Life is filled with strange paradoxes and catch-22 situations. You can’t get a job without a home, nor a home without a job. You can’t enlist the services of a writing mentor until your writing is good enough to render the help moot. You get the drift. And thus we come to strange scenario number 412. Winter, and the cat lovers bird feeding table.
Father dear has a cat. To be more accurate he has 3, but one is enough to make the story come to life. The cat, one Lord Chuffington, embarks upon several primary functions each day. He feasts, he pounces upon toes, he snuggles in darkly clothed corners, he shows his reproductive organs to those in eye-shot, and he roundly kills anything small enough to fly, or scamper near his finely honed teeth. Think of close hand combat with Steven Seagal and you are imaging the flurry of activity which Lord Chuffington can concoct at a moments notice.
Father dear also has a bird feeding table. And it would be an unintelligent reader that didn’t already fathom where this story is going. Bird feeding tables are tall wooden structures which culminate in a platform, a basket containing nuts and seeds, and for some preposterous reason, a roof. It is the welcome resting place of many small birds, and our old favourite, the one we love to hate, the grey squirrel. Many is the critter around the world who seeks respite and nutritional satiation from these towers. In winter, many middle aged folk take heart at the plight of the poor outdoor creatures and so place nuts and seeds out for them at the aforementioned tables. And as the winter months have drawn in, father has been out buying critter food to help them through their hardships. At this particular birdfeeder however there should be a sign in critter-ese which states, ‘Lord Chuffington is watching you.’ For as sure as nuts are nuts, Lord Chuffington is eyeing up the weary travellers with little more than his appetite in mind.
And so to father, the creator and giver of nuts. I made mention that it would take a dullard not to see where this path takes us, but this mortal God remains clueless as to the criminal nature of his charity. He fills the tray, watches briefly from a distance, coo’s over his act and then saunters off to work. Lord Chuffington wakes around ten, goes out to his new feeding post, and the horror begins. In the evenings father returns home to find Lord Chuffington is off his food, despite his ever widening underbelly. He has not realised that the cat is stuffed with creatures from the garden, and has no room for something tastily titled ‘sis Tonnikalaa.’
My dilemma is thus: do I allow the killing to continue or should I tape the frenzy as a Clockwork Orange style example of the ultraviolent events that unfold on a daily basis? How exactly does one get it across to the homey cat lover that you can’t have your bird and feed it?
Please to discuss useful and poor elements of this writing and its style.
