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The cats are spending their summer holiday with us. Although they do spend a lot of time lolling about, sleeping and eating (as you do when you're on holiday), Kevin and Rocky don't really recognise weekends as being on a different schedule from the rest of the week. Because of that, I was woken with a head butt, feet positioning themselves on my rib cage and a gentle paw on the mouth at the usual hour (not long enough after dawn to make you feel you've missed much of the morning). I kept my eyes half-closed as we went downstairs, holding on to the banister so that when I did trip over one of them I wouldn't actually break my neck. (The theory is that if you don't fully open your eyes you can go back to bed.) Kevin has to have his tablet before he eats. First you have to catch him, which is tricky since he has that same sixth sense about his medication that he has about going to the vet and can disappear while you're still thinking about how to proceed. Then you have to wrestle his mouth open. Then you have to jam the teeny tiny pill down his throat, all the while telling him what a good boy he is while he claws your thighs. By the time I'd done all that and scooped the kibble into their bowls while they wailed pitifully and circled round me, getting under my feet and causing me to knock over the bin, I was pretty wide awake.
Resigned to staying up, I decided to go round the corner for the paper. I opened the front door. The day before had been unusually sunny and warm, but today the air was dense and grey and a thick but oddly soundless rain was falling. I went back in for the umbrella.
Obviously, the blokes who run the shop don't own a cat because they weren't open yet.
Several people were huddled under the overhang with the patience for which the British used to be known throughout the world.
'Welcome back to Old Blighty,' said the plump woman with the natural tan. She'd just come back from the beaches of Cyprus.
The weather-bronzed chap in the bright shirt shuffled his feet. 'You can't beat the English summer,' he muttered. He'd just come back from the melting-sun plains of Africa.
'I wish we was still in LA,' said one of the two teenage girls (both of them also naturally tanned, their hair bleached out by sun and sea and wearing, rather optimistically I felt, shorts and sleeveless vests).
The other girl said she did, too.
In the fearsomely polite way for which the British also used to be known throughout the world (I being the only one with no tan either natural or unnatural and armed for the weather), they asked if I'd gone anywhere nice on my holiday.
I said yes.
'And where was that?' asked the woman who was probably still shaking the sand out of her shoes.
I said, 'Norfolk.'
'You mean like in Virginia?' asked the girl in the I Love L.A. t-shirt.
I smiled gamely. 'No,' I said. 'I mean like in England.'
The all exchanged one of those amused, that's-not-the-way-we-do-it smiles.
'What's there to do in Norfolk?' asked ILL's friend.
'I'll wager it wasn't a very long holiday,' said the chap who had watched the sun set on the Kalahari.
Everyone laughed.
'Longer than you'd think,' I said.
To begin with, when you have a car like mine, going round the block can take an hour. Going to Norfolk takes considerably more.
There were three of us going. That meant three sleeping bags, three mattresses, three rucksacks, three pairs of Wellies, two tents, the stove, the barbecue, a week's supply of food. All in a car that was meant to carry two very slender people (the British used to be famous for that, too) with the dog and a picnic hamper on the back seat. (The good news was that the wind-up torch has never worked and the other torch, the hum-dinger one I bought in case we broke down at night on the motorway, always goes off like a smoke alarm no matter which button you push, so they were both left at home.)
We put things in and took things out and rejigged everything for an hour or two but it began to look as though the only way we could get everything in was to leave one of us home. In the end we decided to put C in the back seat first, and then build up our cargo around her.
'You all right back there?' I called as the engine started.
'Except that I can't move and my knee's touching my chin, I'm fine,' said C.
'Don't worry,' said E. 'Even though, it's not going to take us more than three or four hours. And we'll have a pub lunch when we get there.'
C said she couldn't wait.
The car broke down the first time right after we stopped for tea. After the tea we decided that since it was getting late we'd all be dead from starvation if we didn't find a fine old country pub for lunch right then, so we headed off down a fine old country lane.
Almost magically, we broke down right at the entrance to a petrol station.
'See if they'll let you use their phone to ring the AA,' said E.
I said but I thought you brought your mobile (as we all know, I do not do mobile phones). He said he had, but he didn't have much credit on it and we should save it for an emergency.
The kid in the station wouldn't let me use their phone. The kid in the Little Chef next door would, but his boss wouldn't. The kid in the motel behind the Little Chef dialled the number for me.
It took an hour or so, but eventually the AA man got us going.
Everyone felt not just cheerful but relieved. The disaster that we'd all been dreading (funnily enough, this had happened before on long journeys) had come and gone. We were on our way. We'd be there in no time.
Within twenty minutes (having failed to fine anywhere still serving lunch) the emergency prophesised by E happened.
We broke down on the A11. Unlike the entrance to the petrol station, the A11 has no safe place to park your car while you wait for the AA. Assuming, of course, that the AA is coming.
The C and E sat way up on the bank, away from the frantic rush of lorries the length of a city block hurtling by, while I sat in the car (so I could hear more than traffic) and listened to the automated voice say 'Your call is important to us... You are in the high priority queue... Thank you for waiting....' Every time a bus or truck went by my little car shook and rattled. This is it, I thought, they're going to knock us over. 'Your call is important to us... You are in the high priority queue... Thank you for waiting....' The voice kept repeating, and all the while I stared out at the darkening sky. I was just wondering if the storm would actually be as bad as it looked it would be when a living person suddenly spoke. 'How can I help you today?' I squealed with joy. I told him how he could help me. We'd already broken down once... this was my number... this was our details... I was just at the part where I told him where we were, my mouth open to say mile marker number______, when the phone gave a delicate little beep and went dead.
'I told you it didn't have much credit,' said E.
Heads down as the rain started to fall, C and I began the long march back to the petrol station. At least my head was down. C said, 'A Triumph Spitfire just want by waving at us.'
We stopped and looked back. The Spitfire had pulled up behind our car. A couple were climbing out. Maybe they had a phone we could borrow. By the time we reached the Spitfire its driver was standing with E, the two of them looking down at the engine the way men do.
'Don't worry,' said his wife. 'If anyone can fix your car by the side of the road, it's D. That's what he does. Fixes Triumphs.'
Of course he does, I thought, I should have guessed that.
'So how long did it take you to get to Norfolk?' asked the woman who had spent her holiday sipping cool drinks and reading novels she didn't feel bad about spilling sunblock on.
'Eight hours.' I didn't mention that this was us going flat out, since we were afraid to stop again if we had a choice. By the time we reached the campgrounds the engine was overheating.
'Camping's nice, though,' said the bloke who'd camped not on a site with RVs and families playing badminton but where the lions and antelope roam. 'Relaxing.'
Did they think we were mad? We could've camped in the backyard for all that. I said that we weren't there just for the camping.
'Course not,' said I Love L.A. 'You were there for all the other stuff to do. Like..." She frowned, trying to think of what else there might be to do north of London.
'Beaches!' filled in her friend. 'Don't they have beaches up there? You know, if it wasn't raining you could go to the beach, right?'
'And museums,' said the woman. 'They must have museums.'
I said I reckoned they do.
'And a boardwalk,' chimed in the first girl. 'They must have rides and an arcade. That sort of thing.'
'Historic sites,' said the man in the shirt. 'Weren't the Romans up there?'
As far as I can tell, the Romans were everywhere.
'Actually,' I said. 'We went to learn how to build a cob house.'
I Love L.A. was eyeing some boys across the road, her friend was buffing her extraordinarily long silver nails on her shorts, the woman was looking at her watch and even the man in the shirt was glancing up the road, but this statement caught their attention.
'A what?'
'You mean like out of sweet corn?'
'Can you do that?'
'Why would you want to?'
I explained that the cob house is another old British tradition. Low-impact, made of natural materials and as friendly to the earth as a tree or a bumblebee. 'They use passive solar energy so they need little extra heat in the winter and they're naturally cool in the summer,' I further explained.
Everyone nodded, though it could have been because they were dozing off.
But the age-old sense of politeness ruled. 'I'm sorry,' said the woman, 'but I'm not quite getting this. Are you saying they're made out of corn cobs?'
'No.' I laughed, just in case this was an example of the legendary British sense of humour. 'They're made out of cob. It's a mixture of clay, sand and straw.' Even to me I sounded like a manual.
The girl whose nails looked like spikes frowned. 'Isn't thatmud?'
'More or less...'
'And how long's that meant to last in this weather?' wondered the chap who had slept in the bush. 'I should think you'd be better off living in a tent.'
'There are cob houses in this country at least six hundred years old,' said I.
"And that's what you did on your holiday?' A smile lit up the first girl's face like the California sun as she saw the bloke from the shop hurrying towards us. 'You built a mud house?'
'Part of one.''
It doesn't sound very exciting,' judged her friend. 'You know, it's not fun like going to Disneyland.'
Oddly enough (and not including the half-naked man who had to be hosed off in the garden because he fell in the bog) it was very exciting and a lot more fun than having your picture taken with Mickey Mouse.
I said you'd be surprised.
This is a cob house. This one looks like somewhere a hobbit would live, but many of them just look like your regular old country cottage made for people generally shorter than we are. This cob house is a one-room studio. It was designed and made by our teacher Kate Edwards of Edwards Eco Buildings. It's even more amazing on the inside.
The first time I saw Harley, she was stretched along the top of a sofa, looking disapproving. Her brothers and sisters (of which, in my memory, there seem to be about a hundred) were launching themselves off the furniture, scrabbling up the curtains and swinging themselves around chair legs the way kittens do, but Harley sat among them like a meditating Zen master in the middle of a riot. She was a cat of enormous dignity, even when a less serious sister was trying to grab her tail. Paws crossed, eyes half-closed, ears pricked, Harley lay there with an air not of tolerance but of graceful endurance. I am above this... she seemed to be saying. And this, too, shall pass... She opened her golden eyes and looked at me. I looked at her. Harley never implored, but Sally, her owner, did. "Please take one of the kittens," Sally begged as the other hundred kittens hurled themselves around us. "Please... please... please..."
I said that I didn't want a kitten. Absolutely I did not want a kitten. I needed a kitten like I needed a pink tutu - possibly less.
I pointed to Harley. "But if I was going to take a kitten," I said, "then that's the one I'd take."
Harley flicked her tail and threw her sister to the floor.
The next time I saw Harley I was on a train going into the city from Long Island. Seconds before the train pulled out of the station, Sally had come racing along the platform, a wicker basket only large enough to hold a picnic for one clutched against her. I was hanging out of a window. She thrust the basket into my hands as the whistle blew, waving good-bye. I sat down, the basket on my lap. There was no sound coming from inside. She must be asleep, I thought, and opened my book. Every five or ten minutes I'd lean my head to the box, but there was still no sound inside. No purring, no snoring, and no complaining. I had once tried to take a cat on a train journey in a box and that cat had not only made an unholy din that did nothing to make us friends among the other passengers, she'd eventually clawed her way out of the box and spent most of the trip on my lap. I began to fear that Harley was dead. I've killed her, I thought. What was I thinking of? She's suffocated in that tiny basket. When I got home, instead of shouting, "Look what I have! I have a surprise!" and pulling out a beautiful kitten with the coloring of a Halloween candy, I was going to pull out a limp length of fur like an old draught excluder. Look what I brought you - a dead cat! Very cautiously, I opened the basket and lifted the lid. Harley opened her eyes. "So you're all right, then?" I said. She twitched one ear. And went straight back to sleep.
I watched Harley walk through the door of our apartment as if it was the door she'd been waiting to walk through all her short life. It occurred to me then that I hadn't chosen her at all - she'd chosen me.
Harley settled right in, but the rest of us took longer. She was often grumpy, largely disapproving and had no tolerance for fools. In Harley's world there were two ways of doing things: her way and the way she didn't want them done. She sat where she wanted, even if someone else was already there. She peed down the plughole in the bathtub. She let you sleep with her. She didn't like loud noise or childish behaviour. When we played ball, she did the counting (one... two... three... THROW!) When we watched TV she demanded her share of salsa and chips. If Harley wanted something, she told you. If your sneezing annoyed her, she complained. If your hand was in the way so she couldn't stretch out on the keyboard of the computer the way she liked, she moved your hand. If you left a tomato or a blueberry muffin unguarded, she ate it. If you ventured out of your room at night when, as far as she was concerned, you weren't supposed to be up at all, she lay in wait to grab a passing foot or stalked you down the hall. And, after that first idyllic train ride, although it was possible to get her in her cat carrier, she howled the whole time like several very unhappy banshees, so that people would be peering into the case, trying to see what unearthly beast you had in there.
Harley pretty much came and went as she pleased - out the back door and over the fence into the gardens and up the fire escapes of Brooklyn to see her friends and have adventures. In one building we lived in, she would go to the top floor apartment every day, to eat tuna fish sandwiches and watch soap operas with the woman who lived there. In another she scaled the heights to pick fights with other cats. And often she couldn't get back down and someone would have to go knocking on doors and climbing through windows to retrieve her.
Harley died this July. Someone, trying to cheer us up, said that eighteen years was a long time for a cat. But, sadly, it's not a long time for a friend.
Harley Street Davidson
1990-2008
One Swell Cat
I have resisted getting a mobile phone for so long that it has almost become the most interesting thing about me.
'What's your mobe number?' someone will ask, pen poised.
And I will smile the smile of the person who has never had a cavity or lost a set of keys and say, 'Oh, I don't have one.'
Incredulous, my questioner will laugh nervously. 'Really? You don't have a mobe? What happened to it?'
Meaning, I assume, did I lose it? Is it on a train somewhere, travelling without me, occasionally playing the theme tune from The Rockford Files to no one? Did I misplace it? Will it be fifty years before someone discovers it under the basement stairs, listening to the last message it received (Hi, it's me... I'm on the bus...) and wondering what it really means? Or maybe it was stolen. (One of my friends had her phone stolen so many times that she always carried two with her, so she could have one nicked and then continue her conversation after the thief had galloped down the road.) Or maybe it fell out of a pocket while I was leaning over the canal to see if that flash of silver was an old can or a fish.
'Nothing happened to it,' I'll assure them. 'I've never had one."
Incredulity turns to astonishment bordering on outright disbelief. 'But that's impossible! How do you manage without a mobile phone?" They're so useful. They're so important. They're so necessary. "For heaven's sake! Even shepherds in the mountains of Spain have mobile phones!"
I can see that mobile phones are useful. And I can see that, especially if you're on a mountain in Spain with only sheep for company, they could be pretty important in an emergency. But I'm not so sure about necessary.
Most people can barely walk two feet without pulling out his or her phone. A bus ride even of only a few minutes is impossible without a conversation (that, yes, really does include the information that the caller is on a bus). No one seems able to nip into a shop for a container of milk without ringing someone to alert her to that fact. I'm in Tesco's... No, the other one... I should be home in ten minutes... A person will be riding her bicycle down a busy road, carrier bags hanging from the handlebars, and instead of giving a great deal of thought to getting through the traffic without ending up under a van, she is chatting away to her best friend about what J said when she told him she didn't want to see him any more. A person will be in the bank, engaged in a transaction that in Olden Times would have involved an exchange of hellos and information (I'd like to withdraw some money... You have to sign this slip... that sort of thing), but now instead of talking to the teller the customer is talking to someone named Sharon and telling her off for borrowing the boots with the rhinestones without asking.
'All right,' you say. 'But the other day I was meeting someone at the train station and if we hadn't had our phones we would never have found each other because even though I told her to meet me outside track 23 she got hungry and was waiting in McDonald's.'
But if she hadn't had a phone with her, she would have stayed where she was meant to be, not wandered off for a packet of chips. Indeed, people not only managed to have fairly full and interesting lives before the advent of the mobile phone, they also managed to meet in front of the cinema at five o'clock as they agreed without having to ring each other as soon as they got out of the tube to say, 'Where are you?' (to which the answer is usually a wave and the words, 'Over here!)
But then I started to rethink my position on mobile phones because of The Incident.
F and I couldn't decide where to have dinner, so we said we'd meet outside the train station at seven. That way we could go down the road to the Mexican place, or across the park to the Ethiopian restaurant. F, who lived near the station, said, 'Don't worry if you're late. I know what the trains are like.'
I sailed out of the station at five to seven. It was winter. It was dark. It was raining with a great deal of enthusiasm. I planted myself just inside the entrance, so only my feet and the front of me would get wet. I spent half an hour listening with no real curiosity to the phone conversations of those around me (I'm at the station... I had pasta for lunch... But I only need to borrow ten quid...). And then (because I also don't own a watch) I went inside to check the time. I went over in my mind my conversation with F that morning. Seven... train station... entrance... Don't worry if you're late... I slouched through the rain for a bit, the way you do, in case when she said 'in front of the entrance' she'd actually meant 'over by the newsagent's' or 'halfway down the road by the auto shop'. At eight, since I was already pretty wet, I did another tour of the area, looking up and down the road as though I expected to see F running over the roofs of cars under an umbrella. At eight thirty, about to go back into the station and get the first train home, I decided instead to walk down to the Mexican restaurant. I peered through the window, like an orphan in a storm. There was F. She was eating chips and salsa.
Even I could see that if I'd had a mobile phone (and if F had had one, which she didn't) I would have been able to ring her at seven-ten and find out that she'd gone straight to the restaurant we hadn't said we'd go to.
That was when I started to give some serious though to getting a mobile phone.
Another friend, C, had recently bought a super-duper model that was a radio, mp3 player, camera and phone all in one. It could play music, take pictures and film clips, and send pictures and messages fast as you could hit the buttons. State of the Art. Guaranteed to be nicked within a day and a half (or to fall in the canal).
'C,' I said as part of my research into buying a mobe. "How's your new phone?'
She said it was brilliant. It could do everything - take pictures, play music, show film clips... The only thing it couldn't do was make phone calls and send text messages.
As I already can't make phone calls or send text messages, I decided against the phone.
Because I've become a bit weary of reading about Amy Winehouse, I haven't been paying much attention to the news lately, but there was an item this week that did catch my attention. Apparently, a plane spotted a group of indigenous people in the Brazilian jungle who had never been made any contact with the modern world before. I first saw this item online, with a tiny picture of men shooting spears into the sky. To be honest, I don't know if this story was true or not. Rumour has it that there was a big piece in The Sun about it, but The Sun isn't a paper I would read if I was in a train crossing Siberia in a snowstorm, totally by myself, and there was nothing else to read, so I didn't see it. The paper I will read didn't have anything about it.
Nonetheless, this story made me think. If it's true, and these people had never seen a plane before - if they had no idea that there was more to the world than the life they'd been living in the jungle for thousands of years - what must they have thought? When the first European ships hove into view off the coasts of the Americas, quite a few people thought their ships must be floating islands. Which makes sense. Not many islands do float, of course, but it's not impossible. And they knew what an island is. So would these surprised hunters in the Brazilian jungle think the plane was some sort of very large bird? With people in it? Or would they have heard stories? Maybe they'd even seen a plane or two before, just never been seen by the plane. At least they had the good sense to shoot at it - and then to scarper - obviously knowing instinctively that whatever it was it wasn't good news (something that didn't occur to most of the indigenous of the Americas until it was way too late).
So here we have a people who have lived a 'primitive' but sustainable lifestyle probably for tens of thousands of years. They can take care of themselves. They feed and clothe themselves, they shelter themselves, they have their own medicines and ways of dealing with accident and illness. If they need something they make it. They've been doing extremely well, really, and require absolutely nothing from anybody else. And these people have now been 'spotted' by the 'civilised world' - a world in which most of us can't put up a shelf. We are almost totally dependent. Everything we have - our food, our clothes, our entertainment, our homes, our transport - we get from someone else.
I am the first to admit that though I'm really good at turning on lights (and turning them off - I do my bit), I have no idea how they work or why. If the planet had depended on me to give it lights and televisions and Iphones, we'd all still be sitting in a cave somewhere singing about the day's hunt while I tried to work out how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. But I am not alone. The majority of us don't have a clue how anything works. If the power goes, we flap around looking for batteries for the torch and waiting for someone else to put the power back on. If water starts streaming down the light cord in the kitchen, we run screaming from the house and call a plumber. A challenge for most of us is what to do for an evening if the TV breaks.
I was once woken up very early on a Saturday morning by my sister-in-law, who must have been twenty at the time, because her mother had gone to work and although she'd figured out how to put two slices of bread in the toaster she didn't know how to boil an egg. How many people are there in our world who can't boil an egg? Or cook a chicken? If you can cook the chicken, would you know how to catch a chicken, kill, pluck and gut it if it was the only thing you had to eat? Or would you just sit there watching in run around all fluffed up and clucking, hoping it'll die of old age before you starve to death? Let's say that the chicken did have a timely heart attack. How would you start the fire if you didn't have any matches?
Those chaps in the jungle - though probably impressed that we can fly and talk to people who aren't there - would be astounded to discover how useless we are personally. So here's my thought question for the month. If these people aren't left alone by us (as one certainly hopes they will be), what will they make of fellow humans whose greatest contribution to their own survival is shopping? What on earth will they make of Amy Winehouse?
I just got back from a trip to New York. Where I stayed there is a very large colony of wild parrots. I know, you don't think of parrots when you think of New York. (Not out of a cage.) You think of pigeons. Or possibly sparrows. But these parrots are all over! Legend has it that a doctor and his wife let a pair loose (or possibly several pairs) and now there are hundreds of them. They're good sized parrots and of a greenish hue. If you close your eyes when they fly overhead you'd swear you were in the jungle (even though you're standing on a city street by the bagel shop). It's pretty cool, really. No one seems to know how they survive the New York winter (which does usually include snow and freezing temperatures, not conditions one associates with parrots) but they do. I think I can honestly say that you haven't really lived till you've seen twenty or so parrots hanging off the bird feeders of a house in Brooklyn. The world is really very interesting.
Usually when I go to look forward to going to my favourite Chinese restaurant. But my favourite Chinese restaurant has mysteriously closed. Disappointed, I spent a lot of time walking around the Lower East Side of Manhattan (mostly in the rain). I found a very excellent bookstore. Besides a great selection of books, it featured two dogs who were either playing a game of tug-of-war between the shelves or sitting on either side of anyone trying to eat something from the café (looking both expectant and hungry). I don't know if it's something about that section of Manhattan, but the nearby vegan shoe store features a lot of cats, not all of them what you'd call friendly.
Since I got back from New York, Rocky (otherwise known as Demon Kitty because although he looks very sweet he is really very evil) and Kevin (otherwise known as He Who Worries All the Time because that's what he does) have been staying with me - cats like to take a holiday, too.
Because they are only visiting, they're not allowed out. Kevin, who looks like he's always been disappointed and expects nothing more, doesn't mind that much, but Rocky does. Rocky is a trained killer. He doesn't want to be indoors, knocking a soft ball down the hallway. He wants to be outside, tasting blood.
Back at home, Rocky is the scourge of the frogs, birds, mice and even mutant rats of his neighbourhood. Rocky's mother often wakes up to the sound of panicking frogs trying to escape from her flat. She has more than once trod on dead rodents. There have been mornings when her living room looked like an abattoir. Sometimes she's afraid to leave her room. Where people like you and I hear the noises of the city - traffic, police sirens, people shouting because Arsenal just lost again - Rocky hears The Call of the Wild.
Rocky spends a lot of time sitting by the kitchen window, watching the birds and the mice. He calls it Cat TV. After the time I woke up to the sound of running water, I always tie up the tap so he can't accidentally turn it on in a moment of excitement when he thinks that if he scratches at the glass enough he'll be able to escape.
Sometimes Rocky likes to sit on top of the fridge for a better view of the garden. But sometimes he falls off. (So the other things I've learned is to take all magnets off the side of the fridge before he arrives and never to leave anything that might break in the sink.) Rocky is one of those cats who is lucky to have nine lives, because he's always falling off things like table tops and chairs (and refrigerators). And sometimes you'll see a bag moving frantically across the kitchen floor and have to help him out.
Kevin likes to sleep under the bathtub or on the keyboard of my computer in the day, and Rocky likes to sleep on the bed, but at night they both like to be awake. They chase each other through the house. When they get tired of that they try to wake me up. Rocky does this by digging his claws in my head. Or sitting on it. The other night I woke up pretty sharply when Kevin bit my finger.
Rocky also likes to do yoga. He's very good at lying flat on your back in deep relaxation. I have recently reinstated his yoga room privileges (taken away after the time he bit my toe and drew blood) because it's impossible to get into the oneness that is yoga when someone's wailing loudly and waving a foot through the crack in the door.
While Rocky watches Cat TV, Kevin watches Meerkat Manor. He loves it. No matter what he's doing, or where in the house he's doing it, he comes running as soon as the theme song comes on, and sits in front of the set, mesmerised, until it's over. I can't decide whether he has a thing for reality TV or if he thinks the telly is another window.
(Note to You: Those trying to find HERE'S WHAT I THINK
The Teenage Girl's Guide to Life, Love and Walking in Six-inch Platforms by Aunt-Know-It-All (aka Janet Bandry) it is here.
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HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION 
ONE SWELL CAT