To break the torpor which has overcome this Cat has been one serious challenge. For weeks now, I've been so occupied with the maintaining of my kingdom - fending off pretenders to my throne, administering a salutary thick (or torn) ear where necessary - along with cleaning its precincts of mice, rats, politicians and various other species of vermin. Such activities have been sufficient to occupy my paws, claws, teeth and intellectual powers. While the soothsayers have regaled me with tales of woe about the Great Wibbler Plague - which reputedly attacks the fragile constitutions of human beings and renders their brains into a gel-like mush while transmuting them into gibbering clones of Edweird the Milliner and Dagwald Caedmeron - I've chosen to turn my ears and eyes into a more parochial direction.
Nevertheless, I've been re-animated by the excited reports from Beeby See and other soothsayers about the forthcoming collective action announced by the Water Fairies in response to the harsh strictures imposed upon them by the Tree/Liberationist Alliance Administration.
For the sake of my uneducated readers, the Water Fairies are a mythical species of human being who live under rules, terms and conditions of their own. In a parallel universe, to put it another way. Their function is to sit together in communes, play cards and tell jokes among themselves until their daily responsibilities are fulfilled, and then to go home, once they've been succeeded by the next shift. Occasionally they are called to drop their cards and suspend their stories in order to dash elsewhere to administer water to house fires, thus extinguishing them to the relief of the hapless householders. For thousands of years this comfortable arrangement has existed, and the Water Fairies have happily drawn their wages and their old-age stipends from the public purse.
Other services however have been less favoured, and have been customarily obliged to spend their working days dashing to and from in the interests of public health or civil order. Naturally those transporters of the Sick and Ailing to the witch doctors of the Northumbrian Herbalist Service have been resentful of their water-bearing peers, and have failed to understand why they should enjoy such lavish benefits while they have to endure all manner of woes in the routine execution of their duties.
The forthcoming weeks are going to prove to be quite interesting while the Water Fairies play cards and tell jokes to each other outside their communes around their braziers. Their day isn't going to be vastly different from the one they spend in harness. Their replacements in the case of emergency are yet to be selected...
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