Crop Circles, & A Bit More About Cats

 

Letters from the Falkland Islands 

Today marks a week of quarantine completed. All that really meant was that it was the day 7 covid swab test. It was someone different from the hospital this time, and there was very little preamble about it all. How are you keeping, and then a giant cotton bud gets shoved up into your brain? I knew that it wasn’t going to be good; moments before I’d heard Mags exclaim, ‘oh fuck me’, from the room next door. We hung out of the windows for the next thirty minutes all agreeing how brutal it was. Catrin was adamant that she suddenly felt a lot less intelligent, and that it was nothing to do with the time spent in this slightly suspended existence. We caught up with each other’s news, which was all pretty interesting today. Mags hadn’t been given any jam for her breakfast toast, but thankfully she had saved one from a previous day when the little jars were in surplus. Catrin had repeatedly been left without cutlery, but we didn’t ask too much about how she coped. I didn’t have any stories of loss to share, so I just showed them how I had managed to spill gravy on the hotel bath robe. I feel like I’m going to have to leave a note at the end of my stay explaining what happened there.

After a time, a well-dressed man wandered into the back carpark. We all waved and smiled. He said it must be nice to talk to someone different for a while, and then promptly walked off. To his credit though he returned about five minutes later to honour his statement. He was jolly nice; we talked about the weather and quarantine things. He even said that if he wasn’t too busy on Christmas Day that he might come back and throw us some sweets or something. I’m really hoping that he is not the Falkland Islands’ Santa Claus. After he left, I remembered that I hadn’t told the others about the older man with the distinguished beard who I’d been chatting to the last few days. Yesterday evening when I was out in the sheep pen, he suggested that instead of running around in the same old circle I should think about mixing it up and creating some crop circles. It certainly seemed like the best idea I’d heard in days. Better even than my idea to acquire a quarantine cat, believe it or not. Catrin suggested a satanic star of sorts, while Mags went for either a ‘H’ to create a helicopter landing point, or SOS as a cry for help. Either of those might be a touch irresponsible, but we settled on SOS because at least it reads as an apology as well. The next eleven or twelve days might be oddly productive. Oddly, being the key word there. My attempts to re-domesticate the missing cat requires a little more work and patience, though. I saved a scrap of bacon from breakfast and put it on a saucer when I went out for my morning exercise. I didn’t see a cat the whole time I was out, and when I sat down quietly on the grass after my run, I only had a few moments to wait before watching a regular sort of gull swoop down and eat the lot. But that is what hope and tomorrows are for, are they not?