Survival Of The Fittest

Today I am in the gallery. The office is cold and outside a small sculpture is buzzing quite loudly. (On purpose).

On the plus side, I have just noticed a chocolate Santa and a bag of foreign looking things that appear to be edible. And what is probably a bottle of wine wrapped up. So I’ve got some supplies if things get tough.

I went down to see my parents on Sunday and on the way we stopped by Ikea to return a faulty cactus. The cactus in question was quite a specimen, standing about three feet tall, but should have been a further seven inches taller had Trish not done some freestyle pruning with the car door. So we took it back and acted dumb. Erm, this cactus has got a sort of flat bit on the top, we think there might be a part missing. And so the good people of Ikea replaced it with a similar model.

Trish bought another plant for my mum. More specifically an aquatic plant for the aquarium. It was quite small but its water-based nature meant that my journey home involved holding a plastic plant pot full of water and checking to make sure that the replacement cactus didn’t roll off the back seat. When we got there we saw that the aquarium seems to be thriving. It’s full of energetic fish and healthy looking foliage. Then I remembered that the previous occupants of said aquarium were still in my mum’s custody. In the freezer to be exact. I had completely forgotten that when I moved flat I had temporarily moved my piranhas (four of, stone dead) back home in order to avoid them thawing out and starting to smell. So I was amazed and delighted to discover that my mum still had them filed away at the back of the freezer in their icy Tupperware grave. But then I forgot to get them when I was leaving. So they’re still in there behind boxes of waffles, cartons of ice cream and various bags of frozen veg.

People often ask why I’ve got four frozen red-bellied piranhas in my (currently my mum’s) freezer. The answer to this question is easy. Because they died. I didn’t just put them into the fridge and then wonder why they weren’t moving around as much. I raised the little blighters with care and attention until they grew big enough to bite the hand that fed them. Despite this, I did keep feeding them. Despite that, they died. So I froze them.

Then people ask, Well what are you going to do with them? This question is not as easy to answer. Apart from occasionally taking them out when drunk to show to the more curious of my friends they tend to just sit there frozen. I was, and still am considering taking them to a taxidermist and having him perform the marine equivalent of having them stuffed. And then displaying them above the mantelpiece. But alternative fates for the wee fellas occasionally suggest themselves to me. A nice necklace perhaps. Piranha soup. Or even harnessing the power of science and creating some kind of reanimated Franken-piranhas. I don’t know yet, so in the mean time they remain in cryogenic stasis.

What I did remember to bring back with me was another cactus that my mum had been looking after since I moved. Admittedly cacti don’t take a lot of looking after. You have to water them regularly of course, but you have to forget to water them for about two years to actually kill them. And if you have forgotten to water your cactus for a couple of years, it’s probably because you’ve forgotten that you actually own a cactus and are therefore unlikely to mourn its passing. But my mum is good at growing houseplants and this particular cactus was looking pretty healthy. So we left in the morning with about 90% of a cactus and returned home with two cacti. (My favourite plural- one cactus, two cacti; one octopus, two octopi; but what about ‘bus’?).

Anyway, I’m going to look after them until they grow big and strong. Big enough and strong enough to be used as offensive weapons against burglars. And then I might freeze them. Who knows? We already have a few houseplants but they are mostly pretty boring. One in particular is extremely dull. It looks to me like the plant that you would see a picture of if you looked up ‘plant’ in The Idiots Encyclopaedia. Its green, it’s got leaves, it grows, that’s it. I doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t look interesting and more importantly it doesn’t look like it will ever do anything interesting. So I don’t water it. Which is why I was perplexed and annoyed to find that it just kept growing despite my hard-line policy of neglect. When I pointed this anomaly out to Trish she told me that she watered it because I kept ‘forgetting’. So now it looks like I’m going to have to poison the damn thing.

I have also embarked on a campaign to convince Trish of the virtues of owning a cat. She hasn’t bought it yet. One of the issues surrounding the cat situation is whether or not it gets let outside. I tend to think that the answer is yes; it should get to go outside. Cats seem to like it outside. The problem is that it’s a pedigree cat I want. A Havana to be exact. Most people assume that pedigrees are stupid but the Havana is said to be a particularly bright breed. Probably not bright enough to make a cup of tea or toast bread but bright all the same. Although a lady who breeds them told me- ‘They’re not very street-wise, you know’. The precise implications of this fact are open to interpretation but it probably means that it would get beaten up by other cats, locked inside wheelie-bins, blown away in a gale etc. Maybe even stolen on account of its fancy looks. Whereas if it’s a house cat then it will have to crap in a box and things like that. I don’t know, we’ll see. I still have to brainwash Trish. It’s going to take a bit of work but I’ve already found a weakness concerning mice which I intend to exploit.