The death of Brian Coleman/Pond Life

Breaking news: a tragic loss has just been discovered.

Just to explain: there are two small ponds in the Angry family's garden. One pond is occupied by frogs, and the other by newts. The frogs are a bunch of fat, lazy, slimy cannibalistic bullies,who sit around all year round doing nothing very much, other than eat their own offspring, whereas the newts are charming, subtle and elusive creatures, oh and pretty adept at eating the unhatched frogspawn. Luckily, by a process of hard won consensus, they have agreed to disagree and keep to their own territories.

Anyway. The Angry cat, although an alarmingly large ginger and white tom, known to have fully grown policemen quaking in their boots at the very sight of him, ( I refer you back to the beginning of this blog if you are wondering why we spent so much time in the past year and more helping the police with their enquiries) is actually pretty dopey, and utterly hopeless at catching birds, luckily, or fighting other cats, spending most of his time outdoors skulking in the bushes, hiding from his arch enemy, a horrible grey and white tom called Derek. Part of his daily routine, apart from sauntering down the garden, poking his head insolently through the fence and winding up the equally dopey dogs next door, is his dedicated monitoring of activity in the ponds. He spends hours on guard, watching and trying to catch frogs, always without success. Until recently.

There is - oh dear, was - a particularly big and ugly frog with distinctive markings who squats in the frog pond and lords it over the others. In the absence of any toads - except for a dead one we spotted round the corner,near the park, squashed in the gutter, ironically in a road whose speed humps had been removed by You Know Who - Mrs Angry's daughter amusingly decided this frog should be named Brian Coleman.

A couple of weeks ago, Mrs Angry's daughter was alerted to a most peculiar noise coming from the garden. She noticed that our cat was running around with something in his mouth. Uh oh. You may not know that frogs emit a horrible high pitched scream if in peril: and here was a frog in peril - Brian Coleman, no less, in a state of terror, his head and legs poking out of the mouth of the Angry cat, who was looking very pleased with himself, and in no mood to let go.

After being chased around the garden, and then bribed with left over chicken, we managed to persuade the cat to open his mouth, and Brian Coleman fell gratefully on to the lawn, playing dead (although it's difficult to tell with frogs, isn't it? And Tory councillors.)

Ever since then, Brian Coleman has been hopping around the garden with a limp, and something of a persecution complex.

Until this morning, I am afraid to say, when our cat arrived at the back door looking very smug, and dropped a present at my feet. Brian. Dead, and not playing.

Brian is now in the wheelie bin with the rest of the rubbish.

I do hope this isn't an omen, don't you?