Remote chance of dental work
Icouldn’t resist the lolly sitting in the jar on the shop counter and now I am lighter in the mouth for yielding to temptation. Another filling had gone west, so I rang one of those dentists that advertise all the time about how they can take you at the drop of a hat, or a filling in this case, but there wasn’t an appointment till September.
Oh well, by then waves of saliva will have worn down the rough edges that my tongue strays to, so what’s the point? There’s so much amalgam on that side of the mouth that losing a bit will probably straighten up my noggin’s inclination to list to the left.
Perhaps I should just let all the fangs drop out and retreat to the bush or a remote island like Japanese hermit Masafumi Nagasaki, who turned his back on civilisation and has lived on the island of Sotobanari since 1989.
A traveller who writes about castaways recently discovered the naked Nagasaki on the remote island, reported that he was poorly, and now the hermit lives in great misery some 60km away in the city. The spoilsport Japanese authorities have refused to allow Nagasaki to return to his beloved island where the octogenarian wanted to die.
There may be a scarcity of remote islands to repair to in New Zealand but there is certainly a lot of bush. However, I wouldn’t fancy having my health threatened by the 1080. If a travelling castaway writer should stumble upon hermits who took to the Kiwi bush a few decades back, they might find human mutants covered in pustules and knobs from exposure to the poison.
A hunter friend is adamant that it’s not just Zealandia causing the rich birdlife in Wellington, it’s the 1080 drops that have driven our winged friends into the city.
Sometimes I have romantic ideas of turning my back on civilisation and going bush, but it would be just my luck to be ripped to shreds by packs of feral cats.
Just about every second person I know, of late, seems to have been through a long, drawn-out cat death. The vets have ummed and ahhed over the moggy and kept it going and going at great harrowing expense and pain, when really it should have kicked the kitty litter bucket weeks ago.
Now that the puss has passed, they miss the furry face, but not the kitchen floor awash with urine-soaked newspaper from misfires into the kitty litter tray, or watching the poor creature suffer.
Some vets are making an awful lot of money getting to play feline god. We poor dumb owners of creatures (I too have been guilty of this) slavishly follow their advice.
It’s a wonder vets haven’t turned their hand to running elderly cat homes, where the declining animal could spend its last days curled up on sunny La-Z-Boys watching reruns of Top Cat and pet versions of The Chase.
Guilty owners could visit on Sundays clutching posies of cat mint and small preserving jars of dainty offals. It goes without saying that at the bottom of every communal litter tray would be a picture of Mr G Morgan.
Cows suffering beatings by farm workers must look at cats and wonder where they went wrong. Seriously, there have been so many reported incidents of the breaking of tails, the slicing off of udders, and hitting of animals by sadists, surely it’s time for an animal rights commissioner to be appointed. Either that or humans should be banned outright from milking sheds and let the robots perform the work in a decent and humane manner.