Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The moronic inferno descends

Another interregnum – apologies, from now on there will be no more. I’ve been in San Francisco interviewing Neil Young for the Sunday Times and returned jet-lagged and frazzled a day ago to a pile of letters from outraged cat-lovers. Is there something about owning a cat which obligates the owner to have his or her brain sucked out by a straw? As someone who dislikes “domestic” cats, or more properly the people who own them, I would like to think that this is true – that cats are at the nexus of all manner of stupidities, that they convey a certain unfathomable imbecility upon their owners. This seems to have happened in the case of online reader Christina Burton, for example, who rang the RSPCA, the ombudsman (I don’t know which ombudsman) and probably the UN Court of Human Rights to have me banged up for having written the following. I was commenting on the case of the woman called Mary Bale, who placed a live cat in a wheelie bin. Or, if we’re honest, commenting upon the moronic inferno which engulfed the woman not long after. Anyway, this is how I began the article:

‘Well, thank the Lord there were no cctv cameras around when I caught Mr Tibbles in my garden a few weeks back, before the whole furore began. Luckily, I read about Mary Bale and surreptitiously took down the mini-gibbet and buried the remains in a small trench behind the pond, before the Facebook maniacs had a chance to get on the case. The cat had been doing its usual stuff — crapping on the lawn, eating wild animals, urinating in my daughter’s sandpit — before it was unfortunately snagged in the wooden peg and wire snare I had laid by the hedge. It was subjected to a brief trial, of the sort you might receive in Cuba or Burma, before being marched to the centre of the garden swinging by its back legs and subjected to due process: I even put a suit on for the event and sang a brief requiem, by Fauré.

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