Feline Sexual Predators in the Expensive Sector

'Eyes without a Face' by glitterdarkstar, from deviantart

It's Saturday, I'm in a bit of a funk, worried about a friend in another country. It sucks to be so far away from someone you love sometimes, and I'm not good at feeling helpless and impotent. Although, maybe there are people out there that are good at it. Are there?

I go to the Chief's to take him out for coffee. He's still cleaning the detritus left over from the office party the night before. I could say something here about him still being in stripy pyjamas as he cleans, but that would be a breach of privacy. Not that he'd know about it. The Chief isn't reading the Daily anymore. He says that I betrayed my readership by disappearing from the face of the planet and abandoning them to virtual silence.

While the Chief cleans, I wander upstairs to find Harry, who can always be found under the bed. Harry is the Chief's cat. Actually, I'm not sure Harry can acccurately be described as anyone's cat (cats don't really belong to anyone but themselves, do they?). True to form, he is lying under the bed looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and disdain.

"Harry! Come on then! Come on then!" I call, not like an invitation to a fight, but like an invitation to come out and allow me to harass him for a while. He concurs.

Harry is a strange feline, the Chief calls him a non-cat. His affection comes in stages. First he drools on you a lot. He's a natural born dribbler. Usually, I give up at this stage, for obvious reasons. I like cats, but rarely enjoy taking a dip in their saliva.

Today, though, I am feeling distant and unsure. I'm happy for Harry's company. I lie down on James' bed and Harry jumps up to join me (don't tell James, he doesn't let Harry on the bed). I stare balefully through the window (which is also a jar) at a windy, raining, very English autumn day. Harry drools happily all over my sleeve as I stroke him. We stay like this for awhile.

I am thinking about my distant friend. I am thinking about how helpless I feel, and even though I know worrying solves nothing, I have never discovered the ability to switch off the part of my mind that, when something bad happens to someone I live, worries and worries and worries about them. I wish he was here, and then I could take over and busy around until everything was ok again. It occurs to me that maybe worrying is more about me than it is about my friend.

Then Harry bites my arm.

"Ow!!! Harry!" I squeal, in an entirely girlish manner that makes me feel more than a little ashamed as the sound emerges from my mouth.

It's not that he bit me hard or anything, but Harry has very sharp teeth and even a light bite is enough to get you to notice. Then I saw something else. Harry had stopped drooling. Which is how I discovered stage 2 of affection from Harry. Biting.

Harry bit my arms, my head (which left a lot of saliva in my hair - not cool) and even my leg. I announced a very firm 'No!' however, when he moved towards my chest, though. No frickin' way, dog. Or cat.

At this stage, I got a little nervous about Harry's biting fetish, and, feeling cat saliva trickling over my scalp, I got up to try to sort out my hair. Harry sat on the bed as I stood up and turned my back to him. I was fussing with my hair, when suddenly I felt a pair of teeth sink firmly into my right buttock. The girlish squeal long-gone, I emitted an actual yelp of genuine surprise, followed by a round of loud laughter.

"Harry, you actually just bit my butt, dude!" I squawked at him, and I could have sworn that cat was laughing.

The Chief appeared in the doorway.

"Who have you been talking to?" he asked quizzically glancing around the room.

"Harry." I tell him, as if it were obvious. He was the only other, er, cat there.

The Chief glanced at Harry then at me.

"Shall we go?" was all he said.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Sherlock Holmes

The entire lyrics to the Charlie Brown and Snoopy show are now posted on yesterday's post, thanks to the Anonymous. We cannot get enough feedback. Obviously, I now also cannot get enough of singing the Charlie Brown theme tune, but that's a whole other post.

I spent much of this morning, in my incarnation as a Policy Assistant with the Ministry of Cultural Services (recently renamed, do keep up), with the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Lancelyn Green Bequest. You can get an insight into this amazing collection, which has truly staggering potential for the development of the city (not least in terms of tourism, but also academic reputation and kudos with the huge international community of Sherlockians), at the City Museum's award-winning exhibition, A Study in Sherlock (do you see what they did there? No? Well, you'd probably have to be a bit of a Sherlockian to truly get that pun). I'd recommend a visit - I've been twice and will doubtless take visitors to it again.

I was visiting only the Archives strand of this important bequest, which is being co-ordinated by the city's fantastic archive staff and a band (unspeckled) of outstanding volunteers, of which I one day hope to be one. The Archives service are dealing with the records of the Collection, inlcuding letters, paper based memorabilia and countless photographs. The complexity of the work being undertaken is astounding, and there is so much work involved for the volunteers and project staff. I was lucky enough to meet two of the volunteers this morning, one who was working on the digitalization of the project and one who was removing duplicates from the photograph collection prior to them being digitized.

What struck me most about my visit (I was preparing an article for Culture Brief, our internal newsletter) was not just the amount of work needed to prepare a collection for public access like the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Lancelyn Green Bequest, but the breadth of skills required. The photographs alone cover such an extensive range of subjects and themes, for example.

Currently, the collection's preparation is split across libraries, who are dealing with books, museums who are dealing with the 3d items and the records service, who are dealing with the archives element of the collection.

If you can't get to the Portsmouth City Museum immediately, you can find out more about the collection at its dedicated website, here. Subscribe to the email newsletter online at the Collection's website for news.

In other news, my mojo has returned. I had been fearing for much of last week that a huge aspect of my personality, namely the fun part, had disappeared with the removal of caffeine from my daily diet. However, today, I felt much more like myself, and even found time to irritate the Chief, amuse Miss Sally and distract my other colleagues from their valuable work.

Everyone in the office is understandably relieved by the return of my eight personality - one of approximately thirty competing personalities, the Chief believes.