‘Get a cat’
Time for a break from the parade of shops currently occupying my mind. So, a little feline diversion...
In his book Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, Patrick Leigh Fermor tells an old story about a Greek sea captain. Troubled by the number of rats on his boat, the seaman calls in a priest to perform the ceremony for casting our vermin. Chants, censing and asperging ensue, and the priest takes his fee, ensuring the man he’ll have no more trouble now, the rites have never failed. ‘”But there’s just one point,” he said. “What’s that, Father?” The priest stooped his bearded head to the seaman’s ear and whispered: “Get a cat.” Since then the phrase “getting a cat” means, in maritime circles, making surety doubly sure.’
Often, of course, the process of ‘getting’ a cat is rather passive. A cat arrives, and if the humans are welcoming enough, the cat stays. Something like this probably happened in 1963, when a tabby adopted the verger of Fairford church and his wife. Tiddles stayed, became the church cat, and attracted the affection of visitors, who come to Fairford to admire the stunning late-medieval stained glass, and of parishioners, on whose laps she sat during services. No doubt her mousing skills were not much used. But the parishioners of Fairford were doubly sure. And when Tiddles died in 1980, this stone, carved by Peter Juggins, was erected near the south porch. Requiescat.
