Disaster Appeal - Heathy needs your help

This Christmas no doubt you are enjoying precious time spent in the company of your loved ones, taking advantage of extensive food and wine, and laughing happily.
But for some there will be no celebration this Christmas – only the ongoing battle to survive. Heathy is just one such individual.
By modern standards, Heathy never had a chance in life. Before he was six months old, when his family were away on holiday, he fell out of a tree and got his paw caught on some barbed wire. A week later he was discovered, thin and not having any fun at all. Fortunately he was brought back from the brink, thanks to emergency medical care and a ridiculous bandage that made one leg twice as long as the other, and that stuck out like a handle when he tried to curl up. Tragically he lost 2 toes in the incident.
Over the years his senses have gradually dwindled – his teeth are weak, his hearing is thought to have completely gone, his whiskers have started coming out in all the wrong places. And this Christmas he has suffered a loss of eyesight, as his retina has slipped off his eye.
As a result he is a shadow of his former self. He can see no prospect of a return to his glorious days of catching mice, then allowing them to slip through the gaps in his teeth.
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But you can make a difference. The Disasters Appeal Committee has arranged a special fundraising activity this Christmas which aims to make a real change to Heathy’s prospects.
Just take a look at the options listed below. Whatever you can afford, it will be richly appreciated. Please.
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1p will buy heathy an oat, which can be used to make porridge, from which he will be able to lick the oat-flavoured milk, nourishing himself for a few more valuable seconds.
5p will buy him a cat biscuit, which he will be able to sniff and then reject, giving him a much-needed boost in self-esteem.
45p will buy heathy a sachet of cat meat in jelly, the aroma from which he will inhale, dreaming he still had the teeth to actually eat it.
90p will enable him to experience life untroubled by fleas, or the eggs of fleas, for 24 hours.
£2 will keep him in drugs for a day.
£5 will purchase the material so that a new cat bed can be constructed in his honour, such that he can ritually disregard it with the appropriate measure of disdain.
£10 will enable Heathy to have reconstructive ear surgery so that he looks like an actual cat.
£15 will provide him with the services of a carer, so that he can be freed when he gets a claw helplessly caught on a chair or some carpet.
£21 will buy Heathy prosthetic toes to replace the missing ones, so that his footprints in the snow don’t give the impression that he is permanently flicking some kind of ‘horns’ symbol.
£36 will enable Heathy to have much-needed eye surgery so that he will be able to see, and not walk into the wall so often.

If you can help, please direct your contributions to Paul Harland, who will be collecting on behalf of DAC.

Thank you.

View from Park Hyatt, Tokyo

Paul Harland

Steve Fung leaves - the end of STFU

Steve STFU Fung has now left us to go and work for IFS Spain. He’s a lucky boy.
We had a big send off event at Sarah, Van and Gem’s place, the designated setting for all such functions when one cannot afford to hire a village hall or similar. Or maybe it is actually a village hall and they are actors. There were about 20 hangers-on there, some of which I recognised from work.
The theme, coincidentally, was a Spanish one. As a result Steve was dressed as some kind of slippery Iberian waiter and made to wear a broad hat and moustache in the style of a typical modern-day Spaniard. He had bought the misinformation that he was being taken out flamenco dancing, but then, so had I. There was a cake, which was in the style of the Spanish flag – I think credit for that goes to Sarah Hale, or possibly Gemma Copping. I don’t really know, because I was just flying back from Paris and got in a bit late, and I was a bit jetlagged from my holiday, and everyone was talking a bit too fast for my comprehension. It was just a blur of words and food. For all I know, Van Wyk Louw might as well have cooked the Spanish cake. Oh now I remember there was also a lot of other food. This included things like tapas and paella, which are commonly found in Spain. I believe some of these were home made while others came directly from specialist dealers, Nandos or Wickes or somebody.
At one point a PINATA emerged. This is a species of which I retain a deep suspicion, for I am sure it didn’t exist prior to MAY 2009. I had never heard of them anyway. Then suddenly in May 2009 I was surrounded by Pinatas and their uncanny proliferation seemed to me as if everyone else had had Pinatas in the backs of their minds like a nightmare for years, but had collectively somehow forgotten to actually tell anyone, and then suddenly realised and invented them and portrayed me as some kind of hermit paedophile for not having encountered them previously.
Anyway, a piñata came out and Steve took to demolishing it with The Wrath Of Fung which is some form of intense kung fu/maypole dancing derivative involving a gaily-patterned wand. It took a number of strikes before the piñata was battered out of existence and an array of chocolate and sweet type objects poured out. These were eaten, not least by Hayley. The gaystick was then reinvented as a limbo dancing bar.
I am finding this blog a bit hard to write, as my memories are a little vague. I am only writing this because Hayley bade me do it. This event took place almost 9 days ago.
Steve made a little speech, something on the theme of gratitude and parental influence, and some people started dropping things. Mostly this was Hayley, who found some breakable chinaware, glassware and some such, and dropped it. This made a mess. A bit later we got out Beatles rock band and played it. This is a game on the Xbox involving guitar playing, drums and singing. But this got a bit emotional and then Steve had to go home.
Otherwise most of the entertainment revolved around people taking the comedy moustache and wearing it in humorous positions other than upon their lip. Numerous photos attest to the hilarity engendered by this opportunity.
I can’t remember much else, except the following day, I was performing some kind of silky hat-snatch in the kitchen but the presence of my Force-distorting jedi nature induced a half-empty bottle of wine to slide across a table and down onto the floor. Upon hitting the floor, the glass of the bottle surprisingly came apart into a number of pieces and the wine itself emerged. The fluid nature of the wine meant that it flowed over quite a wide area, and being red, was in fact both visible to the naked eye and potentially liable to cause a small degree of stainage to vulnerable floor-coverings such as carpet. Meanwhile the smaller pieces of glass were considered by some to represent a minor physical danger to humans, especially children. On the plus side removing the glass and wine from the floor proved a straightforward task and I suspect, the coating of alcohol helped to kill off harmful microbes dwelling in the floor-grout.
My appreciation to Sarah and Gemma for assisting with the clean-up operation there.