Six cats, two excuses

A couple of postcards from my collection, in the niche subcategory of kittens + apologies

I had to cancel plans this weekend. I was due to see family and to check out the excellent-sounding NeoAncients festival in Stroud. But, feeling like I was coming down with something, I couldn’t imagine driving or getting onto a train (let alone a rail-replacement bus), so I phoned with my apologies and stayed home.

I’m fine, but I’ve spent the Bank Holiday weekend resting (apart from a spell this morning when I decided every single surface looked inordinately dusty; I got out a cloth and polish and dusted for five frenzied minutes until I realised that I had inadvertently used up all my energy for the day).

I’ve caught up with some films I’d missed, including A Real Pain, and I’ve watched some ‘good bad’ TV (the first couple of episodes of a series with Jon Hamm playing a rich guy who loses his job and so starts stealing from his wealthy friends). Yesterday I read an article from a three-week-old newspaper that was lying around; I thought it was so good I’ve cut it out ready to stick in my notebook. And you can read it online without the need for scissors and glue: Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’. I’ve not read any of Katie Kitamura’s novels … have you? That will be next on my list from the library.

Anyway, going back to cancelling plans, I wanted to share a couple of gems from my postcard collection that deal, in very different ways, with having to let people down.

Watertight excuse, 1911

Dear Chum, 

                     I received
your letter but I cant
come ashore because
I am in the rattle
4½ hours adrift, I will
send letter later, ive
one in the stream now not far
from Mount Wise, so you come aboard if you can.

This one, coincidentally, was forwarded on the next day to an address near Stroud (having originally been sent to Devonport). As far as I know, ‘in the rattle’ = in the bad books (or does it mean that they are actually imprisoned?! Naval historians, let me know). Mount Wise was a Royal Navy HQ for the area.

On to our second example:

Stone-cold sentiments, sent in 1961

Dear [name], 

   I am not coming
home for the
Dinner, it is not worth
it. I am enjoying myself.
isn’t it cold, cold
enough for snow. how are 
you both. Love Mother.

When I dug these cards out this afternoon and re-read them, I turned them over to the picture side and realised that, although sent fifty years apart, both senders chose to soften the disappointment with … kittens.

The front side of the postcards. The top image is the one from the 1911 card and shows a colourised picture of a cat and a kitten in a basket, with two more kittens either side. The 1961 image is a black-and-white photograph of two kittens on a table, both looking unimpressed.

p.s. Apparently, the collective noun for kittens is ‘a kindle of kittens’. And I’ve written before about the collective noun for cats:

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