Animals

My insomnia has kicked in with a vengeance which is just as well considering I’ve let it get to 1am without writing this. I forgot. I’ve been too busy stroking the cat, and no that isn’t a euphemism.

Now the little beast is asleep to my left, lying on his back with his paws in the air, snoring. He has no trouble sleeping, this cat. He trips over in his sleep though, just like we do. That sudden jolt when your dream throws a ball at your head and you start awake into a totally different reality and try to establish which was the real one again. It’s funny to see a cat do it, so familiar and yet so animal. He is immediately on all fours looking around. What do cats dream of?

I thought I’d give the snake a bit of quality time, as Mao can be very demanding of my attention. I spent a few hours with a Hex necklace this morning. I’ve been wondering when he’d get round to doing a skinshed and a poo as he’s had two mice without a sign of it. He’d clearly been storing it up for me, but it’s quite remarkable the amount of mouse that gets converted into raw snake on the way through that mobile aesophagus. There was virtually nothing to clear up but the old skin, and he felt new and fresh. It’s quite a thing to be able to do, to just turn yourself inside out and have a whole new layer exposed to the air, fresh and clean and just a little bit bigger.

Mao is completely indifferent to the snake – I think it’s so far from his frame of reference that he still thinks it’s a scarf. They both leave large unwanted portions of themselves lying around for me to clear up. They are both very different but very simple creatures. Are they natural enemies? Maybe so, but not in this flat. They’re both pretty blind and neither of them have a very well developed frame of reference. Mao is friendly but very limited. His ambitions don’t really range beyond the next stroke, and whatever he’s freaking out about in his dreams, it isn’t ophidian. It’s probably just a big clumsy dreamfoot walking where he’s lying.

Hex and I hung out celebrating what must be pushing being the anniversary of his starring role in The Tempest. My happy little menagerie, sheltering from the horrors in a nice warm flat. I wonder what sort of animal will come into here next… Somebody is gonna ask me to look after their okapi. I can feel it.