One of the things I dislike most about this time of year is the fact that news sites are full of articles of highlights and honours, of lists of the best, the most read, the most popular…
To be honest, I mostly don’t care.
Even so, I am very tempted to do a ‘review of the year’ as my last post of 2018.
First, though, I’ve noticed that yesterday’s piece was more popular than some that I’ve posted recently, which I suspect is due to several factors. One, it was posted in the morning, so there was more time for people to see it on the day of posting. And two, it featured cats – in the title, in poetry and in photos. And we all know that the internet is ‘a series of tubes’ dedicated to the glorification of cats.
So if I want a boring review post to be popular, I’d better pay the cat tax:
Although it was my vague intention to update the blog every Saturday and every Sunday, there were several weekends this year when I didn’t manage to post on both days, and even one, in early November, when I didn’t post at all. But I did write a good few extra pieces to mark bank holidays, so this will be the 96th post of the year, which isn’t too bad.
And the posts have been relatively long, too: unless I go on a lot longer than I expect to today, this won’t quite be my most verbose year – that was 2011, spread over 164 posts – but I have written around 40,000 words.
I know there hasn’t been much new poetry in 2018 – neither here nor elsewhere – but, while a lot of the poems have been re-posts, what I have tried to do is either combine them with new photos, or with other pieces to give a different perspective.
Mind you, there are still lots of posts in the archives that have hardly been read as I’ve never made much of a thing about the blog: followers just happen here by accident and it took several years before anyone found the place and started reading regularly. Which makes me think that I could do worse now than dig into the past and re-revive one of the very earliest pieces – from way back in the summer of 2007.
At the time I was living in Spain and I was beginning to develop the writing style that I kept for years, where the language wandered happily between Spanish and English. It’s a style that served me well and I used it for a couple of newspaper columns that I wrote for a number of years. (The columns have since been compiled and published as books.)
In order to add something new to this piece, I’ve made a sound recording, which you’ll find after the text, where there’s also a second installment of the cat tax.
“Don’t give it a name unless you’re going to adopt it,” was the wise advice from a friend when I told him about the young, skinny, grey cat which was merodeando la casa sizing us up as prospective family.
Wise advice. Except it got me thinking about cats and cat names, of course.
The first feline I can remember was Twinkie, my grandmother’s black and white short-hair. I can’t remember much about either Granny or the cat, except that she always wore an apron and chain-smoked, and her little terraced house with the narrow tunnel alleyway between it and the neighbours smelled of cats and cat food. I don’t know whether that would have been tinned cat food, or whether it was fish heads, but it’s a smell which belongs to my childhood holidays.
Other cats of that era, the ones in fiction, tended to be called by sibilant names that addressed their physical appearance: Smudges, Spot, Sox… Then there were Jenny and Thomasina, Marmaduke, and Orlando the Marmalade Cat. Macavity and the other Eliot cats came later, but were no less loved.
“Puss” is far too ordinary for a self-respecting cat; I’ve always thought Pushkin and Caitlin serve well as generic names for the cat in the street – or should that be The Cat on the Walsall Omnibus?
Friends have had cats whose names were usually either literary or witty, or occasionally both. There was Tucker – so called because he had a white bib – and PG, a colourpoint Persian who had tips the colour of tea. (He was named well before his owners discovered his habits with birds which made parental guidance a requirement.)
Waverley was a tabby with waverly stripes all over who came “as a boon and a blessing” to an owner old enough to remember the advertising slogan. Pathos, Porthos and Artemis, the three mouse-getters, seldom responded to their classical names, while Milly, Moll and Mandy were a bundle of mischief as kittens and grew up into three full-sized trouble makers.
Black Forest Gato was so named by a friend who’d been studying Spanish, and it was a Spaniard who once told me, “Tengo un gato que se llama como tú.”
Confused, but flattered, I asked “¿Cómo yo?”
“No. Se llama Comotú.”
Then there was a Spanish child I taught English to years ago. The family had a wonderful long-haired white cat, like the one who used to star in the carpet adverts on UK TV. I asked the girl what its name was and she looked at me as if I was crazy. It was just el gato, and she had neither interest in it nor affection for it.
The same child showed me a new doll she’d been given for a birthday present. Again I asked what the doll’s name was. “No sé,” she said, before having the bright idea of searching for the label in case the manufacturers had provided a name.
Thinking of the strings of names my peluches had when I was a child, and the way I automatically invent names or motes for any neighbour or animal I see regularly – like ‘Dusty’ the Shetland pony who I feed carrots to en route to the village – perhaps this preoccupation with names is more indicative of a problem on my part rather than on hers.
Which meant I was determined not to nombrar el gatito, at least until I was sure of my intentions. But he’s gris, he’s skinny as a breadstick, it’s impossible not to follow the logic through to its conclusion.
So Grissini is now named, though, like many of the local roads, not fully adopted.
Of course an “adopted road” is like a “made up road”. And there’s always the possibility that Grissini – along with the other characters on this blog – is made up.
don't confuse the narrator 