I went to visit the General. He was in his diningroom, where he had placed a stick of burning incense in front of the television and a little night light flickered on the coffee table.
“I’m purifying YouTube,” he said.
The scent of incense reminded me of a yoga room.
“I’ve been listening to the wrong people,” he explained. “Trump and Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson for hours on end. And I can’t resist Piers Morgan either. So now the television set is polluted and it needs to be cleansed.”
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“What’s wrong with Piers Morgan?”
“Don’t be fooled,” the General said. “He’s dangerous. He’s a cosy enough fellow and of course he has a brother in the army, so that’s a plus. But for me he’s the beginning of the slippery slope. I start with Piers, since we have a lot in common, and then one thing leads to another, and before you know it, I’m watching Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson. And they keep insinuating that there’s a plot to wipe out all the white males on Earth. Which is ridiculous. But for some reason, after midnight, and a couple of stiff whiskeys later I end up believing them. By the time I go to bed I’ve been completely poisoned by those whinging pricks. So every morning I purify the television with incense. I’m not just trained to kill; I also happen to be a reiki master.”
I didn’t argue about what he watched on television because I wanted him to do me a favour.
“Would you feed the cats while I’m away?” I wondered.
Over the August bank holiday I left them on their own. I thought they could find mice in the long grass. But the summer was so wet that the field mice were wearing wellingtons and had moved to higher ground. The cats were wet and hungry. And then there was a problem with the pine marten; a refugee from somewhere farther up the hills, who had found asylum in the spruce tree near the back door where the magpies had been nesting for years.
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“Did you actually see a pine marten?” the General wondered.
I hadn’t.
“But the magpies owned that tree for generations and they have clearly been banished,” I said. “And something got in through the cat flap. The cats were so stressed that I crushed one of my own nerve tablets into their food to calm them down. And I haven’t forgotten the time the badger ransacked the scullery, although on that occasion it was me who stood terrified and naked, while he eyeballed me boldly, before getting stuck in the cat flap on his way out. So I’m convinced the pine marten is disturbing the cats. Sometimes when I’m walking across the yard I can almost feel two eyes watching me from the top of the tree. I was hoping you might go over and feed the cats when I’m away.”
“I’m terribly sorry but it can’t be done,” he said. “The old jeep is in hospital. Just leave the cats in the house with a litter tray, sufficient food and an old-fashioned radio playing in the distance.”
“I don’t have an old-fashioned radio,” I said. “I get all my radio on the internet. Unless perhaps I was to leave the television on.”
The General’s face turned white.
“Not a good idea,” he declared, “even for cats. Do you want to expose their little minds to YouTube? Have you any idea how exhausting it is, listening to those sour lunatics for hours, ranting about how Marxists are destroying western civilisation?”
“But the cats wouldn’t understand what they were saying,” I argued.
“For most of the time, neither do I,” the General retorted. “But it’s the tone of their voices that does the damage.”
In the end I decided to leave the cats in a cattery. There are plenty of those in Leitrim, and they could be described as hotels for pets, with little apartments for each animal and even calm music playing in the background all day long. So they wont be in danger from the pine marten while I’m away.
Although I changed my opinion about the pine marten. They may be worrying the cats. But they’re also an endangered species, precious migrants taking refuge in my garden. A female might be pregnant after the summer. A mother in search of home. And I can only guess what Tommy Robinson or Andrew Tate’s solution to that might be.