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.