91. A letter to Terry ✒️ #20
Shakespeare and Caesar were cat people like you, biking, and yppah yrasrevinna!
Dear Terry,
I am grateful for your latest letter, in which I learned a great deal about Shakespeare’s work ‘Julius Caesar’. The Bard himself would, I’m sure, have been delighted with your inclusion of a cat in your gory illustration of the death of his protagonist, having clearly not had the oak gall ink available with which to wax lyrical on his pages of that play about the one thing which he and Caesar had in common. That’s right: like you, Terry, they were both cat people.
Of course, Shakespeare squeezed feline references into a number of his other works, but presumably in an effort to not come across as a softie, he does this not always in the most flattering way.
In Act 3, Scene 1, of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, for instance, Shakespeare has Lysander attacking Hermia for her clinginess with ‘Hang off, thou cat, thou burr! Vile thing, let loose…’, but I like to think that that’s only because he had such a close relationship with his own pet.
Of course, his very first play, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, had been written straight after Shakespeare’s own cat Elizabeth – named of course after the queen – had brought in a lively specimen of the species which then took up residence in the thatch above William and Anne’s four-poster bed.
That very first night – with the shrew scrabbling noisily above him, bits of reed and dust clouding the air of his bedchamber – William got up and put quill to paper. The cat was duly renamed Katherine after the heroine of the piece.1
Caesar’s cat Maxipus, on the other hand, didn’t ever have to lower himself to hunting rodents, instead being fed oiled grapes from a silver spoon as he sat on his marble stool at Caesar’s right hand. He became such a trusted friend that his master began to use him as a special envoy, sending him overseas on diplomatic missions on which to report back.2 In fact, archaeologists found his skeleton – that of Maxipus, I mean, not Caesar – just a couple of years ago at a dig at a Roman amphitheatre not a million miles away from where you live, Terry.3
I’m impressed with your cycling exploits, particularly your speed of over 18 mph UPHILL! Before Covid hit, curtailing our not-yet-reintroduced habit of making summer Saturday afternoon visits to the garden of the pub in the next village, Jim and I would often cycle there and back. It’s a lovely freewheel almost all the way there, but that of course is tempered with an uphill ride home – something of which I’ll be reminded in a few days’ time when I run the annual 5k race between both our local pubs.
Jim has an electric bike, and although my steely attempts to power my own bike by the strength of my legs are generally not unsuccessful, I have nevertheless been known to hang onto the back of his to steal a tow up those hills to get home.
🚴♀️ 🚴 🚴♂️
Thank you for pointing out the errors in my counting. (You can go off people.) 🙄
I had indeed questioned your assertion that we have been writing to each other for the better part of a year. Of course, you were absolutely right with your arithmetic, but my own point remains that there are still over three months to go before we reach our first jubilee edition.
Speaking of anniversaries, I came across this lovely thing on a walk last weekend. It was in the middle of the road through a gorgeous rural village near to our campsite, and just a few steps away from the pub. Perhaps that’s where the happy couple had been celebrating the occasion?
The little confetti legend made me wonder whether they were enjoying their marriage backwards? Well, it’s made me smile, Terry, so might I just take this opportunity – in my twentieth letter in our continued canon of correspondence – to wish you a yppah yrasrevinna?
Our letter-writing anniversary proper comes around at the beginning of December, and I was thinking about how to mark this occasion last week when I read this delightful article about penpals who have been exchanging letters across continents for 70 years meeting in person for the first time.
And did you know about the two ladies who send the very same birthday card back and forth every year? Sisters-in-law Christine Woods and Freda Fisher, according to this lovely article published in the Rutland & Stamford Mercury in February 2017, had been sending each other the same card on their birthdays since 1977, writing a new line of text each time.
I have to admit that this letter had been going to be mostly about the weather. Soon after your letter arrived on my cyber doormat last week we were under threat from Storm Betty, with news headlines like these to scare anybody hanging out on the BBC News app on Friday:
And then on Saturday, this:
We had some rain, yes, but our corner of England then began to enjoy its first – and very late, might I add? – hint of the summer weather to hit us this August. At the weekend I enjoyed several long walks, a gorgeous run on the beach and two – two! – dips in the sea! This evening (I’m writing this on Monday) the sky above our house looks like this:
Would it be churlish for me to say ‘well, it’s about time’?
Well done on solving the puzzle I’d set you in my last missive. I’ve always liked the phrase ‘infinite variety’, and feel that it’s one that can be easily applied to our letters!
Well, as I finish my twentieth letter to you, dear Terry, I hope that I am not to be the subject of such an expostulation from you as Lysander’s ‘Hang off, thou cat… Vile thing, let loose…’ Let’s at least make it to our first yrasrevinna, eh?
All the very best, as always,
Rebecca
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This is unlikely to be true.
This is extremely unlikely to be true.
This bit is true. The skeleton of a cat, the position and location of which had caused archaeologists and historians to hypothesise that the animal had been kept as a pet, was found on the Richborough amphitheatre dig in October 2021.
You both need to publish a collection of these gems.
With Rebecca's drawing as well, it would be a kind of Pillow Book with humour. And centuries hence, folk will read it and learn what society was like in the 2020's...
Ahhhh. A cup of coffee and a letter to Terry from Rebecca.! What a fine way to start a Wednesday morning! And so informative! I had no idea that Caesar had a cat named Maxipus! Sounds exactly fitting, doesn't it? I once had a puppy we named Magnus. He never lived up to the name so we just called him Maggie. We loved him even though he was not very bright. Thanks for the fun read, my girl. Always a pleasure. Congratulations on your 20th!