Cat in Winter

I live in the tropics, but late December is relatively cool, windy, wet — just as it is in most of the Northern Hemisphere. And the cat, the cat doesn't like it so much.

Today I sat with him. He paced around. The sky was a bright pale grey-blue, like ice. Grey wisps of cloud scudded around. The wind blew dying flowers and leaves into the patio. The cat chased some of them, sniffed suspiciously at others.

His golden fur, bright and brazen in the full summer sun, looked brown and irritable. He was a tarnished copper cat today, not the golden glory he prefers to be. He obviously felt brown and irritable too. He looked out over the garden, tail slowly twitching from side to side, as if to say, "I know you're out there somewhere, whatever you are. Bad day! Bad day!"

Once in a while, he'd run back to me, and bang his forehead against my shin. I have no clear idea of what that means to a cat, but it seems to be partly reassurance based on solidity (or solidarity) and partly head-banging from being irritated with something.

Ah, the cat, the cat in winter. "In winter's tedious night, sit by the fire / With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales / Of woeful ages long ago betide." So said the bard, but the cat still twitches.

This Island Race

Yes, I've been reading a lot of Churchill these days. A quintessential leader for dark times, his caustic wit and declamatory style burn through the fog like a beacon on a hill. It was he who appropriated the phrase 'this island race' for the British, he who said, "Do your worst, and we shall do our best."

I am a man of two parts, geographically and literarily; born on one island and living on another, I find the poetry of the first almost sufficient for all things and the poetry of the second infuriatingly sparse in resonant metaphor. Which island is it that goes with 'race'? It might seem a trivial issue. But listen to this, taken from Shakespeare's Richard II, II(1):

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands, –
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Who could read this, born upon the 'sceptred isle', and not wish that it were true in every detail? Then again, my second island too has poets. One of them wrote these lines:

Peoples settled here,
Brought to this island
The bounty of these seas,
Built towers topless as Ilium's.

They make, they serve,
They buy, they sell.

Despite unequal ways,
Together they mutate,
Explore the edges of harmony,
Search for a centre;
Have changed their gods,
Kept some memory of their race
In prayer, laughter, the way
Their women dress and greet.
They hold the bright, the beautiful,
Good ancestral dreams
Within new visions,
So shining, urgent,
Full of what is now.

It is hard to choose between one island race and another, at times. One has a surfeit of history, a long and tangled tale told in dark rooms; the other has an earnest of history to come, but the shadow of doom upon it, that it might fade before that earnest comes to pass. It is hard; it is hard. Sometimes, though, it is worse.