FIFA's president Sepp Blatter has temporarily united England (not to be confused with the Kingdom) across the political divides. He and his organisation's apparent intense dislike of us is possibly because our own Football Association had a half-hearted go at getting him out of his post, and possibly also because we have an irritatingly free press, some of whom have alleged that FIFA is a corrupt gerontocracy. So, Russia get the 2018 World Cup (the Wikileak stuff about mafia being obviously wrong then), and Qatar - a nation composed of sand - get 2022. Anyway, time to move on. Mostly. Those dates feel like science fiction anyway. Maybe aliens have taken control of FIFA. But, moving on.
More important to Fruitcake Miniature College is the news that Fruitcake, our cat and Principal, is poorly. A couple of days ago the Head of Animal Care and the teaching staff noticed that his usual combination of greed and fussiness (a common trait in the powerful) had gone to another level, and his bulletins were becoming urgent. We found ourselves on our knees hand-feeding him morsels of tuna, slivers of grilled herring, and special crunchy things with magical properties.
Drinking has been similarly complicated (and almost humiliating). Because of a period of vagrancy in our Principal's rise to the top, he still drinks outside, and only water at a particular level of standing greenness. This is tricky when everything is frozen, so ice lids have been removed by hand, snow collected and brought indoors in a pudding bowl, and the like. Consequently Fruitcake's private eating quarters now resemble a tapas bar.
Luckily if unusually, this particular senior education manager counts among his lady friends a very brainy person, who has a degree in getting medicine into cats. And yesterday, the H of AC whisked him yodelling off in the car to see her. He came back high as a kite on the fruits of his private medical package. Steroids were certainly in the mixture, as was an anti-depressant. To the relief of the whole college, today he has eaten entirely unaided, albeit modestly, and we've upped his intake of De-fur-ums (I know, I know).
Against this background of a management crisis, too much talk about football, and sub-arctic conditions, the teaching staff have ploughed on as normal with lessons. But then, what's new? You might say that life is too short, too busy, too underfunded - and at the moment too cold - to spend time feeding titbits to a noisy, demanding, and uncommunicative tyrant. If such practices were endemic in, say, international trade, world sport, or geo-politics (you might ask) where would we be? But, you see, the sad truth is that Fruitcake Miniature College is a corrupt gerontocracy. So we will leave you with this football inspired entry for the Fruitcake Malaprop Competition: sick as a cat.
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