There’s life in the old boy yet! (Although not much in this rat).

I thought the woman who feeds me would be pleased with this irrefutable evidence of my keen observance of housecat duties. But you know how it is with people, they’re unpredictable.

Before I go any further I make a formal apology to Cat-the-Rat and Starsky over at Rattitude.

It’s not every day, not even every month, that I manage to bring down something of this nature. Let’s be real, catching a wind-blown leaf is difficult enough and really takes it out of me.

This isn’t an Australian rat, it’s the widespread and abundant Black Rat, Rattus rattus (or Roof Rat, responsible for London’s Bubonic Plague in 1665), an unwanted rodent usually found in the compost bins in my neighbourhood. I don’t expect to see the people who live round me suddenly go down with the Black Death, but this specimen here is definitely a pest and not someone’s pet.

These rats are capable of producing ten or more young every three weeks under ideal conditions. A breeding base like this leads to rapid overpopulation and allows them to exploit optimal conditions in the aforementioned compost bins.

What else could I have done?

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• The Black Death (slideshare.net)

Sometimes I feel my age.

It’s all the brain really, in the little Poirotien grey cells. It’s not about senior moments and little accidents (cats get them too) it’s about the relevance of things to my daily life. My response to tragedy is no longer an impassioned howl to the heavens on the bloody blatant injustice of it all, but rather a semi-guilty sadness that such things could be.

I only have to momentarily raise my head from my sheepskin cuddle blanket to see what’s what. Yep, the world has gone crazy. Wars and disasters, fire, flood and drought, tigers will be extinct by 2012 and I’m spending more time traveling to the Vet than meditating in my nap basket.

A mere couple of years back I would have been spitting at the cosmic injustice of it all! Now I don’t worry about these things as much as I used to.

Am I growing callous and and uncaring? Is this a sign I’m on the way out? Is this encroaching senility ? But wait, the worst is yet to come…..

Yesterday I had a driving compulsion to chat about my various surgical experiences to a passing possum.

What is it with people?

They all have an incredibly high opinion of themselves, revel in self-obsession, make bargains with the universe and generally swan around as if they’re running the whole show. If it’s not arrogance it’s ignorance.

Take this idea of New Year Resolutions for example. Only humans would consider such a self-defeating exercise.

As if the noise of fireworks and inebriated revellers wasn’t bad enough the other night, I’m now faced with self-righteous people swapping their resolutions over the back fence. What do they hope to achieve by making some sort of pact to do better in the future?

Do they aim for World Peace? A drastic cutback in carbon emissions? An equal redistribution of wealth?

No. It’s all self-righteous gumpf about losing weight and saving money.

If half of the human race stopped eating processed rubbish in plastic-wrapped packages both of those petty ideals would be knocked over like a sick chook on a fence before you could say Catnip but, alas, no such foresight is evident in the simian brain.

It was different in my day.

If I made a Resolution it would mean something, like sending spirits of departed pets to terrorise the brutes who produced the poisoned petfood.