Big Lights, Small Bells

Just back from a trip to Sydney to show Llywelyn the city and, after more than four months in little old Coffs Harbour, it was something of an eye-opener. There were crowds of people everywhere, none of whom Sara and I recognised, and some of them were wearing suits. Imagine! And at night there were many lights in the sky which apparently came from something called office blocks, which is where people in suits go to work, I’m told. Anyway, what with all that, and the shocking price of a short black (espresso to you), we were quite worn out and some of us woke rather later than others this morning.

I was breakfasting alone, after a run on the beach, surveying the banksias and the locust-ravaged yuccas in our terraced garden, when I heard the tinkling of a small bell. We’ve heard this before, on warm summer nights when we’ve been sitting on the patio, but never managed to discover what the bell was attached to. This morning revealed the owner to be a grey and black striped cat, looking extremely grumpy, possibly about being attached to the bell.

He may also have been grumpy about being a member of a persecuted species. Australia has its fair proportion of cat lovers but it also has a refreshingly large number of people who think, as one phone-in caller had it, that the only good cat is a dead cat. This is not because of the way cats torment vegetable gardens, which has always been my objection to the little sods, but because cats have brought Australia’s indigenous wildlife, particularly birds, to the point of extinction.

Now this may come as surprise to anyone woken here by the dawn chorus, which is deafening and varied, and less of a chorus and more of a heavy metal gig, but these people believe that every cat comes home in the morning covered in blood, fur and feathers after a night of slaughter. Point out that, birds aside, this fair isle has some of the most vicious and deadly indigenous wildlife in the world, and you’ll be told that cats are very clever.

Just how clever? Well, according to a leaflet published to encourage people to be “responsible” cat owners (there‘s a whole debate there, I know, but we‘ll leave it for the moment), every cat should have a collar with three bells on it. Baffled, I read on to learn that some cats were capable of muffling two bells, yes, two, with a paw, so having three ensured that the cat could move nowhere without alerting its prey.

Even I feel this may be going a bit far but I do look forward to my first sighting of a hunting cat, stumbling round the garden, desperately trying to cover its bells with a paw, and snorting soil out of its nostrils after yet another lurch into the ground as efforts to be a lean and hungry killing machine on three legs come to naught. And, after all the crapping in my vegetable gardens over the years, I’ll sit back in my patio chair, open another stubby, and have a good laugh.