Cats and mice

I had great plans to write a think piece – something political, something on a global scale. So much has happened this week. There’ve been chemical attacks in Syria, and bombs. Somehow, though, all the big ideas refused to coalesce, and it was easier to write about the new mice. I was reading an article online, about how novels in the past decade have been preoccupied by the self, and we need to write more novels like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which examines power and its abuses. I felt guilty – my novels and comics have been small in scale – and defensive – isn’t power and its abuses reflected in all interactions? Don’t the patterns in the world repeat themselves at a grand and microscopic scale? Isn’t it crazy how the veins in your body look like the veins on leaves? Everything is connected. Anyway, the internet likes cats. Cats are powerful. Mice are kind of at a disadvantage, even in their little cages. I feel bad about caging animals but somehow I made a contract with Violet that I had to honour. Now I have to figure out how to stop the cat from busting its way through her doors.