Did you miss me last week?
I wasn’t away on holiday, or anything (as if!) – I just couldn’t fit my witterings in, is the honest answer. Sometimes deadlines and column space conspire against me, and last week was one of those times.
This page (known in the trade as the BMDs), is a bit of a moveable feast for obvious reasons, and a few weeks ago, we had no announcements sent in at all, prompting this witty response from reader Gordon Beastall: “‘No births or deaths, weddings or thanks, Not even successes – perhaps these are pranks? Page two looks quite strange with no such array, I wish for a phone call to brighten my day.”
The paper in question was the September 8 edition, which, as you may recall, came out
on the day that the biggest national death announcement of most people’s lifetimes was made…
Anyway, let me relate to you the tale of an incident at home recently, which concerns a very naughty black-and-white cat and a rather big television.
Said feline, who goes by the name of Fuggs, has long believed, rightly so, that the TV competes for his attention.
For months now he has been wont to clamber in and around the glass stand and try to jump up the back of the TV, meowing and generally doing anything he can to get us to stop watching the gogglebox and feed him, play with him, or some other unspecific demand. (Sometimes we’re not entirely sure he even knows what he wants.)
Of late, he’d managed to figure out how to turn off the sound box, meaning we were forced to get up and turn it back on again. “Oh, now you’re up…”
In an attempt to stop this behaviour, we invested in a more heavy-duty oak TV cabinet that he would not be able to squeeze under or behind. Which was a sound plan – until Fuggs decided to try to leap over the TV from a standing start on Sunday night.
He’s not the most balletic of animals, it has to be said. Needless to say, he didn’t make his high- jump attempt, and he pulled the 50in screen right over before bolting out of the room.
We gingerly picked it up, hoping it’d be OK (the TV, not the cat). It wasn’t OK. I shared an image on Twitter of the ruined screen, complete with its numerous flickering horizontal lines. Some suggested the cat did it in protest over who got booted out on Strictly that evening.
Whatever the reason, he has had his pocket money stopped for the foreseeable future.
