He nothing common did or mean

30th January Thought for the Day :

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try....

Another thought...


Heigho! the lark and the owl!
One flies the morning, and one lulls the night:
Only the nightingale, poor fond soul,
Sings like the fool through darkness and light.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Archie's song, Charles I.


Maybe, taking the long view, PBS timed the Bay of Naples boat trip well enough...
All very well in the Regency, but honestly, a media atheist veggie as Poet Laureate to Queen Alexandrina ?

My Early Life... Afterthoughts

All cats must leave home. This is a small and cruel law of nature. While still with my mother, I learned many essential truths and, in theory at least, I learned to hunt too.

Ecologically, domestic cats live in an artificial environmental niche, supported, hideously, by body and soul destroying conglommerates. One of their latest ploys, now the World Health Organisation has frowned on baby milk, is peddling junk food to the two dollars a day market. I can't afford lawyers so no names or air time. Small, efficient, ruthless little tigres de salon, we could catch all our own food, the way we used to. Fed by global etc , there are far too many of us, our numbers unsustainable. This, supposedly, is what we should live on :

Mice. Rats. Birds. Fish.
& Carrion.

The last Carrion I saw was one of those burst badgers farmers keep squashing, blaming the poor creatures for TB, instead of their own lousy greedy abuse of dairy cattle.

The last Carrion but one was much more exciting... There she was, splayed out, full length, across the frozen fellside, as if she'd just stumbled, fallen flat on her face. Any minute now, she'd be up on her feet, bounding away and out of sight...
Three days later, what was left of her ?
Nothing but bare bones... Something had begun to chew at her ribs... Carrion, technically, I suppose, but if Carrion is spelled Venison, lead me to it.

Dead badgers rot until they dissolve or go off bang, like putrid animals in biological warfare, the romantic mediaeval version...
Legally or not, farmers seem to think badgers are fair game...Badgers don't cause TB. They catch it, but this isn't their fault. Run over, accidentally on purpose, dead badgers stink for weeks on end and they taste nasty too.
My source for this information is first hand and impeccable, because he really is a Carrion Crow.

Mice and rats ? Purrrlease...The silly creatures eat yummy tit-bits people put down for them, laced with warfarin and that new stuff too, Last Supper, before they die, quietly, under the floorboards or the sink.

Birds ? Verboten... My mother explained this to me. The entire R.S.P.B. would have my (cat) guts for garters...
Waste of time and energy, usually... Pied flycatchers, redstarts, long-tailed tits, ring ouzels and those useless little firecrests... Not worth the effort, honestly... One swallow doesn't make a summer ? Take it from me, ten swallows don't make a supper. Give me a fat little Flopsy Bunny any day, organic and free-range...
Except the gall-bladder... Never, ever eat this.
I have no conscious memory of this lesson, but one day, my beloved mother must have purred into my tiny ear a lesson on the consumption of free range bunny, mouse, vole, squirrel.
Gall bladder out, food for the gods. (and Cats)
Gall bladder in, unfit for feline comsumption, green, tainted, diabolical.

My mother was an excellent teacher. The abandoned waif who came to live under my authority never learned this essential skill. Teaching her has proved impossible. The idiotic creature once tried to eat a mouse, without first performing this essential gustatory operation. Since when, she has never dared eat anything bigger than a spider.
Proof that she is almost completely brainless. Even the foolish Tom Kitten could manage mice. (but not, of course, Samuel Whiskers)





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