Of Cats and Cucumbers

As you can see, I’ve gone all Old Testament and decided that Saturday is the Day of Rest.   I’m not sure what ancient book of gruesome tales I can call on to explain my anticipated absence next week,  when I will be Giving Thanks from somewhere in the South China Sea, free from the shackles of both air conditioning and  telecommunications.  I shall, of course, wither and die without either.  I was thinking earlier about how up-my-own-arse that sounds – Just off to a tropical island for the weekend, sweetie – but then decided that this is the upside to being so damn far away from family and friends and winter and fluffy-bobble hats and blackberry pies.  Oh, and Christmas which is celebrated in a timely fashion.  We are all heartily sick of Christmas already, having been subjected to it for about a month now.  Santa Schmanta.  (By the way, the Sainsbury Ad is nowhere NEAR as good as the John Lewis one, creepy old man aside.  [I rather like him, actually.])

It is Sunday afternoon, and I am alone in the house, with only the cats, the sick Baby, and Tom & Jerry for company.  Cartoons and hacking coughing aside, it is blissfully quiet – soothing balm after a morning dedicated to noise and technology. I awoke to the following conversation outside my bedroom door at 7am:

Boy: Let’s get Mummy’s phone and video the cats being crazy and put it in the internet.

Girl: Huh?

Boy: The INTERNET.  You know that the internet is, don’t you?

Girl: Huh?

Boy: It’s a big thing like a television and you put videos of cats in it and then everyone in the world can watch them and you get famous.

Which, sadly, about sums it up.  

We then had a pleasant half hour watching cats being scared out of the skins – almost literally in a few memorable cases – by the common cucumber.  Naturally this led to the creation of a vanguard to the fridge to forage for weapons of feline consternation, but the cats were having none of it.  The outcome is that I now have two inedible cucumbers, and the Boy has reassessed his opinion of the internet to a place where you put up FALSE VIDEOS. 

He has also reassessed his opinion of the cats, downgrading them to a level of disinterest below even that of the hamster.  The cats have responded by ignoring him entirely, which is a tactic I must start to employ.  In fact I think I could learn quite a bit from the cats – namely:  Sleep as much as possible, and only be nice to people when a base need demands it.  Their toilet habits remain questionable, however.

Which reminds me – enough dilly-dallying online, there’s a full cat-poo-box with my name on it.  Sigh.