Viennese Whirl

I got the bug for making puns out of titles from the writer John Brunner who was apt to head his chapters with far-too-clever titles like Roomie Nation in which we find the novel's protagonist in retrospective mood as he considers his domestic arrangements in the light of a trend — in the world of the novel — for people to share their living space with non-relatives. I like to take things a tad further and deeper and the meanings are, I suspect, apparent only to me, but that is how I like it because i write for myself and not for anyone else.

Still preoccupied with the unseasonal dampness associated with the ridiculous heat and humidity and which has now caused my front door to swell and to stick I have gone to the deepest extremes to make my title extraordinarily dense. I came home today to find the kitchen window was host to an angry population of fat, black flies all buzzing mindlessly as they took to the fœtid air in short, aimless figure of eight sorties in search of a way through the impervious transparent barrier that separated them from the light. In an instant I knew that my resident serial killer, a cat by the name of Mirelly Lyra Zeelashisthra, had allowed another of her victims to escape behind the boiler and there to become maggot food. I long ago gave up hope of curing her of this sin; it seems ingrained in her genes and it would be a cruel crime against nature to seek a means of ending it.

I am hardened to the problem by now. The darned cat has been with me since she first wound her way, mewling piteously about imagined privations and hardships of a feline nature, when I called at a farm to ask directions. I left with a better idea of where I was as well as with a cardboard box — that had once held a Toshiba television set — filled to bursting with eight ounces of vigorous black and white fury. Before I had reversed my car away from the farm entrance and pointed it up the road the flap uppermost on the box jittered upwards and a tiny, bewhiskered face emerged. She stared around her new environment with disdain, clambered out with as much grace as she could muster (not much) and spent the next several miles attempting to sit in a demure manner on top of the box so that she could observe the passing scenery. It was clear to me that she had never before seen trees move with such reckless abandon.

All that was nine years ago. She is still the maddest cat I have ever known ... and I have known enough to be a fair judge. Mirelly — mostly known to me as Little Mad (which is short for Little Madam and not an insult) — is as nutty as a truck load of walnuts with a side order of pistachios. I even allowed her to play the field with local tomcat population in the hopes that motherhood would lend her some wisdom. Some hope. With the first kitten mostly out and clenched neatly around the neck she decided enough was enough and tried to run away from her own back end. Fortunately I was able to help the two get acquainted. Three more kittens followed the first and she became a model mother ... unless an inability to count is a fault because she moved the litter several times, each time moving three and leaving the fourth behind. I grew far too attached to the kittens in spite of myself but I bravely managed anyway to surrender them up to the various offers of homes that came once it became known that kittens were up for grabs.

As soon as the kittens were all gone Mirelly instantly reverted to her former condition of madness though now with an increased penchant for murder. Clearly, now that she no longer had a pack of dimwitted babies to learn-up in the tooth and claw jungle of hunting etiquette she could always make sure to keep her paw and eye in in case some more kittens should happen along. As if! She had been to the vet in the interim and had come home with that tell-tale postage stamp sized patch of fur missing from her right flank. Luckily she was too busy practising the art of bringing down a pigeon in mid flap to study up much in her biology texts. Over the intervening years she and I have enjoyed a peculiar sort of relationship. She hangs around because I do not set unreasonable conditions upon her; she lets me keep most of my skin because I make a neat place for her to sleep on. I also turn out to be a pretty cool object for getting annoyingly large quantities of rain out of fur when she gets caught in a hailstorm as happened a day or so ago.

So there it is. Imagine if you can yours truly doing a cross between the sailors' hornpipe and the tarantella as I try to avoid the twin hazards of getting my cuffs of my jeans soaked with wet cat and my ankle skin flayed by playful cat who thinks that the return to fashion of flared trousers is just so cool that playing with them is irresistable and you have half a scenario to fit the title: the whirl.

The sadly missed Leonard Rossiter was a fabulously talented actor, equally at home on stage in comedy and Shakespeare, as well as on the both the big screen and the silver. He is most memorable to me for his fabulous protrayal of the odiously comic slum landlord Rupert Rigsby in the TV series Rising Damp ... aha! A clue. Or as Inspector Clouseau might say: 'ay clure. Rigsby, of course, owned a cat. Naturally he did because scrofulous he might have been, but for a character to be endearing and ultimately lovable he needs to have at least one redeeming feature. Rigsby's was his cat.

In case you forgot, or else didn't know. Rigsby's cat was named Vienna.