Herding cats

Beasts, being beastly and - thankfully - being beaten into banishment as a result

My mother’s cousin Harry and his wife, Jessie, farmed a farm in the wilds of Wigtownshire. It was an animal farm, but they didn’t abuse the animals to the point of revolt, far from it. I once killed a fly there (farms are a bit like that) and Jessie railed at me for killing one of God’s creatures.

She wasn’t too upset at sending her bullocks off to be reared further and then sent to the slaughter, in order to be put on people’s dinner plates. But she herself went to the butcher to buy in meat. Daft that, in a way, but she obliterated from her mind the bullocks’ fate between leaving her farm gate, glistening with sweat, and arriving in the butcher’s shop, glistening with blood.

It’s got nothing to do with anything, but it’s an interesting digression and it could even get you to think about how chickens are slaughtered, how foie gras is made and why the Amazon’s being ripped up to put fuel in cars, as well as whether you have the slightest interest in even knowing all that, let alone actually thinking about it, as you open windows to release flies out into the natural world of spiders’ webs.

I once cleaned spiders’ webs away from the kitchen door and window and, the next night, opened the back door for half a second and was startled by a cry of “Tally ho!” as a squadron of gnats invaded me, which I then pursued around the kitchen (they’re very docile, actually) for ten times the time it had taken to remove the spiders’ webs. A lesson learned. I leave spiders be, except when I trim the firethorn and they go into my pants.

Okay, animal farms. Aunt Jessie would call in the cai (it’s Wigtownshire dialect for “cattle”) from the field by whistling and calling “Heeeeere, cush, cush, cush, cush.” When she did this, the cows would obediently come to her for milking and being further cooed to by Jessie. She was a very good farmer.

In the prairies of Texas, cush is a seldom-heard word and it’s not unusual for wranglers to go out in pick-ups or on horseback to round up their herds. It’s called “herding”, if you’ve never heard of it.

We people do a lot of herding, with cattle and also with each other. Traffic islands herd, as do cinema queues. And so do theatre and choir directors. Even in a two-hander, getting director and two actors together in the same place at the same time can be what is described as “herding cats.” Even if the show isn’t Cats. Problem is, herding cats makes directors catty.

In the recent past, I have been herded, and no one either said cush to me or came at me in a Wrangler driven by a wrangler. They asked me to do things that were voluntary and non-committal and not a commitment and not paid or rewarded except from the joy I would receive from having helped them and I said, “Sorry, got other things on.” Like work, or not getting up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning, that sort of thing. Upon which, they railed at me for misunderstanding and not knowing I was having my leg pulled – to which I retorted it felt a bit like an amputation, actually – and for saying I thought they had a bloody nerve, which I think people can say to each other without falling out, even if they themselves don’t.

People to whom you can’t say “You’ve got a bloody nerve” without them going off in a cream puff, are wranglers, but in disguise – no chaps on these chaps. In herding, a pick-up is an effective tool, but usually carries bull bars, and these are generally present in all herding, even if you can’t see them coming. Dangerous things, bull bars. Or, alternatively, you can say cush, but that kind-of implies you don’t actually want to milk the poor burden-laden beast to a point that’s unheard-of.

Now, all puns and punches aside (well, not quite), there’s a serious side to all of this and it’s this, to this: there are “friends”, nay “employers”, who regard themselves as proffering to mankind unique opportunities like some latter-day gentry, allowing others (I nearly said people, but that’s stretching who “others” are in their view - we’re back to cats and cattle) to blossom and flourish and reap the reward of Heaven from having done their bidding. When you do their bidding, you are not helping them, you are serving yourself from the banquet of life that they have laid out with plenty, and plenty of plenty at that. When you have the utter temerity to utter words like bloody nerve, you are ungrateful swine for having repugned their generous, philanthropic offer to grasp at their coat-tails as they shoot for the stars, at their manna from Heaven and at the crumbs scattered by them from their table of self-fulfilment.

And I regard that a little bit like coastguard officials in Ukraine regard Russian warships.