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Picked up at 6.45am today and finished "work" at 6.45pm. It had been a challenging day, requiring intense concentration and the hours flew by. I am learning a lot about myself in this "job". In the morning everything seemed hopeless, but by the end of the day I had pulled things round, if not to outright success, at least to a level that I would never have expected of myself.
Will this all make sense one day? Hopefully. Though I suspect I am part of an elaborate prank that everyone else is in on an that the footage we have created will never actually be televised.Look at this prick. We've told him he can do this and he believes us. How wrong he is!
What I will say is that I spent the day contemplating my childhood pet, Oscar the cat. When I was young we found him in the embers of our bonfire on November 6th. He was badly burned on his side and things looked bleak, but he was a wild cat from the farm behind our house and no one owned him, so we called out the vet, got him fixed up and he then belonged to us.
I'd been looking through my childhood photo albums over the weekend and was amazed how many photos of Oscar I had taken. This wasn't the shoot everything world of digital photos and mobile phones - this was the days of cameras with film in them, where every shot cost money to buy and develop and where you didn't know what you'd got til your film came back from from the chemist or whichever postal service you were using.
Have you ever seen a more 70s carpet than the one Oscar is standing on? Sadly it's no longer in my parents' house for some reason.
So I must have loved this cat, though looking at him again, at least in photos from the 1980s, he's a pretty raggedy fella. In our early relationship I'd pull his tail and bully him, but I came to love him and write songs about him and he'd sit on my knee whilst I watched TV (which is more than my bastard current cats do). As he got older he started weeing behind the sofa and remarkably I loved him enough to clear up the mess.
He died when I first left home to do an archaeological dig in 1985. I'd like to say it was of a broken heart, but it was organ failure of some kind. He book-ended my childhood. Finding him is one of my first clear memories and him going came as I ostensibly became a man and kissed a Dutch woman in a tent. Which is how you become a man. If you haven't done that yet, fellas, then you're still a boy. Also you should do it. It's fun.
Anyway, I was paying tribute to him today in my own way, even though he's been dead for forty years and wouldn't have understood the tribute even if he was alive.
The thing I remembered about him was that sometimes when he'd been licking himself all over (which is apparently OK for cats, but not for people) he'd forget his tongue was out and not put it back in again.
I am trying to write a joke for Oh Shit I'm Sixty based on this, but haven't got the wording right yet. You'll know it when you see it.
Anyway here's a bit of one of the songs I wrote about him
"I've got this new cat and his name is Oscar
He sits by the fire and then he dies.
He's only twenty two and a half, you know
Still got the best of this life to go, life to go, life to go, life to go.
And when I say Oscar, his tail curls up a bit
And when I say Oscar, his tail curls up a bit
And when I say Oscar, his tail curls up a bit
And I think he's nice. He eats all the mice.
My cat Oscar, he's got a furry tummy
My cat Oscar, he's nicer than my mummy, nicer than my mummy, nicer than my mummy
And I like him
Although he can't swim."
What an incredible muse he was. Oscar RIP.
Thanks to that poetry and music, no one will ever forget him.
