SO A NATION of animal lovers is outraged and everyone says only a sick and twisted person would chuck a perfectly serviceable mousecatcher into a bin and leave it there.
Bank clerk Mary Bale had some kind of rush of blood to the head and, after a quick shufti to make sure no one was watching her, grabbed Lola the moggy by the scruff and chucked her in the wheeled recycling receptacle.
Anyone who would even think about putting a cat in a bin must be totally doolally. Yeah?
Er . . . well. It was a long time ago, you see. I was very emotional. But I love all little furry animals, honestly.
My cat was a feisty feline called Jethro. As he had matured, he had taken to acting very oddly to me and the other lodgers in the house. Try offering cat food and he would look at you as if you were trying to poison him. No, he preferred sausages.
He had begun to show his disapproval loudly when his housemates did everyday things – like shout at him, fight with each other or roll in from the pub having had a few noggins. He was a bit Free Church in his ways, that cat.
Jethro would arch his back and hiss at us. The best thing to do when someone or some thing does that is to ignore them. Show them you are not bothered.
I take the same approach nowadays with Mrs X. She can have fabulously hissy fits. There have been many over the years, but they have never got her anywhere. I just gawp back at her, hissing myself.
Jethro would not be shunned. Streaking up the curtains, he would perch himself high up on the rail until you had forgotten about him.
He would crouch there, waiting. Then, when the object of his loathing came in from the kitchen, often carrying a bowl of hot soup or platter of steaming cheesy pasta, the mad moggy would launch himself into space and crash on to their unsuspecting head, sending them somersaulting into the fireplace in a splatter of lentils and tubes of pasta.
Ah, how we loved those games with Jethro.
Housemates in that Big Bother house, which included Bernera types like Heggo and Norman Murray and Peter Cameron and an Irishman called Paul, would emerge from encounters with Jethro having been “sgrobed” red raw. They looked as if they had done 10 rounds with Muhammad Ali and not a small, if slightly evil, sausage-munching pussy.
So how did Jethro end up in the wheelie bin, you ask. Oh, don’t talk about that. The memories are flooding back. I’m filling up here.
Here in the Western Isles, the brawny types in Ness like other animals, too. Like birds, for example. No, not those kind. Get your minds out of the gutter and think gugas.
The unpalatable, stinky mess that passes for food in places north of Barvas has been getting the SSPCA a tad excited. They think it is time the Scottish Government called a halt to the slaughter of a couple of thousand gannets every year on Sula Sgeir.
Like Eddie Mair at the BBC and several national newspapers, I had a chat about this needless slaughter, which casts such doubts on our claims of being civilised, with my old classmate, Donald S. Murray.
Now based in Shetland, the teacher and scribe reckons it is OK to lasso these birdies, clobber them senseless and serve them up, as all Ness people do, as an aphrodisiac disguised as a shabby mop head.
It was equally delightful to hear the review of the week on the Radio 4 PM programme on Friday afternoon.
There was a Mrs Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells-type who prattled on about how difficult it was to listen to D.S. and his defence of the “barbaric” bird hunt.
“If a person did this anywhere other than in the Western Isles, he would be hauled before the courts, and rightly so. Save the guga,” she shreiked.
Yeah, Niseachs, that’s you told. You could just feel all the Mrs Wilberforce-Smythes throughout the home counties nodding over their scones and clotted cream.
We are not all Niseachs, though. In case you’re traumatised about poor Jethro, he did, indeed, end up in a wheelie bin and was carted off to the Bennadrove Garden of Rest, otherwise known as the landfill site.
However, I should explain that, unlike lucky Lola, when he entered the bin, Jethro was no longer with us. He was not serviceable as a mousecatcher or as anything else. He was an ex-cat.
Dashing across Perceval Road to try to see off a neighbour’s much-better-behaved moggy, he met a grisly end under the wheels of one of two passing vehicles.
They were not going fast. One was a hearse. How ironic if it was the wheels of the hearse that did for him. However, just behind it was a butcher’s van. Maybe it was loaded up with sausages – just how Jethro would have wanted to go.
The next day was bin day. We all got up early and put on black ties. To make his final journey as comfortable as possible, Jethro was placed on a bed of crumpled pages from various newspapers and a colourful Scandinavian magazine that was found under one housemate’s bed.
The binmen noticed us and scratched their heads. Unwitting pallbearers, they grabbed the bin, as we peered through watery eyes.
As it was upended into the lorry, it all got too much for us. The hankies came out.
The binmen must have sensed the deep, unspoken emotion. As one, they looked down and shook their heads. That was lovely. Binmen in Stornoway can be so sensitive.
Just think: Jethro is probably up there now. After a good feed of celestial bangers, I bet he is perched on that great curtain rail in the sky, waiting and wondering who will be the first to come home.
