Gato y raton

After the useless football match, in which world-beaters England puked, scuffed and fluked their way to another victory, a few bottles of Rolling Rock and Sunday dinner, a spot of levelling. I got into my photography course, but may not qualify for funding since the government gave me £300 a year between 1994 and 1998 to do my MA and now they may not give me any more. Furthermore, the guy who runs the Scottish Literary Tour Trust, for whom I have been doing work now for almost a year, looks to have stiffed me out of a considerable (for me, anyways) sum of money. He's ignoring phone calls, texts and emails that run mostly like "Where is my money? Qu'est-ce que tu fabriques?". I have, as we all do, bills to pay. Then, stepping outside for a midnight cigarette, my old buddy the big ginger cat comes bounding out from under the hedge for some purring (him) and rubbing (me, and him). Then, he disappears for a bit and so do I, to watch the Flaming Lips do Sabbath's "Warpigs" on Jools Holland. Fucking genius.

I go outside 15 minutes later or so and no sign of the cat, but a rustling under the big hedge. There's a beam of light from the kitchen shining past my vegetable patch to the entrance to the hedge, but you can't see much. The cat seems very animated in that "I have caught something small and defenceless and am now going to torment it, then eat it" way. Sure enough, I get the big Maglite from its perch under the stairs and shine it into the hedge, where the cat is batting about a little mouse. The little fella is tiny, I mean TINY. Small enough to fit into a Swan matchbox if he were flattened. I miss my chance to grab him from under the cat's gaze (he's concentrating so fiercely that I risk a clawing myself, and this cat has bitten me before) and try to shoo the cat away. He's having none of it, so I crawl on hands and knees to try and catch the wee bugger before the cat finishes him off. Coaxing the cat out from under the hedge with that smoochy mouth thing isn't working, so I head into the house and get some of the leftover roast beef from the fridge. It takes a good two minutes for the cat to cotton on that I have meat in my hand, by which time I hope the mouse has made a run for it under the azaleas. The cat eats the beef obligingly, but then I start to worry that I've just triggered his bloodlust and he wants the warm, twitching kind of meat, the kind that needs pursuit and claws. I sit very still at the back door listening for tiny rustles, but hear none and head back into the house.

Perhaps a lesson to be learnt is that it's a harsh, ruthless life, this one, be you cat or man or woman. You should torment and then eat those who are smaller and weaker than you. Or, more realistically (and, when I think about it, completely contrarily), that you should stand up for yourself and not take shit from anyone. Which is what I will be trying to do tomorrow, when I put in a stern phone call to the guy at the Tour place. Would he have known that I tried to rescue a small mouse tonight? I become ever more convinced of the notion that Raymond Carver had it all so right in Where I'm Calling From, in that, it seems, life is no more than a series of tiny epiphanies and that it is only when you step back from it that life comes into focus and starts to bloom. Or that you should leave cats to the killing and get on with looking forward to turning 30 instead.