The Major’s cats are at it again…

The other morning I opened one eye, as is my wont, to survey the geography and assess the chances of an ambush. I was right to do so, for there were my wife’s two cats staring back at me with a look of malevolence in their pitiless orbs.
As I fought to open my other eye, the wretched creatures licked me in and around my startled mouth. Steady on! I mean to say these are the same filthy criminals that wash their fundaments via the tongue.
I shot from my bed of pain, which cannot be good for a chap of my years, and stood pop-eyed at the sight of my still slumbering wife, who had not been disturbed by her cats, while I had been forced to leap for my hygiene in a state of disgust. My morning so far had demonstrated the hard and fast rule that the more you dislike something, the more that something wants to lie on your pigeon chest and upset you.
I picked up my cloth cap from the nearby bureau and flung it at the damn cats. It sailed unerringly to where they lay, or where they were a second earlier, for they had moved and quite quickly too. You can’t trust cats; the scythe-like hat struck my wife Kitty between her heavy brows.
At my school, I was known as a master whimperer. I would whimper over anything. I was, I admit, afraid of my own shadow and of being caned, the second far more than the first. I was finally caned once, on principle. The headmaster saw me sitting beneath a tree and said the sight of me so offended him that he felt he had no other option but to cane me for the greater good of the school.
I whimpered as Nero must have at his end. I could whimper for Canada, if there was an Olympic class for whimperers. When I arrived at the designated time for my beating I was shrewdly wearing 12 sets of underwear in an effort to ameliorate the forthcoming pain. The Head looked me up and down and asked if I had had a personal accident as my trousers appeared full. I had to strip down to one pair in front of him while begging that he had the wrong chap as I didn’t even like trees. It came anyway and I took six strokes of that bloody weapon. I then walked out of his office carrying 11 pairs of Stanfields, to my great embarrassment.
I discovered one thing that day. It did not hurt as much as I thought it would. I stopped whimpering … until now.
My wife rose like a breaching whale and I whimpered as if I were a school of Abalone. It was only a cloth cap after all, and meant to strike the cats. An honest mistake. I pointed at the cats and said, “Bad cats for throwing hat at Mummy.”
This last-minute attempt to sway the jury had little effect. My partner of so many happy years approached at a gallop. I smartly stepped into my toilet and locked the door. All went quiet.
Life is so cruel at times. There I was an innocent victim of Pericles and Bertram once more. I had just tried to defend myself. However I could not stay in there all day and would have to make a move soon as I was expected at the club by 10 bells. It was, after all, Wednesday and as my loyal readers know, it is the day when my fellow mems queue up to take advice from the Major. I cannot let them down. “It is not on,” as my late father used to say.
I whimpered softly as I opened the door. Nothing stirred. I came out from my keep and quickly dressed, too quickly as my “unmentionables” were on backwards, which made for an uncomfortable day. A chap’s “wedding tackle” is not made for a miscue like that.
Still it was a matter of moments before I had the second-storey window open and had descended via the English ivy that encases that side of the house.
I sprinted for the street unseen till Pericles pointed me out to my wife, who scowled from the drawing room french doors. Even as I legged it for the club, the thought of returning that night loosened the bowels in a sickening fashion. It was to be a day of more than a few martinis. Bloody cats.
Copyright Christopher Dalton 2016