Pussy Galore

There are two types of people in the world.

There are those who have read Fifty Shades of Grey and those who wish the protagonist had been bound, gagged, and thrown to the fishes while still wearing his gimp mask, a very long time before he thought of picking up a pen or indeed opening the sticky lid of his laptop. There are those for whom blue cheese is one of life’s delicious post prandial treats and for others it reminds them of the smell of the headmaster’s armpits seconds before the cane rips a new welt into the buttocks. Some people believe in the wonders of scientific medicine and are content that their children are not scabrous, flaky skinned pox infested malodorous vectors of infection while others live in Totnes laying their children to rest to the sound of whale songs, wishful thinking and regret.

What seems to unite everyone on the planet is their love of animals.

The difference is how they express that love. In Scotland for instance the grouse is tenderly nurtured and protected from their natural predators. Food is abundant and their habitat is kept pristine to ensure they can breed and proliferate. There are oil paintings on the walls of ancient castles as pictorial odes to their status as most favoured bird. There is even a whisky named after the famous ground nesting featherling. Love knows no bounds right up until the moment when a dog is set loose to scare it into flight, and just when it feels it has got away, it feels half a pound of hot lead up its arse. We then express our love for the bird by roasting it, smothering it with red wine gravy, and slurping copious amounts of Bordeaux before belching and falling asleep in front of a roaring log fire as the mist rolls across the moors outside.

In Spain, the black bull is a symbol of virility and strength, often let loose in the streets to frolic and gambol willy nilly. They always miss the china shops as they run, but with unerring accuracy always seem to find the most pissed local to ram a horn into. A buttock is the preferred option, but failing that a bull will take anything on offer, be that belly or neck. The Spanish love them, and seem to get great enjoyment from putting themselves into the path of rampaging death before retiring to quaff a barrel of Rioja and singing songs about the old days of grape crushing and maiden courting. The bull seems to enjoy it too. It probably does not know that it will later suffer a bolt between the eyes and end up as myriad cuts of meat for the barbecue. Oh, how we love beef. Apart from vegetarians that is, they are the yin to a carnivore’s yang.

We love puppies, baby rabbits, little yellow fluffy chicks and spring lambs jumping with pleasure among the daisies in the fresh Spring air while their mothers chew lush grass, clover and clumps of mint totally unaware of the portent it signifies. We love those lambs so much we devote a whole cuisine to them: marinade, roasted, barbecued, curried… Little baby calves are loved in a different way depending on which sort of person you are. There are at least two types of calf killers. Those who eat the calves that are born as part of milk production, and those who pretend the calves don’t exist and are content to let them be put in dog food as surplus to requirements. The third group are French.

We all love animals but in two different ways. We either anthropomorphise them by giving them names and pretending they have human characteristics such as love, loyalty and intelligence. Or, we eat them.

Even then there are two ways of eating them. You are either in the group that carefully selects which bit is for the roasting tin, spit or frying pan. This decision is based on how close to muscle tissue it looks, and which bit gets, ironically, thrown to the dogs. Or you are one of those for whom no bit of an animal is off limits. The divide between these groups is usually the English Channel. There are a few funny folk, usually up north or the poor, who relish a bit of exotica as long as it’s cooked slowly with bacon, onions and served with beer. An important aspect of this is that it should not look like the bit of animal it actually is. That ringlike piece of chewy tissue could be a section of intestine or it could be something related anatomically to gut, but located at the distal end of whichever animal it provided a service for. Offal is a minority sport in England, south of Watford. The further north and west you go, the more it appears to be the staple diet. They do like a pie in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Have you ever wonder why the meat is hidden in pastry? Don’t look too closely, just enjoy the taste. That meat in a Cornish pasty you think is beef? Since when were impoverished tin miners able to afford prime chuck steak? The Squire would have scoffed that, leaving entrails for bal maidens and scurvy ridden urchins to mix with the village turnip as an Easter treat.

Cats.

Can’t eat them, can’t run them over (easily). The Egyptians loved the little buggers ascribing spiritual significance to them. They even gave one a name, “Bastet, the daughter of Re”. Egypt is not that far from Jeddah and perhaps this long association with deity accounts for why there are – what’s the collective noun for cats, a ‘chinese restaurant of’? – hundreds of them lazing and strolling along the park. You either love them or you don’t.

This lot are a curious bunch. Almost universally scrawny, flea bitten, hairy rags on legs. They must be feral. They are definitely not someone’s fat pampered well groomed pet with a name and a bell. At about 6 at night when the sun is going down, the families of Jeddah stroll up and down what we would call a promenade, but they call it the Corniche. Then, you get to see why there are so many cats. They are the community’s pets that live on the Corniche but are fed by the community. The other reason why there is a plethora of pussies, is of course that being wild, as soon as a female is of kitten bearing age they are fertilised. Ruthlessly. It is not uncommon to witness a coupling in full view of childen eating their ice creams.

“What’s that big cat doing on the back of the little cat mummy?”

“Ah…that is Allah’s will being made manifest as a glorious reminder of the eternal wheel of creation.”

“Oh, I thought they were fucking…”

There are two types of people in the world, the sacred and the profane… and you can tell which is which by how they look at cats.