We are not a cat; we’re just tired

‘IAM not a cat.’ Was he trying to reassure the judge, or was it himself he was trying to convince? If the previous week was the week of Jackie Weaver, who faced accusations of having no authority, last week we all connected with the US lawyer who got stuck as a cat in a Zoom court hearing.

Maybe it was his eyes, shifting around anxiously behind the cat filter, a metaphor for the prisons we all find ourselves in. Or maybe it was because we realised that we all need to reassure ourselves now and then, as we regress from our humanity, that we are not a cat. Yes, we increasingly wear coats of fur and down, we increasingly want to curl up in a ball somewhere warm and go to sleep, and we would increasingly view playing with a ball of wool as entertainment. But we need to keep telling ourselves. We are not a cat. We are human beings godammit, and we will begin to act human again, and wear human clothes, and do human things when this is over.

When this is over. A phrase that seems to mock us at this stage. We keep waiting, wishing our lives away, getting over 2020, getting over January, now getting over February, getting over so-called Quarter 1, waiting for the numbers to go down so we can meet three people from one other family in a garden, waiting for the vaccines. But increasingly, some scientists are telling us it will never be over. Now they seem to be saying even vaccinations won’t be the answer. Variants you see. And there’ll always be variants. Some of them almost seeming to be saying we will have to live with Covid, and we all know how that worked out. And we’re just so tired.

So in the meantime, we tear ourselves apart. We are not cats, but squalling alley-cats. The media are camped out at the airport feeding our need for someone we can blame. But increasingly it seems that sympathy is what we should be offering those poor souls en route to Spain and the Canaries.

The previous week, we had people going to Benidorm for knee surgery, and then we heard of the people whose dental issues are so severe that they cannot be treated in this country. They need to go to Tenerife, a world centre of excellence for dentistry. Some of them are so sick they don’t even make it to the appointment. And of course, if you need an urgent hair transplant, Istanbul is your only man. Everyone knows Turkish rugs are the best.

For those of us with the opposite problem, it may become essential to go to Seville, world famous for its barbers. Some of us are considering going to Florida to have our children surgically removed from their iPads.

They are not cats, but they are now evolved into some kind of half-child/ half-device hybrid. If they can learn to order food on it, they won’t need us anymore. Our job will be done.

At least now the powers-that-be have flattened any hope or expectation we might have, so everything will be a bonus now. Meanwhile, we barely have the heart to judge the man on Prime Time driving around on coke with his child in the back seat.

Maybe he thought it was a cat.