Animals of October

I'm here with my very best dude, Strong Snowy. He's an albino gorilla with faded sideways eyes, floppy arms and a scrappy flap of a nose. He's got a ridge above his eyes for cheeky monkey expressions and patches of his fur have worn down the cross-stitch. He's about 25 years old now I reckon, and he's spent most of his ridiculous life at my childhood home in Preston, but currently lives with me in Manchester in my study. If memory serves me right, he originally belonged to little brother Rick, but he soon became a firm favourite among all three of us kids. We gave him a voice, a sort of low-pitched nasal cartoony ape voice (not far removed from Baloo the bear from The Jungle Book ), and he developed a personality as a lovable fool, a sort of Falstaff among a clan of scruffy teddy bear layabouts.  The toy has come back into my life because he's become a major feature of the novel I've been writing for my PhD. He features as a recurring motif throughout the bo...

Cats with no concern for cinematography, Dogs, gangly, sprawled, a tangle of limbs and mouths, uncontainable within the frame. A hoisted guinea pig is just a brief white void with eyes. One moggy passes across the foreground of one square just before another trots along the background of another square and we might pretend, for a moment, that it is the same cat performing a merry teleportation trick in an effort to reclaim human attention. An unmuted person offers an opinion which is answered first by the yaps of their dog who believe some sort of conversation has begun. Why would it think otherwise? There's no-one else around.  OK, so many of us are quite royally sick of Zoom by now, but we can't deny that it has served us pretty well these past months. And the invasion of our animals into our little mise-en-scenes is never going to not be delightful. Perhaps such small furry moments have helped us paste over some of the cracks of our physical disconnection, and that counts fo...