Swede Teas

I’ve just spent hours Christmas shopping. HOURS. My feet are sore, I’m more drained than I’ve ever been in my entire life, and I’ve only got a small bagful of stuff. So, obviously, I’ve got to go again. And again. I kind of half-wish that the government had banned Christmas this year, to save money. A bit the way Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas back after the Civil War. Wouldn’t that have been great? Then no one would have felt they had to buy loads of stuff any more, or send any boring old cards, and there’d have been all the joy of secretly, illegally buying presents, and secretly celebrating, in a small way. Sort of like prohibition, with illicit Christmas parties going on in the cellars of innocent-looking shops.
At about 3 I met up with Glenn for tea, because he wanted top see me, and I do not want to end up sleeping with him, and tea is a meal it is pretty well impossible to:
a) get drunk at
b) extend late into the evening.
It isn’t romantic, either. I wanted a cream tea, but the nearest we got was scones and jam and a pot of tea, along with a smuggled tub of clotted cream in my handbag. (I’m going to leave the remains under my bed for Mirabelle to find, in a bid to enrich her environment, as Topiary has suggested . (The best way to enrich her environment and stop her being bored, of course, would be to buy a mouse from a pet shop and release it into the flat. But that would be cruel to the mouse, so I can’t do it.)
Glenn was wearing a truly gross black T shirt reading: ‘For my next trick I need a condom and a willing volunteer’. I asked him where the lovely cat-fur one was, and he said he’d borrowed it from a friend of Jasmine’s, just to please me.
Also, as we were eating he told me that most jam is about 60 per cent swede. Even strawberry jam. It’s used as a filler, as soft fruit is so costly. He knows this cos a farmer near him in Cornwall grows Swedes for jam. Isn’t this depressing? Next he’ll tell me clotted cream is made of pig fat or something.

What is Freedom?

Went out with Glenn last night. I think I said yes because when he asked me he was wearing a T shirt that said ‘No Outfit is Complete Without a Little Cat Fur’ – and I was touched. We just went to a pub in Hammersmith, and had sinister pub pies. (The kind where you honestly couldn’t say what the meat is. I thought mine was probably chicken with gravy browning, but Glenn, who knows a lot about cheap food, said it was more likely New Forest Pony, bought cheap in the autumn round-up, or else mechanically recovered meat slime, pressed into believable shapes.) It’s quite slimming going out with him.
He was going on about the Five Freedoms – a thing to do with chickens, where a well-looked after battery chicken is able to run, dustbath etc. Anyway, then he got on to what he thought the Five Freedoms for humans were, well, what they were for him, specifically.
1)The Freedom to live in a warm dry place with no rats or mould.
2)The freedom to eat food that doesn’t make you sick (or creep you out)
3) The F to be in a place where you possibly COULD have a relationship if you wanted
4)The freedom not to be hassled by The Man (ie not to be bothered by letters from the bank or credit card companies complaining about debts). (This would include freedom from landlord types popping in unexpectedly to see if you are breaking your tenancy agreement re cats.)
5)The Freedom to dream about the future and not be stressed out by global warming and governments doing nothing about it.
Every time Glenn talks I realise how different he is from me, in a kind of puzzling, disturbing way, that almost entirely cancels out how great-looking he is.
I said that one of my Freedoms would definitely be the freedom to wash in a lovely bath whenever I wanted, and put on perfume and crisply ironed laundry and a selection of (possibly vintage, to be ecologically sound) clothes and shoes. Oh, and have access to a hairdryer. He replied oddly to this. He said: ‘Yeah, that’s why we put in the bath-house.’
‘Where?’
‘At the farm.’
‘What farm?’
‘The farm where I live. In Cornwall.’
‘Aren’t there bathrooms in the chalets?’
He looked puzzled, and then started laughing. Strange man.

Mirabelle Goes Hunting

Yesterday Mirabelle slipped through my legs as I was coming in from work, and shot down the stairs and into the street. She’s so fed up with being shut in the flat all the time. I suppose it’s not much of a life for a cat, but what am I to do, when she isn’t even supposed to be there?
It took ages to find her, shouting along the street and hoping that my landlord didn’t suddenly decide to pop up and ask me what I was doing. And eventually, when it was really dark, and I was frozen stiff, I found her in one of the gardens in the next street. She had a bird in her mouth. A blue tit. I put my fingers in her mouth and to get her to open it, and the bird got free and just flew straight out into the sky. I hope it survives. But I suppose it couldn’t have been that badly injured if it could fly.
I was so glad she hadn’t got hit by a car or something. Apart from anything else, I hate going to the vet. It is a bit weird the way vets behave, don’t you think? Especially the way they give the pet your surname, and call out the whole rigmarole when the vet is ready; ‘Stripy Jenkins’, ‘Flufflepuff Mackintosh’ etc. Makes me wish I’d called Mirabelle ‘The Marchioness of Mirabelle’ just to make it all sound stupider. (It is strange, really, when you think of how even old, very dignified human beings are only called by their Christian names in hospital wards.)