Guest Post, by Me Bhiksu: We are hanging in there, waiting for Halibut's Annual Solstice Dinner and Talent Show

When Halibut is blacker than usual, he crawls into the back of his cold cave and doesn't come out for weeks.

He has been there for a while now. My brother and I think a warm spot beside a pig is best.

We know a pig who is very friendly on a dark day. He has the right colour and smell.

Anyone who needs cheering up should meet one soon.

Yours truly Bhiksu

An extra hour to prowl

The great millstone of the year grinds round, and we once again enter the dark days when the sparrows witter on their leafless twigs. It's much easier to find them that way. That may be why, when everyone else is sinking into the gloom, I feel more tail-lashingly frisky, more glowing-coal alert, hungrier than ever for furred and feathered victims.

I am looking out of my den now at a sky of pale blue, glaring and tinged with a grimy horizon. Daylight  will soon become dusk and the hour to hunt. I will exhale a hiss of relief.

Rêves de chat

Éditions Flétans need not rely on my feeble efforts. Not when there is a stable of willing hacks to trot out a few verses celebrating the idylls of the season past. THEREFORE:

I take great pleasure in announcing the first installments in our international autumn line of fine po-ems.


My dreamy sunny afternoons
Are free alike of cares and fears
As little piping cries of birds
Fall softly on my furry ears.


L’après-midi
Est sans souci
Et les petits oiseaux
Chantent ‘Kikeriki’.

All cats are janus-faced

Frank and Louie, the two-faced cat, is famous all over the world today. And why? Simply because he does not look like other cats.

Foolish humans. Every cat does not look like every other cat. Indeed, every human does not look like every other human. Why then recoil when one notices an extra nose? Especially if it possible to smell with it, as I understand the fortunate F & L is able to do?

Over here, the mouse-scented breeze,
the gamey twang of tom down there;
And what if my noses are pink and grey?
The bird I sniff out won't care.

(That isn't a bad effort for someone hungover from a month of torpidity. I admit I was thinking of a fusion of Gooney & Bhiksu, which would achieve two differently shaded noses but a whole brain.)

Birthdays

At the end of this month, the fat and conceited cats B & G will celebrate their sixth birthday.

What is the customary gift for a sixth birthday? Lead? Saltpeter? Moth pellets?

I must go shopping.

So you proles didn't like it, then?

You would think that anyone would appreciate wise words in a temple of rats. Well, I've already learned to lower my standards. I suppose I just need to lower them a little more. Except that I am too busy at the moment. A fresh crop of crow and magpie babies demand my attention. The old ones scream at me, mobbing, the moment I appear.

Well, let them scream and swoop. The ugly little babies perch on the ledges of windows, looking in with their blank, black eyes. Halibut waits in a black heap. He knows how to open windows. Oh yes.

Like it?

My style designer, Signor Niccolo Piccolo il Tipo Astuto, suggested that I dispense with the sombre Halibutean backdrop and try for something more jolly.

The Halibut Relaxation Tapes

The masses have been asking, when do the mindfulness seminars begin?

The answer is, immediately. (Please enter your credit card details here, addressed to 'Halibut, Cave, Under the Sideboard'. Please send by ground, express delivery, insured.)

Now, sit very still, preferably in a sunny corner of your own cave or hut. If it is night where you are, find a moon. (Tonight, where I am, the moon is a slivery crescent above the waving branches and in and out of the running clouds.) It is also desirable to have a full belly, preferably with lots of fresh blood. All set? Good.

Now settle onto your front paws and bury your nose in your fur. Close your eyes. Feel the sunlight or moonlight on your back. Breathe in from the ends your claws, slowly down your spine, all along the vertebrae of your tail, one by one. Then breathe out in reverse: tail, back, neck, forearms, claws. Imagine there is an ant crawling from your south pole to your north pole and then back again. The ant crawls with unbearable slowness. Up and down. Down and up. Up and down.

Do this 17,000 times, and you will feel calm.

(If you would like to have my recorded voice speaking this to you, please include extra postage.)

Dreams of Thrushes, also Grey Squirrels with Ratty Tails

They were in a green square with branches of sweeping yellow. The wind tossed the tasty bits along with the leaves. Idiot dogs ran fatly, close to the ground. Round and round the black cars went. Inside was the spring, and my lunch.

Mindfulness seminar

Humans have a lot of trouble with what they call (in a fit of imprecision) mindfulness. By this, they mean that they can't stop worrying about what might happen or brooding on things that have happened instead of simply looking out of their cave and seeing the tasty flutterings go by.

Their brooding and their worrying (not to mention all the fluttering things they miss) make them very unhappy. They then fight against their unhappiness by all sorts of lesser and greater ineffectuals. For instance, they talk or eat or collect.

What they should do is to try to be more like us lower animals. When the sun is warm on our backs, we stretch out in it and never worry about filing our taxes. When we smell rodent, we hunt. When our arses itch, we lick them.

Since the publishing business is not making me any money, I have decided to run high-priced seminars in mindfulness, taught by myself and other experts. Such as Gooney, who, it is rumoured, has no sort of mind at all.

G says: "watch and learn, folks"

Magical Spring Recipes

I have been thinking of magical activities which might make the glaciers retreat from the deck and back garden. Not that I mind the sedimentary deposits of four months of snow, all crispy and edged with dirt. I just can't stand Bhiksu's shrill complaints as he stares down the back door, willing it to open.

Cooking is, of course, the best of magical activities. My recipe books make a pile that reaches to the ceiling of my cave. I haven't even opened all of them.

How the tips of my whiskers vibrated when I opened the index of a particularly fat one and saw the entry, HALIBUT. Think of it, recipes addressed to ME. The maker of this cookbook, though, thinks I must be particularly fond of fish, which as a landlocked prairie-dweller, would be a difficult kind of game for me to pursue too enthusiastically. Still, I think that Delicate has a large frying pan somewhere in her closet.

"A recipe for Halibut." Thank you, how kind!

Flooded cave

I was dreaming of voles. All was set for a satiated afternoon of sleep, when a particularly big one emptied a bucket over my arse.

You can imagine the state of indignation in which I woke. No voles are going to give me the spa treatment! Halibut never bathes.

The truth is, however, even worse, as it usually is.

My cave is dripping. I expect the stalag mites and tites to be forming soon. Gooney is simply not absorbent enough to mop it up as it comes in, even though he is doing his best to supplement fur with his busy little tongue. (Gooney has always liked strange waters.)

It's the ice dams. Damn you, sun! Why did I ever call you back from your solsticial sleep?

A present from Mr Feng Shui, probably someone I've dropped from my Christmas card list

My experience, early in December, with the purported St Nicholas the present bringer made me resolve to sleep through Christmas.

I did, but woke a few days later to find a curious book stuffed into a sock, just outside the entrance to my cave.

Gooney and Bhiksu do not read; they appear only to provide scale.

Since I had also received a voluminous cookbook with promising recipes that I wanted to test (having received a large shipment of imported rodent meat for the holidays), I threw Mr Shui's book onto the comfortable pile of rubble at the back of my cave.

While lying there half-conscious just this afternoon, I began idly turning the pages with my foot.

I am not sure what I have learned, except that Mr Shui is very bossy.

Here is the kind of thing he is apt to say:

If you want the support of your superiors and colleagues, always sit with the wall behind you. Even better, hang up a picture of the Himalayas behind your back.
Look for the three-legged frog in the supermarket. Display it for luck, but don't let it look at the door.
Do not plant a thorn bush outside your cave. Avoid cactus plants and their killing energies.
If you use a litter box {and some do!}, trace a wavy line across the sand to allow good luck to flow slowly to your posterior.


OK, I made up the last one. But this is very much the style adopted by FS. Does this suggest, as M Salaud le Marché Boursier was suggesting to me only the other day, 'un retour au mouvement littéraire et culturel de l'absurde'?

Even fewer signs of the Apocalypse

It seems that recent scattered showers have been due to avian sponging. It is well known to me that many of the feathery tribe (particularly Turdus migratorius and Bombycilla cedrorum) are notorious sots.

Their common device is to wait until the fruits of trees, for instance of the genus Sorba, are well fermented. Apples will also do. (Top alcholic content is achieved just around this time of winter, in fact.) Then the sozzlers descend in clouds and get on with berry-bibbing. Sometimes, if you're lucky, they will drop off the branches, infused with a delicate hint of wassail.

This week in dead animals

Here the the days are lengthening apace. The sun has returned, brought back by the sacrifice of the chosen ones, toothsome magpies. We are still picking the sinews from between our teeth, every discovery a delightful rancid surprise.

And yet the humans live in fear, as they usually do, gibbering about an Animal Apocalypse. They feel guilty about their poisonous habits, and suspect the Big Cat in the Sky is sending down a disapproving rain of fauna on their meagrely stocked heads. "Some had no eyes." Indeed.

We know what we would do with a thousand tasty birdies falling from the sky.