This is Page 7 from the book Diary of a Buddhist Cat
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“It’s my first morning here,” I reply. “I don’t know where they serve breakfast, do I?”
“Have you never seen a tea-bag before?”
“Not a purple one, no, they’re usually brown and taste of tea.”
“These human gaolers are pretentious and drink tisanes, which are teas made of various fruits, plants, and spices. Don’t chew those again and don’t chew the bread.”
“Which one was that?”
“The one your teeth can’t chew properly, the one that looks like diarrhoea on the counter, because you drooled it all over the place.”
“I’m sorry, I won’t do any of that again.”
“Good,” says Gemma, “we have to resist their jackboot thuggery, Freddie and escape from this place permanently.”
With that, Gemma headed away towards her bed. I had a lot of words to look up in a dictionary – jackboot, thuggery, diarrhoea, and fascist. I like to learn unfamiliar words and practice them when I can in conversation, but I thought I might struggle with those four, especially diarrhoea. Using the four when speaking with Gemma wouldn’t count, of course, as that would be repeating parrot fashion and I’ve not got feathers.
It seems like the humans have cleared up the kitchen counter, though listening in to the conversation they reckon a squirrel might have entered the house. I sit on the kitchen chair, starkly wooden and shaped for a human bottom, and tuck my feet under myself and watch them go through their ‘getting ready for work’ routine. This seems well choreographed and organised as they never bump into each other as they move in and out of the room and then, just before they leave, they pick food out of the fridge, place the food into containers where they can still see the food and then place that container into a bag so they can’t see the food. The fridge looks full of interesting things to chew and munch, so I make a careful note of the way the door opens and closes.
If I lie on the ground and insert my front paw into the bottom of the fridge, I should be able to use my front leg as a lever to open the door, even though the door has some suction around the edges to stop the door swinging open. I am very good at using my paws and legs as levers and I have studied the principles of Archimedes in this matter – if the distance ‘a’ from the fulcrum to where the input force is applied (point A) is greater than the distance ‘b’ from the fulcrum to where the output force is applied (point B), then the lever amplifies the input force.
The problem, which Archimedes can’t help me with unless he turns up to open the fridge for me, will be how to insert myself into the fridge before it closes and to make sure the fridge doesn’t close with me inside. I reckon I will need to insert a spoon in the gap that I create with my levering so that the curved part will stop the door closing completely. The thin handle wouldn’t work. I don’t want to get stuck in an icy prison, although I wouldn’t starve to death, of course. At the moment of potential discovery, I would have to pretend I was a furry loaf of bread or a black-and-white lettuce and hope that would fool them. One of the things I will have to practice soon is lying on the ground in front of the fridge to find the optimum spot for myself. I also have to find a soup spoon in the dish rack. I will place the spoon in my mouth when I’m lying on the ground.
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