Locked out syndrome

February 7th - March 16th.

Silence...
No, I most certainly did not get bored and give up.
I was locked out, my identity and my entire personal history challenged and rejected, citizenship and my very right to exist questioned and found wanting.

I was even asked who I was ???
A half sibling ? So what ? Half siblings claim at least one shared parent.
Was I some other impostor and/or pretender or even bone fide bastard ?

The Church used to mind its own business about matters which
were not its business. (including who goes to bed with whom)
As for the State... It should keep better records, less susceptible to corruption

And the little matter of locking me out ?

Happens all the time, if you happen to be a cat...
Window sills look unfinished without a cat, hunched and meditating on the crime committed against him or her, by whoever is keeping that window firmly shut.

Throughout most of the recent lock out, I was trying to get a straight answer to a straight question

Quis custodet ipsos custodes ?
Answer came there none, many times. even when the Truth Game level moved several notches higher. ( when the opponent is supposed to tell the Truth, no matter what)
They didn't. Instead, they simply upgraded the Untruth.

So I tried again, putting a different and probably even more annoying question...

What is Truth ?
Jesting (allegedly) Pilate didn't get an answer.

Neither did I.

In the bleak midwinter, at last

' Love me, love my dog'.

Bernard of Clairvaux, allegedly. Feast Day : August 20th
I loathe August. In the Northern hemisphere, August is and has always been a completely pointless month. It rains, all day, every day and/or it's infernally hot, made worse by clouds of evil unseen creatures, possibly midges.
I'm not absolutely sure. They might be the Furies...
The other nasties are called clegs and their bite can mean death. Avoid.

And Bernard ?
Not many people did love him, including everybody called Peter Abelard and someone called Arnold. I wouldn't know about the dog, let alone what he was called.
Dogs, including of course, St Bernards, have an extraordinarily powerful sense of smell. Unkind critics of St Bernard have suggested that the St reeked of vomit. (this isn't why he was made a St. The 'odour of sanctity' wasn't vomit . Something else, allegedly. Ketosis ? Sickly sweet, like acid drops, but definitely not sicky.)

Luckily, it isn't August, it's February 7th, freezing nicely,blue skies, bright sun, and I'm studying ornithology... Through a glass, darkly, because the staff haven't cleaned the windows.
No idea why they're so worried. The calories in a firecrest or a wren aren't worth the effort.

The snow is deep, crisp, but no longer even because so many happy people and even happier dogs are enjoying it. Almost every kind of dog. No St Bernard's so far, with or without the brandy. Administering brandy to casualties in the snow is frowned on by Health and Safety and Mountain Rescue.

Why not ask the casualty ? If conscious, surely they should have a say in this ? People who have accidents on snowy mountains are obviously far too intelligent to care about Elf & Safety.
As for the argument that they might have a fracture and might
need an anaesthetic, consider the time line...
When did you last wait in A & E ?

NB. This is a true story and could happen to anyone, on any nearby High Street.

First, slip/trip up on snowy mountain.... One second ?
Land heavily, frequently onto rocks... Instantaneous ?
If conscious, register severe pain.... Ditto...
If unconscious, no brandy or other liquid would be administered, even by an eager and willing St Bernard
Summon Mountain Rescue
Depending on precisely where you slipped, somebody might need to re-climb whichever mountain, just to get a signal. Which is why only barking mad people or dogs climb snowy hills on their own.
Wait for Mountain Rescue.
And wait
And wait...
Mountain Rescue Land Rovers do their best, but they can't climb hills...
This is why Rescue helicopters whirr about mountains on fine sunny days,
exercising...
To cut a longish and possibly boring story short, rescuing broken people from snowy mountains takes ages, even, in this case, till 4 in the morning....
On the whole, I might just shut my eyes and pray for a St Bernard.
(dog, not saint)

MagnifiCat

My Early Life

Sorry... My fault, as usual, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa....

My early life seems to have gone awol.
Thinking this over, it's clearly some kind of avoidant behaviour.
I don't want to say any more at all. Separation from my mother came so pitifully early.
Old pain ? Not exactly. Somebody said, a long time ago, you can't step into the same river twice...
Which is a very silly and almost meaningless statement. Think about it...
Same river as what ? Last year ? Three seconds ago ? If you can't step into it twice, neither can anyone else and it never is the same river.
So he was wrong. Philosophers often are. They have fancy names,live in Cloud Cuckoo Land,write in Ancient Greek/gobbledegook... People think their idiotic pronouncements must be true, because a philosopher said it.

More things in heaven and earth, I'd say, and, since this is my life, nobody else's, I'll decide how many things are necessary...
Leaving my mother, never seeing her again... Of course it changed my life, and no, I can't move on. CBT therapy, the latest happy pills, pulling myself together and whatever the global shrink industry comes up with next. All are different ways of telling lies, making therapists rich and famous.

The truth is infinitely cheaper and deeply unpopular, because it won't make anyone rich or cure my sadness.
Fact :
My mother's health was failing, skin and bone, weight absolutely falling off her, despite all the Whiskas, sardines, pilchards, line-caught dolphin-adoring tuna and free-range chicken she could eat.
She had cancer. Inoperable... The man asked, the vet said it would be cruel...
No chemo...No losing her beautiful fur. No 'lines' going anywhere, in or out.
No agonising about opium eating. Dying of cancer, morphine's for pain relief.
She died, the day after we were taken away.

Baby weight ? Listen to me, you fat slobby bone-idle whinging human mothers... THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS BABY WEIGHT.
None of this obscene, gloopy, wobbling adipose tissue is attached to the baby.
(Almost none, but if the human)baby has the sheer bad luck to belong to a woman wailing about her 'baby weight', watch this space)

How to prevent Baby Weight
Dead easy, no need for a book...
Have kittens (or a baby, I suppose, if you must, though they really are ugly and useless little things)
Feed kittens.(or baby, see above)
Feed kittens/baby again.And again.
Do this round the clock, day after day, week after week, until the kittens/baby don't want any more.
Baby weight ? Real mothers, cats or any other kind, end up bones (and fur) held together by skin.
This BABY WEIGHT nonsense really has to stop...
Shut up, stop telling lies, especially to yourself.
Women who've had a baby and are still FAT are just FAT because they have eaten too much.Blaming a helpless baby for your (disgusting, blubbery etc) WEIGHT is a LIE and nothing to do with the baby. Feed baby. Problem solved/never there in the first place.
On a mother cat, any remaining post-kitten FAT goes into kittens. Takes them from blind and mewling to enchanting and irresistible in six weeks flat.
House trained, articulate, independently mobile...
Which is more than you can say for the miserable puking, stinking and squawling human version at six weeks, six months, six years...
Things improve, briefly, then they turn into teenagers.
English isn't my first language. I don't know any printable words to describe 16 year old homo sapiens, either sex. Or 13, 14, or any age between ten and three and twenty..
Clue, just for interest.. Mother cats smack. Social workers can't stop us.

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)





)

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

My Early Life...

Once upon a time there were three little kittens, and their...
Sorry... Wrong file, someone else's story , borderline plagiarism, and at first, there were four of us.

I was the youngest and the only female.
You see the immediate benefits of our inheritance law. As the only girl, it was winner takes all...
In any rational and intelligent community, inheritance and all other rights are claimed through the maternal line.
Wise and ancient faiths know this. For instance, the Lord God blessed Abr (ah)am and his seed for ever. Allegedly, all those people with wonderful names begat each other, Judas and Phares and Salmon and Booz and Aminadab and Jechonias...

Sorry, sorry, and PLEASE don't read this as anti - anyone...
Blame, instead, my humble and all-American spellchecker, which can't be doing with bog-standard UK English, never mind names like Zorobabel...
The point is, and never mind all that endless begatting, every single one of the Chosen People MUST have a Jewish mother.

' Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called the Christ'

Begatting DOESN'T COUNT, especially without a DNA test, not available in the first century CE. Ask any friendly rabbi.
( Depending on which expert you approach S/he might explain that times have changed. Excluding the heirs of males from their rightful inheritance isn't fair. Agreed, of course, I was simply reporting the traditional position. )

I know almost nothing about my father.Who cares ? Hath the rain a father ? I am, beyond all doubt, my mother's daughter and heir. Other and deeply flawed systems would put me at the very bottom, last-born of all her kittens and female.
Instead, for my mother, there was rejoicing, relief, certainty.
After many litters, far far too many, she'd fulfilled her destiny at last, done her duty. ( My beauty was accidental. It just happened. Ever heard of a Cat signing up for cosmetic surgey ? Of course not. )

There are no ordinary cats, every one of our race created and born in beauty, but random grace shaped me particularly well. Two of my brothers were twins, black and white, not very black, rather too much white, always the last kittens of a litter to go. Half-brothers, actually, the same litter, different fathers... It happens...Don't be judgmental.

My real brother died. Silver tabby, marked like a perfect mackerel sky, he'd have no problem finding a home. Instead, he was buried in the garden under a rowan tree, with two goldfish, one guinea-pig and half a stoat. The (homo sapiens) children cried. They'd come to visit their father. Instead, they discovered death. I never loved my tabby brother and no, of course I don't miss him. Death came when we were far too young for love or hate. Ten days old, all kittens care about is milk. Finding the best nipple... He always lay next to me.
The day this brother died, I heard my first tears, the children crying, their father gentle, hiding his own quiet tears. The children lived somewhere else, with their mother I suppose, just like kittens. Nobody lived with their father, rather like mine, I suppose, whoever he was.

This is completely ridiculous... Mawkish, almost cringe-making... I promised, faithfully, cross my heart and hope to die, NO MIS LIT. As the Lady said, let other pens dwell on grief and misery.
A kitten died. Ten minutes later, this man and his grief stricken children were watching Shrek and stuffing themselves with deep-fill pizza. Straight out of the cartwheel box, no plates, no knives, no forks, and the kids could stay up till morning. Next day, and this is where the real memories begin, the girl and her father knocked at the door. My eyes were opened. I saw grief, but why ?