Another problem with autumn

Apart from it being cold, damp and grey? Leaves cascading and lying in a sodden mulch everywhere? Short days and long nights? Even higher food prices? The approach of Christmas?

You may have noticed that I dislike 'our' cat intensely. For those new to the saga he adopted us shortly after the second of our two cats died about three years ago. We'd seen him about the place as he belonged to a neighbour. And about the time our cats died, quite close together, the neighbour moved to another town leaving his cat behind to fend for itself.

Feeling a bit lonely and looking for an easy life, at least when it suited him, he adopted us.

Now we feed him and pay his vet bills when he gets cut up evading cars or other bigger nastier cats. He's an expensive little bastard. He's also quite adamant that that he doesn't actually belong to us but that we're a port in a storm for him, a convenience store where he doesn't have to pay.

Except when it gets a bit cold and miserable.

Last night he attempted to curl up and go to sleep on my back as I attempted to go to sleep on my front. Shutting the door is no good, he's mastered the door handle. I refuse to lock my bedroom door in my own house. Right now the little bastard is curled up on my lap, as though he holds me in affection, or something.

And when I stand up I just know I'm going to have little muddy paw marks all over the front of my trousers. Thanks.

How to Stigmatise Children (Properly)

Well obviously, as pointed out by John Banks who speaks for teachers, one doesn't hold children back a year, even if they haven't achieved the standards established in reading, writing and arithmetic for progression to secondary school. That would stigmatise them. There they'd be in a swollen class dominated by younger kids who'd 'look' at them and wonder why they were there.

This is an important issue because currently the standard operating procedure for dealing with children who cannot read write or add up at the end of seven years of primary schooling is to boot them up to secondary comprehensives where they are someone else's problem (at least until they've collected enough ASBOs* to qualify for a place at a juvenile detention centre en route to prison).

It is the Tories who are proposing holding struggling children back until they've achieved a sufficient proficiency in the basics.

Labour and the teachers unions have let off one of their stink bombs in the direction of this preposterous idea.

As an alternative it is proposed that children who fall behind are given either (a) one on one tuition using an army of retired teachers, otherwise ex-teachers and wet behind the ears newly graduated teachers or (b) summer schools.

Of course it is a top-notch notion that those who couldn't cope the first time around be brought back into the profession and that those who weren't able to secure a proper teaching job in the first round of recruitment are deployed to work with those most in need of the ablest teachers. And the most demanding teaching is obviously going to appeal to those who've only just got used to being able to put their feet up.

The reality is that those who are still up to it and worth much chop take up private tuition when they either retire or quit the profession.

So as as well as being a perfect job creation scheme for otherwise unemployable teacher training college graduates and a way of supporting the government's ambition to demolish barriers to employment for the over-60s, and a stratagem for reducing unemployment numbers among former educationalists this is the absolutely ideal way of delivery total humiliation to struggling primary school pupils.

How much better to pull them from regular classes at Year 5 or 6 in front of those they've grown up with (sometimes from nursery) and stick them in special dummy tuition. Now that's a Proper Job, as they say out west.

* This is an Anti Social Behaviour Order, for the benefit of those outside the UK. It is a wizard wheeze of the current government; intended as a reprimand, regarded by those upon whom it is bestowed as a Badge of Honour.

The Cynic in me

... says that the string of employees who've taken time off for an Insect Bite should be set to work dredging swamps or cleaning the bogs of the only pub in White Cliffs, so they can learn what a real bite feels like.

The wuss in me says OW it hurts. Something bit me last night and one of my fingers is both intensely itchy and (more locally) intensely painful.

BUT, I've lived in the tropics ... braving lethal salt water crocodiles, land snakes, jelly fish, stone fish, sea snakes. Then I moved to Melbourne and learned to avoid the red back spider and the blue ringed octopus.

So I'm allowed to be a wuss. OK

Good News for Modern Woman

The Shit Weasel (the Cat that adopted us) and the Tart (his female feline friend) working as a tag team caught something tonight. It wasn't cute. The light had gone completely and the Slug (husband) came in to let me know that they were out there in the garden somewhere with something...

So I stumbled about in the dark and shouted the Shit Weasel's name and the little fucker Growled at me. Really loud and really serious type growling, that would have sent me scurrying back into the house if I hadn't already had a couple of bottles of dutch lager inside me.

So I shouted some more and the Shit Weasel picked what ever he'd caught up and ran straight for the kitchen door, only deviating at the very last moment when that primeval self-preservation instinct kicked in and he chose instead to go down the side of the house. Must have known I'd have picked him up and added the colour of his brains and innards to the charmless collection of colours our house is already decorated in otherwise. God, I hate that cat.

Even then he stopped in the middle of the strawberry bed in the back yard. I blundered about in the gloom and trampled through the bits of forsythia that hadn't fitted into the recycling bin, shouted some more and finally he got the message.

He took his kill through to next door, via a gap in the fence, and didn't come back until he'd finished with it over in their garden.

Someone else dealing with it. That's the way to do things.

The Ingrate

We've done everything he demanded. We brought back the Little One and erected the Pink Palace. How's he reacted to all this? By behaving like a perfect ingrate, or if you will a stroppy teenager who doesn't know when he's well off. He huffed about the place for a while before settling down, behind His bedroom door which is, as previously mentioned one of the more awkward places for him to curl up.

Accidents Do Happen

This island nation is currently holding its breath waiting for news of the small outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease at a farm in plush Surrey (near Guildford, which is absolutely about as plush as it gets).

A leading UK virologist, the name of whom I've not yet caught, has dismissed evidence that the source of the outbreak is a nearby laboratory handling on the grounds that these things happen and pointed out that "accidents do happen".

Cheerful news. Do hope though, that they're not handling Spanish Flu or Ebola or anything really nasty and catastrophic or anything like that.

Now a conspiracy theorist would make hay of the fact that the private company operating on the laboratory site has ceased to manufacture the vaccine for the strain of F&M that has now been identified and created the link to the lab. I mean, if your a capitalist with your investment looking a bit limp what better way to give things a jump start than lay out a prima facie case for restarting the R&D and manufacture of the vaccine.

Incidentally there is another irony in this: the UK doesn't vaccinate against this viral disease but within the countries that are markets for its exports, markets that would be under threat if the national herd were to be routinely vaccinated, such vaccination is practiced. And the supplier of all the vaccine? Well, in part it is the UK.

Rodent count

The rodent count around about has plummeted overnight. Last year the cat tended to bring his catches into the house, usually still alive. Usually he surrendered his playmates and I was able to release them. He voluntarily gave up the wood pigeon when he discovered that he and his fat playmate couldn't fit through the cat flap at the same time, particularly with the playmate going in sideways while flapping its wings and jerking its legs about.

This year we've been corpse free. Until last night. He left his deceased friends in a little mouse trail up the path to the main road. Four of them in total. Sweet little field mice and one shrew.

Murderer.