MagnifiCat

My Early Life
Part II
This ( promises promises) really is all you ever need to know. I'll try to keep it snappy, focus on essentials. No sob-stuff, no trauma.

I lived in a sickeningly picturesque, roses round the door cottage, complete with skull-cracking beams and far too many spiders. Just off the main village street, and the views were exceptional. By village, I don't mean anywhere with a Waitrose and a shop selling ribbons. The house where I was born is in a real village, with two live pubs, a school, a church, a Post Office a war memorial, and road signs to places people cross continents to see...
Writing about places like my birthplace, property journalists always throw in their narky ' why not' about buying.. This is because the entire breed ( estate agents, property journalists , out of work media types) all live in London and hate people who've managed to live somewhere beautiful instead.

O.K. the garden wasn't quite up to Yellow Book standard. The man had better things to do. Campaigning against the arms trade, why would he go in for chemical warfare? He shared his cherries, damsons, plums,strawberries, Tay berries and raspberries with other local wildlife, including the local coati... Not rhubarb, nothing else seems to eat the stuff, not even slugs. When the latter overstepped the agreed mark, he did entice a few of them to delicious death, with dregs of ... the local brew. Local = in the village, none of that C*** P*** stuff in the adverts. Describing my birthplace, I left out the brewery. Oversight... The brewery is one good reason to track down where I live. As for the slugs, death was their own fault and would have been peaceful.

Back to My Early Life

The girl and her father came twice, first to choose me, as the most beautiful and the only girl. Four weeks later, they were back. That was the last time I saw my the house where I was born, or my mother, or my brothers.
No crocodile tears... Why should I care about the brothers ? The two who survived infancy wanted all my share of everything, milk, our mother, space in the basket... My heart goes out to anyone who does have a brother.
Perhaps yours will improve with time. Mine ? We'd come to a parting of the ways, won't meet again.

Two weeks old, blue-eyed and mewling, ( me, not the girl )I was chosen, my fate was sealed. A month later, and any vet will tell you this was far too soon, the girl, her sister and her father came to take me away. One last passionate nuzzle at my favourite nipple... My mother, since you daren't ask, tasted of sweetness. In my own way, of course I loved her, she was my mother, cats don't do complicated, not about our mothers... I loved her, she loved us.
But I couldn't have stayed with her, sooner or later, we'd have to part, ae fond lick and gone forever...

A cat and her kindle of kittens is a classic icon of maternity. One old cat and three young cats = every single bill x 4, the vet, the food, the residential care, and even those laughably inadequate bribes people offer to neighbours, sickly fudge, sour wine, broken biscuits, poncey chocolates and, for godsake, tea-towels.
The last item is, of course, completely unforgiveable. Give a woman who's been kind to you a tea-towel and she will never, ever speak to you again. And if you leave the price on this tea-towel, she will, definitely, speak to every single one of your Facebook friends. She will tweet at the top of her voice until the whole world knows that you gave her a tea-towel and called it a PRESENT.
Cats don't wash up, but please remember this warning.

Prattling on about tea-towels and what not to give, I was avoiding the unavoidable truth, the sad and terrible reason why my brothers and I had to leave our mother so soon.

She was dying.

MagnifiCat

MagnifiCat 24th Jan

Vanum est vobis ante lucem surgere, surgite postquam sederitis, qui mandicatis panem doloris...

Translation : It's half-past five, you stupid woman, come back to bed...

Actually, before we go any further, it must be time to tell you about My Early Life. It's conventional. All important people write their autobiography, especially if they know that destiny has called them.

This isn't my CV, but we'd better get it out of the way, and I promise to be brief.
No mis lit. Ever. Nobody ever called me It. And if any idiot tried to call me Ugly, I'd just laugh, and I am, of course, a cat...

Mis Lit is an absolutely terrible idea. Miserable childhood ? Forget it.
If that's too much to ask, stop remembering.
Remembering sad and horrible things is the no-brain equivalent of making yourself sick. It hurts your brain.
This is absolutely true. Read New Scientist... Read that weird Lord Peter Wimsey, the one about the body in the bath.. The mad bad doctor treats the human wreckage of WWI, including shell-shocked Lord P, tells him about the actual brain damage caused by such trauma..

Took another few decades to get the imaging right, but they'd worked out the theory..
Sad and horrible experiences leave scars on your brain. Remembering is like picking a scab.
Clothed from head to foot in silky magnificent fur, remembering too much isn't the kind of thing I'd do. An old memory drifts past, like a bad smell, something dead, somewhere.. Not nice, better forgotten, please don't remind me.

Misery is a nice little earner for some, of course.
Open Yell (Not the last stop before Unst, just the phone book)
Your local will do...

If it helps, read the ads in a James Nesbit voiceover... Still with me ?
My Yell's open, and I'm counting. One hundred counsellors. Twenty-eight psychotherapists. Thirty-three hypnotherapists, couple of dozen mentors, Alexander, Pilates, five kinds of yoga, and for the really truly desperate, there's botox...

This,, meaning the catchment area of my YELL, is in a place where lifting thine eyes unto the hills is unavoidable. You look up, and there they are, purple-headed mountains, rivers running by, the boys in blue overhead...
How can anyone live here and need hypnotherapy ?
(Botox does in fact have its uses, especially for females of a certain age, but not where you might think)

Where was I ?

Mentors, life-coaches, every kind of shrink... None of these sad and wickedly expensive people can possibly make you happy.
It's Time for My Early Life, , mine, not Winston Churchill's, after which I will never, ever talk about my mother again.

Promise. (and please don't tell me about yours. Mine was lovely. That's all ye need to know, or ever know. I bet your mother was vile. Bound to be, if you want to tell the world about her. Children ( all species) shouldn't need to think about their mothers. Cliche but true. The children (all species) didn't ask to be born. And nobody ever fell pregnant.