C.A.T.

🐾 Featuring climate activism, meat pies… and a plan involving superglue

This story is part of The Diary of an Orange Cat — now available both as a book and as a podcast.

👉 Listen here:
Spotify
or wherever you usually get your podcasts.

STORY OUTLINE

At this week’s Mindfulness Meeting, Serafina arrives full of purpose and righteous indignation, determined to launch Climate Action Together — or C.A.T. — a bold new movement to save the world, starting with Diamond Harbour. Her plan involves protest, public awareness… and, somewhat alarmingly, superglue. While Ron and Squeak are mainly focused on stolen meat pies, Weasley is quietly dealing with health concerns of his own. But with Serafina in full campaign mode, there seems little room for personal problems when the fate of the planet is apparently at stake.

Meanwhile, unexpected change is arriving closer to home, as construction begins on the new petrol station behind the house.

BACKGROUND

This episode was written around the time Greta Thunberg was gaining global attention, particularly after her now-famous “How dare you?” speech, which seemed to echo everywhere for a while. Around the same time, work had begun on the NPD petrol station being built in Diamond Harbour, directly behind my house. It felt like an oddly perfect combination of global urgency and very local disruption.

Serafina, who already has a tendency to see herself as something of a political leader, became the perfect character to channel that energy. She imagines herself somewhere between Greta Thunberg and Jacinda Ardern — full of conviction, carefully chosen words, and absolute certainty that everyone else should immediately stop eating pies and join the cause. Of course, Weasley and the others are rather less revolutionary.

This is also the point where The Diary of an Orange Cat begins to shift more obviously into political satire. The stories are still rooted in Diamond Harbour and everyday cat life, but from here on, the cats start reflecting more and more of the personalities, arguments, and absurdities happening in the human world around them.

SOME REAL PICTURES

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You can read or listen to C.A.T., plus all the rest of the chapters in The Woes of Weasley – The Diary of an Orange Cat.

🎧 Prefer to listen?
Spotify – C.A.T.

Or wherever you get your podcasts

📚 Prefer to read?
You can find the full story, along with all chapters, in The Woes of Weasley – The Diary of an Orange Cat, available in print and eBook on Amazon.