Oedipuss at Colonus
“In what manner Oedipus passed from this earth, no one but Theseus knows. We know he was not destroyed by a thunderbolt from heaven nor tide-wave rising from the sea, for no such thing occurred. Maybe a guiding spirit from the gods took him or the earth’s foundations opened and received him…..”!
Form Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus “
Yeah, yeah, we all know that Matthew Appleby, the horti-week correspondent says that gardening blogs about cats are only written by sad old women whose horticultural knowledge is as Spartan as their sex lives. However, the Arne Herbs cats seem to attract as much attention as the plants and so this is a tribute to Snivel, the most famous of them all who, like the Sophocles hero above was taken by a “guiding spirit from the gods” or more likely a fox at 4 AM one Sunday in April. There was a screech and a bang which literally shook the house and that was that. No more Sniv.
Sniv had two claims to fame, the first is that he always looked as though he had been run over in a slurry pit and was inclined to clear his nose into visitors’ shoes and secondly he out-lasted every other cat on the place. His start was a close run thing though; as a very tiny kitten he got flu so badly that I was about to put him down Then as I picked up the inert little bundle of snot, it managed to force one clogged eye open and looked full at me, whereupon, I melted completely and he went on for another fifteen years.
He liked to give the impression that he was 100% blind and deaf but like Robert Graves’ Claudius, this was the ploy that enabled him to survive so long, no other tom could be bothered to waste time beating him up. But he recognised the sound of Jenny’s car turning into the drive from a hundred yards away and was even known to catch the odd bird. When kitchen scraps were thrown out, he always got to them before any other cat in the nursery. He also enjoyed a rich and active sex life, though not sex as you or I would know it, -hope not anyway,- and one scarcely likely to produce any kittens. He was the best friend anyone could have, he was there on the door step in the morning or waiting to greet me when I had been away and more irritatingly, exactly two inches in front of my feet or the wheel barrow wheels, somehow he never got run over and seldom tripped over though his fascination with the exhaust pipes of reversing cars alarmed customers almost daily. With Sniv around, there was no necessity to get a dog, animals which all seem to divide their lives between eating, sleeping, barking and doing unspeakable things with their tongues.
My children invariably ask me why the nursery cats always look so manky. The answer of course is that the majority of sleek spoilt felines are off doing what they are employed to do, eliminating vermin, and very good they are too as the mouse problems in the seed store and propagation areas from which they are excluded, demonstrate. Meanwhile the first and probably the only cat visitors saw was Sniv, who, ever the optimist, was hovering around the car park hoping to be offered some bacon. In spite of all this at least two foolish visitors reported me to the RSPCA for keeping a suffering cat. I suspect they were the kind of urban bunny-huggers who protest against the killing of foxes, one of which ultimately did for poor old Snivel. Again to quote Sophocles “he died…By a swift invisible hand, he was lifted away to the far dark shore” Actually it wasn’t so invisible, a few weeks before his demise, we watched four foxes chasing one another through the plants and it didn’t take a Sophoclean Sybil to tell us that this was a harbinger of feline doom.
Fortunately Princess (so named because she is a right little madam) produced two kittens in spite of herself. She really hates the whole vulgar business of procreation from conception to weaning the results. One was a tough little tom who promptly vanished down a fox’s gullet and the other was a little female, which we christened Slushy. Slush is almost identical to Snivel whom she emulated by promptly going down with flu, in fact she almost certainly caught it from him. No fox in its right mind would touch such an unprepossessing creature,. She is now an adolescent with one eye and a deformity of the vocal cords which causes her to crow like an apocalyptic raven out of a horror movie rather than miow. All the other cats hold back in awe of her foul temper at feeding time, but she loves humans, so all you cat lovers out there, come and say hullo to Slush and remember that we can supply your pussy (darn,- I bet that never gets through the American filters, but then they never buy anything anyway) with Catmint, two kinds of catnep, cat thyme and Valerian. So however picky your little feline friends are, we can provide the means to make them love you all the more. God knows, if I can keep our Princess happy, all other cats should be a cinch. And a tip for all you doggie people, if you don’t want cats digging up your garden, surreptitiously plant a clump of catnep next door and all the cats will go over there, leaving your dogs in peace to make brown stains all over your own lawn.