Day Six: Cat Sicks

Summer blundered into my world today like a slightly clueless bull who's only just been told about the whole Pamplona thing and has chosen to drink through the pain, starting and ending with my expansive wine cellar. And apart from a couple of hours this morning where I lay motionless on my sofa with my eyes scrunched shut, trying to will into existence some kind of reverse-SAD so I'd have a medical reason to paint all my windows black and wear jumpers 365 days a year, I was pretty damn chipper about the whole thing. A pleasant day all round; apart from the universal mind-meld that overtook every middle-class poncey couple in south-west London, leading us to all stumble like zombies to Homebase to buy citronella torches and easy-light charcoal, queuing like it was 1930s Germany.

Anyhow. I said, or maybe didn't, maybe I just thought it, and a rare thought it would be that didn't instantly get broadcast on Twitter, but now it's on here so that's a null statement, and good God, even for me, this sentence has a lot of clauses, that I wouldn't do general boring "Here's what happened to me today" stuff in this intense-o-bloggerama. So instead, here's something that happened a few days ago! IT COUNTS! CHECK THE RULES, YOU BASTARDS!

My cat is a very very very fine cat. Apart from a few things: he doesn't particularly like being stroked. He absolutely loves nipping out while you're not looking on the last cigarette of the evening, meaning you have to sit with the door open waiting for him to return for anything between two minutes and five hours. And while he doesn't rate cat food, he does rate any other rubbish he finds on his mysterious sojourns, up to and including, it seems, broken glass, which he then gaily horks up in the middle of sensitive social interactions.

In other words, he's a cat.

I was on early shifts last week, meaning I go to bed pretty early, and Mr JR stays up on cat-watch chain-smoke Ultimate Force duty. I'll just pause to let you take in the glamour there. Breathe through it, breathe through it. So off I toddled to dream the dreams of the evil and insidious. But later on, as Mr JR stealthily slipped into bed like a Devonian ninja, I was roused from my slumber. Not by him, but by a stench, seemingly from the underworld. I gagged as I was enveloped by its meaty texture; as if Death himself had done a 12-hour shift at an abattoir then draped his fetid overalls on my face. I knew the smell - it meant one thing only.

As I grumpily flumped out of bed, Mr JR stirred and mumbled into his pillow "whtryudng?" Sulking slightly, as I was the one who had to be up in three hours, I snapped "The cat's puked up everywhere. It stinks. I've got to clean it up." There was a guilty pause, before Mr JR's pillow muttered "Oh, sorry, no. That was me. I just made some southern fried chicken Supanoodles."

Groo.

There was a moral to this story, but I've temporarily misplaced it.