this poor fox who got caught up in the electric fence surrounding the chickens he had only wanted to swop recipes with.



This dear hedgehog, also at the wildlife hospital, on the other hand loves being stroked and makes his prickles go all soft so that you don't hurt your hand whilst doing it.



To the dark wood where dwell the lost and the dead announced Scout. 
I suggested to Scout that she may like to write a book - perhaps about her adventures chasing wolves in the snow. She told me she wasn't sure if she'd ever done that in spite of being a wolfhound. 
You could make it up I say - after all you are a wolfhound - I wouldn't be allowed to write it because I am not a wolfhound and these days in the book world you're not supposed to write as someone if you are not them. I reflected on stories about fairies. Could you write it if you weren't a fairy now a days? What about snails? Or guinea pigs?
 "I thought that writers used their imaginations," she said.  "Surely you can imagine being a guinea pig?"
"You could call it Scout of the Antarctic ." I carried on.

She told me she'd rather do a paper round.
                      

And talking of papers here is Rocket exhausted after a morning spent rounding up the papers.




Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
                                          What place is this?
                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.
                                          Let me work.