Of all the things that have happened of late, there is one I can wholeheartedly unrecommend: getting hit in the face with your cat’s claws in general, and getting hit in the eye in particular. I know this sounds like fun, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing there’s a LOT more blood involved than you’d think, and quite a bit of swearing too.
This then is the price for playing ‘Where’s Grendel’ around the footrest under the desk. Though I suppose I could look at it as being a bloody lucky injury (no pun intended) as one millimetre closer and I’d have had a claw in my eye, rather than my eyelid. But painful and shouty though it has been, it’s given me a new perspective on the old lopsided writing malarkey. Never again will I produce passage that describe how the blood from a wound in the hero’s forehead runs down and stings his eyes. Blood does not sting* – I can tell this from extremely recent experience. What stings is the hole in your face that lets the blood out in the first place. That stings like a bastard. What blood does do is make everything go all blurry. It’s like a film of pink oil that puts everything into Barbara Cartland soft focus.
Add to that the fact that the whole thing then swells up like someone’s stuffed a bicycle pump up my nose, followed by a slowly expanding black eye, where the blood’s leaking under the surface of the eyelid, and you have a perfect recipe for a great photo for the Glasgow Herald on Monday. Hurrah!
So if anyone offers you the chance to get scratched in the eye by a cat, think twice. Not as fun as it seems.
* with the exception of people like Mr Rickards, whose blood, legend has it, is about 40% by volume – that’d sting.