The Killer Cat Strikes Back

5: A droplet of advice

SO MRS Watch-My-Fingers-Weave-Enchantment comes home that afternoon with three manky lumps of dried mud.

(I kid you not. Dried lumps of mud. If they’d been green, you would have thought of them as giant bogeys.)

‘I didn’t have a canvas,’ she explained. (Frosty look at me – I just ignored it.) ‘So I moved on to pottery.’

Pottery?

Potty, more like, if you want the opinion of that talented pussycat who painted ‘A Riot of Beauty’.

I put my paw out to stroke one of the lumps.

Accident! It fell to pieces before it even hit the ground.

‘Tuffy!’ she said. ‘How could you! First you tread paint all over my lovely clean canvas, and now you’ve broken one of my pretty new pots.’

Pretty new pots? Puh-lease. They are not pretty. The mud comes from a primeval swamp. And if you dropped so much as a pin into something that lumpy, you’d never find it again.

She put the other two pots safely up on the shelf. ‘There!’ she said. ‘Not even Tuffy can get up here and knock them off.’

A tiny droplet of advice: don’t ever challenge a cat. It may have been a bit of an effort. (I don’t keep as trim as I should.) But finally – finally – I managed to rise to the occasion and get up on that shelf.

Those pots up there were even worse than the one I’d knocked on to the floor. (By accident.) Talk about ugly! They had lumps hanging off here, and extra lumps sagging off there. One of them even had a kind of wart on its bottom, so every time I gave it a tiny little push, it wobbled horribly.

Uh-oh!

I’d like to tell you that it shattered into a thousand pieces. (That would sound good.) But it was such a lump of old rubbish it only fell into two halves.

Never mind. Be fair to me. At least the thing was gone.

Two down.

And one to go.