The cat the council, a breakdown of communication between species? A Sunday afternoon ramble.

 Having had a bout of man flue for the last few days and feeling a little weak as far as I am concerned this rather dull winter Sunday has been cancelled due to lack of interest.

One of the things that I have to do, don’t particularly want to is to pursue the council about the way they are failing to promote and manage leisure in Thanet.

So inbetween the various things one has to do at the weekend, especially if one has children, I have been vaguely trying to compose something for the council, that on the one hand may do something to help put the problems with the way they are handling local events right, while on the other hand not sounding too much as though I am just trying to get at them.

 Next doors cat often asks to be let in here, but only managed to actually get in one, not because I dislike cats, but because I don’t want to steal away someone else’s cat, and a cat once moved into a secondhand bookshop is very hard to budge.

Now this cat moved in nextdoor sometime in November and is something of an ornithologist, though it has considerable impediment to this pastime in the form of a bell around its neck.

We have a large amount of sparrows that live in the garden and a very large bush there where the sparrows like to congregate and do whatever it is that sparrows do.  

So for the last three months this cat from next door has been a regular visitor to our garden where it waits in the bush, trying to keep as still as possible so that the bell around its neck doesn’t ring and scare the sparrows away.

Rather like the Japanese whalers, I think the cat has really always wanted to catch a sparrow for further study, scientific purposes only you understand.

Anyway while I was composing this rather boring missive to the council and wondering how a mere cold could have brought me so low, a great caterwauling started to come from the vicinity of the garden.

There was the cat who had finally managed to capture a sparrow and had brought it as a gift for us in the hope that we would now let it in.   

After about two hours of the cat caterwauling and cavorting around enthusiastically with the dead sparrow outside the back door, presumably hoping to impress us all with its prowess as an ornithologist, it occurred to me that communicating with the cat about the sparrow was very similar with communicating with the council about local leisure.

The problem is something like this, I pay the council to do various things on my behalf, one of which is to promote and supply information about Thanet events online.

So the council spend this money on three websites to promote local events, which seems fair enough, a good idea in fact.

A glance at the local paper website shows that there are events on in Thanet every day http://www.kentonline.co.uk/thanet_extra/news/2012/january/4/your_guide_to_whats_on_in_tha.aspx

One council website has no events for the whole of January, one has just one event and the other has some but only one for Ramsgate for the whole of January, and not for instance the blessing of the sea that Simon has done today’s post about, see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2012/01/blessing-of-sea-margate-2012.html

Perhaps like the cat is approaching us, I am approaching the council in quite the wrong way.

Sorry the pictures of the cat are not very good, all the good ones showed the sparrow and I was concerned about people’s sensibilities.