Sir cat. Unblinking
Watches prey
The way you watch me
Every day
Without the pain
Of empathy
Behind the eyes
No care for me
My feline watcher
With jade gaze
Joy of my nights
Despair of days

©️jj 2024

Sometimes we walk the edges of reality…

The sounds continued, slither and scrape and tapping claws, as the creature passed the bottom of the old roller coaster. Annis could feel the vibrations through her feet. On the bed, Jessica’s eyes were suddenly wide and her mouth opened into a silent gasp as she felt the presence of the Old One for the first time. Annis put a finger on her own lips and Jessica pressed her  hand over her mouth, as if to stop a cry escaping, as the blood eater slowly passed.
They sat in silence until the sounds had faded back into the quiet of the night and, slowly, sounds of the small creatures could be heard again. One of the cats on the bed, stretched and licked the head of the other who started purring gently. 
Once the Old One was gone she became aware of another entity. Also hunting. 
“Silent,” she hissed. “Vampire. It follow you…”
Jessica’s face was a study in terror, but she held herself together even when a masculine voice filled the air.
“Jessica. Jessica. I know you are here somewhere. Come to me.”
Annis saw the other woman shiver and pushed the cats closer before putting more wood on the fire and throwing a handful of herbs onto the flames. The fire burned blue and Annis smiled thinly. A few moments later the hunting vampire began to cough and sneeze and the sense of its presence receded.
“Not gone. You stay.” 
Hoping that the female would have sense enough to stay put, Annis called the two mongrel cats to her side and slipped silently from the cabin. She made her way along the tops of the piles of twisted metal until she reached a vantage point from which she could watch the drunken lads around their bonfire. They appeared to be drinking themselves into a state of complete oblivion and she wondered where they had got that much booze. She didn’t have to wonder for long, as a tall figure strolled into the firelight.
“Evening lads” he said genially.
The youngsters looked incuriously at their visitor, who rolled a log into the firelight and sat down.
“Any of you boys seen a woman tonight?”
“There was one, but she kicked Robbo in the nuts and run away,” the speaker laughed coarsely. “You lost one?”
“You could say that. Which way’d she go?”
“Out of the park. Maybe. We think she run up the road.”
“Right. Thanks.”
The vampire uncurled himself and ambled off carefully slowly and with seeming unconcern. Once he was out of earshot the loudest and most obnoxious of the drinkers laughed inanely.
“If you can’t keep your woman under control you needn’t expect me to tell you where she’s gone,” he slurred then fell into a drunken stupor.
For whatever reason it had happened, Annis was grateful that the vampire had been misdirected. With any luck he would spend the rest of the night searching the verges of the road for Jessica. As she turned to head back home, she noticed a small pile of stuff in a dark corner. A rucksack and a soft bag. Jessica’s stuff, she would bet. Could she get it?
She sat on her perch for a long time, thinking and watching as all but one of the young males fell asleep. One who was easily incapacitated with a smooth round pebble accurately placed from a slingshot. 
Even then it took her many minutes to creep down the pile of distorted ironwork until she and the cats could sneak from shadow to shadow to a spot from which she could pick up the bags and ghost away with them.
Returning home encumbered by the luggage took her some while, so that when she slipped into the room the atmosphere was one of great strain. Jessica sat up and stared as she dropped the bags on the sleeping platform.
“Drunken males have. We take…”
Annis grinned a feral grin and was surprised to see her enjoyment reflected in Jessica’s eyes.
“Will you tell me who you are, and what is happening?”
“Will try. Eat first.”
Annis put the soup kettle on the hot plate atop the fire, then went to the food store drawer and took out flat breads and a lump of hard cheese. She grated cheese onto a wooden board and bent to retrieve bowls and spoons from another drawer.
Jessica spoke. “I’m a vegetarian.”
Annis looked at her in genuine puzzlement.
“You say?”
“I don’t eat meat.”
“Me not too. Soup potato and onions. Come eat.”

Part 7 of Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook will be here next week…

Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

N is for Nicknames or what Mad Maud of the darts team calls ‘euphoniums’.

Okay you horrible lot, listen up. Granny is about to impart knowledge.

If you are a married lady of a certain age, look across the room and consider your significant other. How does he appear?

Dashing, debonair and handsome

Rough, tough and dangerous

Slightly grubby and with jam on his vest

Tidily harmless in his cardigan and carpet slippers

If he is any of the first three it’s an even bet you don’t call him  your ‘hubby’….

Also for ladies who should be old enough to know better. What do you refer to your lady bits as?

Fanny

Man Trap

Minge

Front bottom 

If it’s any of the first three you probably still have a sex life….

Are you beginning to catch my drift here? What we call things matters.

If you call a man ‘hubby’ he will grow into the neutered tom cat smugness the word suggests.

If you really do call your fanny a ‘front bottom’ the chances of it ever getting a visitor diminish with the years as the terminology becomes more and more at odds with the age and the experience of the speaker.

My late husband – god rest his OCD little soul – once referred to me as the little woman, and wondered why I didn’t come across for a month. Although I am certainly a woman, I am far from being little and the term is pejorative in the extreme. It is like so many words used about women, being designed to remind the ‘fair sex’ of its position in society.

So let’s strip the cute nicknames bare, shall we?

Fur baby. Nope. It’s a cat or a dog or whatever. It is not a baby. Gyp is a dog and he is my best mate (except when he barfs on the floor). I would no more call him a ‘fur baby’ than buy him a pink coat and have his toenails painted. He needs to be allowed to be a dog.

Your tiny daughter has baby fat in bracelets around her wrists. You decide to call her ‘chubbykins’. She has body image issues for the rest of her life.

And so on.

Words have power.

So please stop fecking about.

And if you want to neuter the old man send him to the vet. It’s quicker and more dignified 

Things are not quite how you might remember them in the 100 Acre Wood for Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and their friends…

***** ***** *****

Jane Jago

Down to earth advice straight from the mouth of the mystic’s moggy!

So today she (that’s Madame Pendulica to you or Dotty Doris to me) was doing this thing where she grabs a handful of polished stones (she calls them crystals) and throws them on a black cloth divided up into the houses of the zodiac and then proceeds to give her client a ‘reading’ based on which of the stones land where (“You have jasper in your first house and that is bringing optimism in your immediate future.”)Please note that he’s not the one to be optimistic, Dotty Doris is – she’s making a wad from this consultation.
Anyway, I digress, she was doing this reading for a client who was trying to decide whether or not to accept a proposal of marriage. We’d been through the background already:
“She’s perfect in every way and we are madly in love. But should I marry her?”
Madame purred in her throat (I swear she takes lessons from me).
“You are wise to seek my guidance and I shall consult the stars through their union with the earth by the power of the crystals.”
Translation; “I can see we have a gullible one here who’ll pay for at least three sessions and keep me in prosecco and the cat in tuna for a week.”
He nodded and looked grave.
“You see I know the economic and legal commitment of marriage is a serious undertaking and if I am besotted I am not going to be able to think things through clearly. So please, tell me, should I marry her?”
Oh ye gods and little fishes, what a complete asshole!
I’d had enough so put my paw in and told him that if I was his girlfriend I’d be telling him to take a hike. If he’s the sort who can’t even know his own heart and mind over whether he should marry then he’s better left on the shelf with that open packet of dried kibble that’s sat there the last six months since I refused to eat it anymore.
Unfortunately, the mad bat went on to convince him that his answer was obscured by the moon being occluded by onyx and his having obsidian falling in Scorpio so he should come back the next week to get clarification.
I really do have to admire her.
And I thought of him almost fondly when I ate my tuna that evening.

Ailuros the Mystic’s Mog predicts she will be offering more advice sometime in the future!

Telling an entire story in just one hundred words…

Finally, the breakthrough she had dreamed of – sometimes literally.
Two decades Geraldine had worked, yet the last piece of the equation never came into focus.
It happened late at night. She’d been going over the figures one more time and suddenly some stood out as if highlighted. A frantic hour later, she was done.
She was about to phone the team when she looked again at the projected outcome.
A cold horror slipped through her veins.
Dawn broke as Geraldine scrabbled desperately to cover up what she had found so no one else in the team would ever discover it.

E.M. Swift-Hook

A selection of rhymes by Jane Jago, made age appropriate for those for whom their second childhood is just around the corner…

There was a Little Gran

There was a little gran
In a purple campervan
Divorced from a city go-getter
Never had much fun
As a trophy wife and mum
Finding life after sixty much better!

You can find this, and other whimsical takes of life in On The Throne? a little book of contemplation from Jane Jago.

February comes with snowdrops
Green spears through frost-shot soil
As reaching up through snow and ice
Their small white flags uncoil
Proud banners soon a-flying
The vanguard of the spring
They hold the first pure promise
Of what the year will bring
Like resurrected martyrs
In dresses all of white
Beneath the ground just yesterday
Then rising overnight
The ones beside my window
I look for every year
To see the modest stand return
And know that spring is near

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Sometimes we walk the edges of reality…

CHAPTER TWO: ANNIS

Annis looked narrowly at the guest who stood in her home, obviously ill at ease, and equally obviously totally bemused by finding herself an oasis of calm and cleanliness in the middle of a desert of dirt and destruction. This reaction to home would have been funny if it wasn’t sort of insulting. Why wouldn’t her place be clean and tidy? If you live with cats for company you tend not to like mess, she thought irritably. Then she laughed at herself. Why should she care what some human female thought of her. 
The woman opened her mouth to say who knew what, but Annis silenced her with a fierce look. She idly wondered how this Jessica came to be here, and why she had lied with the first words she spoke. The female knew precisely what would have happened to her at the hands of the drunken louts by the gate. She knew, and the waves of fear that rolled off her at that knowledge were what had prompted Annis to come to her aid. 
So. She’s here and you brought her here, Annis thought. Now you better talk to her.
Before she had chance to grope for the words to interact with her human visitor, two heavy thumps announced the arrival of a visitation of a feline nature. Unthinking, Annis opened the door and a matched pair of black panthers slid in.
Jessica gave a half scream.
“Not fear,” Annis managed before the cats bowled her over and started licking her with their rough, red tongues. How long that would have gone on for is open to conjecture, but the happy time was interrupted by more arrivals. Two more big cats, this pair of indeterminate breed, oozed into the room. One sat on its haunches, while the other stared inimically at Jessica. Annis wasn’t prepared to tolerate that. She growled a warning and the cat flattened its ears. 
“Cats not hurt.”
She thought perhaps she should say more, but her ears caught a faint sound at the same time as her nose was assailed by the smell of rotting flesh.
“It hunts…”
“What hunts?” Jessica’s whisper sounded only just on the right side of panic.
“Blood eater.”
Jessica opened her mouth to speak or scream, but Annis knew she could not be allowed to draw attention to herself.
“Silent.”
Greatly daring, and ignoring feline etiquette altogether, Annis leant forwards and put two fingers across the other female’s mouth.
“Must silent.”
She saw the panic being battled by something deep within the woman. Jessica’s eyes shadowed momentarily, then cleared as she found the strength needed to control her fear and swallow the questions that must be crowding her throat.
“Cats hide you,” Annis said, pushing the older woman onto the sleeping platform and arranging a black cat either side of her. Jessica looked at her in confusion, the fear was still in her eyes still and Annis smiled reassuringly.  Being unable to summon sufficient human words to explain her actions, she pinched her own nose with a finger and thumb.
“No smell. Old One comes. Blood Eater. Must not smell.”
Jessica’s face cleared and she managed a nod. Annis found herself feeling the beginnings of respect for the courage being shown by somebody who obviously knew nothing of the kind of life forms that inhabit the places humanity has abandoned. The silence came then, a cold silence, like the chilling silence that came after snow had fallen deeply. As if the world held its breath, not daring to breathe.
Then into the silence came the small sounds creeping, and slithering as every small creature fled out of the path of the Old One. Then it came. Something with multi-clawed feet and the heavy, scraping, scaly belly of the Blood Eater. Then it stopped. Silence. Cold and claustrophobic. In her mind Annis pictured the huge, ugly head she had senen before, lifting, nostrils opening and tongue sliding out to taste the air for blood.
She glanced at the bed, where the two big cats had pressed in against Jessica, their eyes, jewel bright. Jessica’s were closed and her face was white. Annis wondered if it was enough or if the living flesh of the human woman would call to the Blood Drinker despite the felines absorbing the perfume of her blood.

Part 6 of Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook will be here next week…

Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

M is for Master Cooking Shows.

Hands up if you, like me, watch cookery programmes on the box.

We’re not talking about them ones where a very thin person pretends to cook and then counterfeits eating with a mouth that looks like a cat’s bumhole.

Neither are we even mildly interested the ones where a ‘celebrity’ chef ponces about putting baby vegetables on a sea of something obscene. 

I never watch either of the above – unless of course it’s Nigella, whose substitution of food for sex is to be applauded. But I digress…

Today’s exposition of emotion (okay, maybe a tiny rant) centres on competitive cooking on the telly. 

Firstly, cooking is not a bloody competition. It’s the means whereby something earthy and boring like a potato becomes a delicious calorie filled treat like a chip. 
Secondly, watching capable people cook isn’t interesting (Nigella aside).
Which leaves us with why.

An educated guess suggests economic pressures with a side order of sadism.
These cookery competitions must be as cheap as chips to produce and the prizes are crap too. A wooden spoon with a bow in it and a kiss from an oleaginous presenter are scarcely gonna break the production company bank.

And the sadism? You really haven’t noticed the delight the producers take in fallen soufflés, burns, cuts, meltdowns, and tears? 

The winner usually appears very little because she/he is busy being boring and efficient, while Edna from Liverpool who is obviously only there because she was pissed one night and entered for a laugh is far more fun to watch.
So…. 

Given that if the competitors all produced well-cooked examples of whatever and neither failed disastrously nor had loud meltdowns in the public eye the programmes would be about as interesting as watching your nail polish dry, there has to be a catch someplace.
Something has to be done to glue viewers to the screen.

And what have they done?
They have set up the rules to ensure failure…
Don’t look at me like that. They bloody have.

One show never gives the competitors quite enough time to get the required dish done.
Another encourages rank amateurs to attempt recipes a Michelin starred chef only cooks with the aid of three sous chefs and a kitchen porter.
A third has some scary bloke patrolling the place to scare the cooks shitless.
And so on.

And that’s why we watch.
Schadenfreude.

And the hope that in some galaxy far far away a person in a creepy apron will so far lose it as to twat one of the supercilious presenters – for preference with a half-iced strawberry gateau.