Guide Cats for
the Blind - The Launch
by Ian Hutson
Doris Mildenhall, ninety-one,
was chuffed to bits when the freshly, hastily and
ill-advisedly re-named Guide Cats charity asked
her to help launch the new range of animals for
the visually impaired. They sent a taxi just for
her, would award her a bouquet at the end they
said, and her photograph would be in all of the
newspapers.
Asbo was a re-purposed
domestic rescue-moggy with a cute little nose and
pert whiskers, fresh from training school. Albert
from Animal Research & Development calculated
that Asbo would consume just twenty percent of
the food an old-fashioned guide dog would require
and cats also presented the advantage of being
pre-equipped with night-vision, thereby doing
away with the need for expensive doggy-goggles.
Moreover, as any cat person will tell you until
you beat them into blessed silence, cats are much
smarter than dogs so they had been able to
condense the whole orientation programme down to
a snuggle, a nose-bump and a few simple
pictograms drawn with a stick in a litter-tray.
While the Mayor in full
regalia cut a lovely blue ribbon for the Press,
Doris took the handle of Asbo’s hi-vis
harness, smiled for the cameras and pushed
forward gently. R&D had advised that working
a guide-cat was much like riding a Segway Scooter
(which was exactly why Doris had been chosen for
the launch).
Asbo proved a difficult
scooter to start, hunkering to the ground and
twisting around to scratch and bite at the
harness, then sinking his fangs for some probably
political reason into the Mayor’s nearby,
almost wholly innocent ankle (as opposed to the
slightly guilty, further away one). Albert
whispered in Doris’s ear. She pushed again,
slightly harder, and this time gave a double
tongue-click, rather as one might in order to
engage first gear with a horse.
Paparazzi reports claim
that Doris then flailed around like a helicopter
in some distress, with Asbo at the end of his
harness wailing ultra-sonically, scratching
everything and everyone within reach. According
to R&D’s notes the reach radius was
approximately (Doris’s-Arm)+(Harness-Length)+(fully-extended-cat)
wide by (Doris’s-height)+(Doris’s-reach-with-a-dislocated-shoulder)+(bent-harness)+(gravity-defying-cat-length)
high; a truncated sphere of blurred cat and
mildly incontinent guest of honour – an
ethereal English doughnut with damp Doris as the
jam filling.
As suddenly as Asbo had
become a tethered banshee he stopped dead, arched
his back to the Board of Directors, hissed, shat
and spat all at once. Doris, thus unexpectedly
still alive and freed from the strictures of
centripetal counter-force, flopped onto her
backside with legs akimbo and was lost in a cloud
of Harris Tweed twinset fumes and M&S gusset
dust. Her Sunday-best velvet hat was askance and
her magnificent butterfly-frame spectacles were
hanging from one ear. She was glassy-eyed and
grinning.
Quite frankly, she was
spontaneously multi-reminiscing about a hasty
seven minutes and twelve glorious seconds spent in
flagrante lend-lease delicto with an
American pilot behind the NAAFI one late summer
evening in nineteen forty-three, or possibly
forty-four.
‘I’ll take
one’ she said, blinking. ‘No, in fact
– I’ll take two please.’
|
