I’ve been asking a lot of people recently if they know the definition of irony. Mainly due to an episode of Futurama, where Bender continuously reclassifies people’s “irony” comments as coincidence, happenstance, and a few other words I’ve forgotten. I even looked it up in the dictionary, but the definition was too hard to understand. I wondered if it was an example of irony in it’s own right.
Anyway, all of this is a long precursor to an event on Wednesday afternoon, when, after nine days of feeling unwell, I was celebrating my return to health by baking a coconut cake and helping Miss M with her homework. Pilchen, who was inside, asked to be let out, so Miss M obliged, and ran back to the kitchen to tell me Pilch had climbed a tree and looked like she was going to kill a bird. Deep in cake mix, I made some flip remark like “silly old Pilchen won’t catch a bird, don’t worry”. A couple of seconds later, Miss M went to check on proceedings and came running back, crying and screaming that an ironic fate had befallen the bird. I silently cursed the cat, and ran to the front door to see if I could perform a rescue mission, but was too late.
Miss M was totally hysterical, and any explanation I tried to make about a cat being a wild animal, or designed to kill (yeah, I couldn’t believe I came up with that either) didn’t make much difference. Then she asked me if a cat could kill a human, and I thought carefully before replying with a definite “no”, since my last soothing comments had been such a lie.
So I’m hoping Pilch won’t prove me wrong by suddenly leaping the fence and taking down a passerby, because that would be hard to explain to the child. Hoping even more she doesn’t take me down during the night when she appears to be sleeping quietly in the corner …
Today I’m loving: rereading Michael Connelly’s first seven books in four days
