by Matthew Cobb
In the UK, the holiday season sprawls for about 10 days (we get both the 25th and the 26th as holidays), and you soon lose track of what day it is. Although I don’t know what day it is today, I know it’s not Saturday, and that this post is inappropriate, but that will simply teach Jerry to leave me with the keys to the car.
This whatever-day-it-is felid has just been reported to the Greater Manchester Police by its owner, who dialed “999” (the UK equivalent of 911) to ask the emergency services for help with her cat. The “emergency” had been going on for two hours, and consisted of the cat playing with string.
The woman said the cat’s endless playing was “doing her head in”. The reply of the operator is not recorded. You can hear the call by clicking here at the BBC website.
Good to see that Britain has the ‘crazy cat lady’ too.
I always knew that emergency hotlines would finally be used for real problems someday.
And now it has happened!
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Nice kitty picture too! Although I have seen cats stop playing for a second, seeming to be considering something else, I’m surprised that period would extent to the time needed to take a picture, especially with the string wrapped around its ear. The photographer must have been prepared.
Slightly OT. Many, many years ago (Not in a galaxy far away, unfortunately)I was the Officer in charge of the West Yorkshire Police Western Area control room one New Year’s Eve when I received a call from Mike Gibson who happened to be in London.
Who? Well, for those in the know he was the Irish Captain of the game played by men with odd shaped balls, otherwise known as Rugby.
That’s like grid-iron football, with rules but no body armour.
He was doing a first-class impression of a Bishop on the Communion wine, not to put too fine a point on it he was rat-arsed. All he wanted me to do on the busiest night of the year was to search the local telephone directory to try a find a friend of his that he hadn’t seen in 10 years, but to be helpful he could almost remember the man’s name!
It is best described as an amusing interlude and one that he met at every turn with, ‘But I’m Mike Gibson the Irish Rugby Captain.’
So it’s not just silly cat-women who cause amusement.
The Irish half of me wanted to commiserate, the Scottish half just wanted to celebrate and the English half of me put the phone down – eventually.
Happy Days.