Today’s Dollop is an audio Dollop

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On Friday I wrote about the neurosis caused by trying to think of something creative, interesting and funny to publish on the Internet on a daily basis, which is the purpose of this daily blogging project. I mentioned that it was often difficult to know what will go down well with people, and sometimes I am surprised to find that a blog I’m not so sure about gets a really positive reaction, and other times I create something which I think is amazing and it garners very little attention. Often there is just no knowing how your audience will receive you and how much of an audience your work will gain. I have hundreds of people who listen to and read these Dollops, and overall, I think this project is going reasonably well.

But yesterday, something happened to bring out my neurosis once again, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt it particularly acutely yesterday. I’m sure that, just like me, millions of writers, broadcasters, comedians, artists, musicians, PR people and countless people working in the media, spent yesterday scratching their heads, feeling lost and confused. The cause of this head scratching and confusion? It’s a viral infection. A Viral infection that has its roots in Texas, but has rapidly engulfed the planet.

Perhaps you’ve been infected by it too. At the very least, you’ll likely know about it. On Thursday, a Texan woman called Candace Payne, posted a video on her Facebook page. She had just bought a Star Wars Chewbacca mask, she put it on, and began to laugh hysterically at the sounds the mask was making, and the way the mask looked. That was the crooks of the video. She posted it on her Facebook page purely to amuse her friends. Two days later, that video smashed Facebook’s record for most viewed video, having been watched by over 91 million people.

91 million people! That is more people than live in the UK. The most popular UK radio show is the BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show with Chris Evans, which gets 10 million listeners. The most followed person on Twitter is Katy Perry, who has 88 million followers. This woman (a stay at home mom from Texis) has had her video watched by more people than the number of people who follow Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Barack Obama, and countless other celebrities onTwitter.

These major pop stars which I’ve just cited have had millions of dollars thrown at them in order to create their music and their videos. They have legions of people responsible for things like branding and marketing. They have people working with them to write and produce their songs and videos, to style them and think about their image. Their PR team does all it can to create a buzz around them. They are given media training, often told what to say and how to act. Because that is what you have to do to be massively popular. Yet here is an ordinary woman, a complete unknown person as of three days ago, who makes a four minute video of herself in her car, two minutes of which simply consists of her laughing hysterically, and she’s suddenly the biggest thing on the planet right now. She is doing interviews with major media,. She makes it onto news networks all over the world, including the BBC.

It is believed that the biggest selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, sold 66 million copies. More people have watched this ordinary woman’s Chewbacca mask video than the number of people who bought the world’s biggest selling album.

A part of me is horrified by this. There are so many talented people agonising over their creations, who are creating the most wonderful things: radio and TV shows, theatre productions, songs, podcasts, blogs … There are so many amazing comedians and musicians and artists out there who will never get anywhere near the recognition or audience that they deserve. So many people struggle to get noticed above the tumultuous noise of everything. Yet, somehow, a loan woman in Texas, without any forethought, sits in her car, presses record on her phone, pulls out a Chewbacca mask and begins to laugh hysterically, and the world goes mad for it. No marketing, no branding, no script, no artistic direction, no PR, no years of honing her talent, no real disearnable talent, skill or ability … Nothing!

I suppose there is a part of me that is a bit aggrieved that I’ve spent everyday this year trying to think of interesting and entertaining things to put on the Internet, and yet I have an average of about 3 to 400 people reading and listening to each episode. The Young’uns Podcast gets about 2000 listeners per episode. And somehow, this woman puts on a mask, laughs, and gets over 91 million people watching. However, as well as being baffled and a bit aggrieved by the amount of people who’ve watched the Chewbacca mask video, I am also excited and joyous that this kind of thing can somehow happen. The weird capriciousness of it all is wonderful. There must be so many PR and marketing people utterly bamboozled about this. And these are the top dogs of the PR world, who know all the buzzwords and blabber on about brand awareness and the importance of running a campaign that is synergistic. Yet even they are left completely flustered about how an ordinary woman with no profile or brand equity, or any of those PR and marketing props, has managed to gain such notoriety overnight. And that is crazily and hilariously beautiful. It is so uncynical and pure; unless of course the whole thing was very cleverly engineered by a PR team, in which case it is terrifying and depressing. But it’s lack of any external influence, and complete absence of any formula, rime or reason, makes this whole thing so incredible and exciting.

all this woman wanted to do was share her happiness and laughter with her friends, and the world wanted to join in. The word is crying out for authentic, unpretentious, none-branded, unfiltered, unbridled fun, that exists purely in and of itself, with no strategy or marketing/PR formula. Because life is full of people trying to sell us products, trying to market things at us, wanting to ram their agendas down our throats. Maybe this could be the planet’s great moment of awakening. The end of capitalism! Yet, alas, this woman will no doubt be snapped up by some advertising company to sell products, be paraded on TV chat shows and be the next big thing. Her laugh will be sold as a novelty ring tone, they’ll release a novely pop record that features sampes of from her video, with the sound of her laughing to a dance beat. She will be the biggest thing on the planet. Until, eventually, inevitably, the tabloids will start writing scandalous stories about her – “Candace Payne, the real woman behind the mask.” She will be slandered and defiled, meaning that she becomes unmarketable, gets unceremoniously dropped by everyone, and consequently falls into a life-long depression, while everyone forgets about her and moves on.

Meanwhile, the same writers, musicians, artists and comedians will still be doing their thing, completely unknown by the majority, but loved and valued by a precious few, and if I can still be one of those people, all those years later, then I will be very happy.

Thanks for reading. I know this has been a bit of an unfunny, uncoordinated jumble of thoughts. In fact, I think this might have been the first Dollop without any jokes. Feel free to leave a comment if any of you did manage to spot a joke or anything funny in today’s Dollop. I tell you what, as a reward for persevering with this boring drivel, why not treat yourself to watching a hilarious video of a woman wearing a Chewbacca mask and laughing.

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I got a comment today from Delyth Forkington-Smythe (probably not The Delyth Forkington Smythe, although you never know) who responded to yesterday’s Dollop simply with, “honest!” I hope she didn’t do this in the hope that I would base an entire Dollop around her, as I did with Clair’s “different!” comment yesterday, because I won’t be doing that. I am attempting to temper my neurosis in this Dollop.

So, I have spent the entirety of today in deep reflective meditation, in order to calm myself down after yesterday’s neurosis. I found a guided meditation session on Youtube, closed my eyes and prepared to relax and become utterly blissed out. It was all going so well, but then the man conducting the meditation session, guru John Smith, instructed me to think of positive images. He asked me to imagine the most beautiful flowers, to think about a wonderful sunset, and to envisage the smile on a baby’s face. Sadly, this reminded me that I am blind and so have never seen any of those things, and this realisation caused me to fall into an anguished depression. But then I punched Michael in the face, and that cheered me right up.

We’re playing a free festival in King’s lynn, Norfolk today. By free, I mean free for the audience, we’ll still be getting our standard fee: 50 quid, a tub of jelly babies and a sacrificial goat. Well, we’ve won two Folk Awards now, so we can get away with charging such fees. I mean, we’ve had the sacrificial goat on our rider for years. The jelly babies and the 50 quid came after the prestige of the award wins and was wangled by our unscrupulous, hard-nosed agent.

It’ll be interesting to see how many people turn up to watch us, as our performance is on at the same time as the FA cup final, plus it’s forecast to rain, and the festival is outdoors without any covering. But if no one turns up then I won’t take it personally, after all, I’m not the kind of person who gets paranoid or neurotic.

The last time I was in Kings Lynn was 2005, when Sean and I went Hitch Hiking. We got picked up by a man in his sixties called Stephan, who, as well as offering to take us to a good pick-up spot a few miles down the road, also suggested that we went back to his house first for some food and drink and to freshen up. However, our time with Stephan brought us a lot more than mere repast.

We got to his house and he offered us food and drink and we got chatting. He told us that he was really into his martial arts. “Stand up boys,” he requested, “I’ll show you what I can do.” We were both a little concerned. After all, we had only just met this man. He had picked us up and driven us to his house, which was a bit off the beaten track. He had then plied us with food and drink. Had he deliberately done this so that we’d be too bloated to run? Maybe that was the reason he hadn’t eaten or drank any of the food he’d given us – so that he’d be nimble and energetic enough to practise his martial arts on us.

“Stand up,” he excitedly instructed. Nervously, we stood. “Now, let me explain what I’m going to do and what’s about to happen.” My god, this man was a premeditating psychopath, who got a perverse pleasure in explaining his planned dastardly deeds on us before he carries them out. He’s like a baddy in a film. Hopefully, just like in films, his narcissistic prevarication would prove to be our saving grace. There are so many scenarios in film and TV where the baddy spends so long bragging about how great he is and blabbers on about what he’s going to do to his foe now that he’s captured them, that he ends up squandering his opportunity to execute his plans, and is thwarted. The baddy could have easily won the day, but his garrulous hubris is his downfall. Maybe we could keep him talking for so long that we’d eventually get discovered and saved, or we could use the time to hatch an escape plan.

He explained that he was able to put energy into parts of his body in order to facilitate him being able to attack and defend easily without even having to tense his muscles and use any real physical strength. Fortunately, his way of proving this to us was fairly inocuous and non-combative. It involved us feeling his arm in order to ascertain that his muscles weren’t tensed, and then for us to try and move his arm. Upon inspection, it appeared that he wasn’t tensing his arm muscles, yet when we tried to move his arm, it wouldn’t move. Then, he would declare that he was about to dissipate the energy, , at which point we were able to move his arm, although we couldn’t identify any muscle change. At one point, both Sean and I were trying, while he gleefully shouted, “go on, harder, pull it, push it, bend it,” but even with the two of us trying, we couldn’t move it. But as soon as he said “I’m releasing my energy,” we were able to move it again.

This was a really fascinating and interesting experience, although goodness knows what his neighbours must have thought. If they’d have looked out their windows just a few minutes earlier, they would have seen a man in his sixties escorting a couple of teenage boys into his house. Then mere minutes after we’d disappeared inside, they heard him shouting, “go on boys, pull it, push it, bend it, go on boys, harder, harder, can you feel my energy boys?! Can you feel my energy?! Can you feel it boys? I’m releasing my energy now boys.” They would either think that there was something disturbingly kinky going on, or that we were playing some kind of advanced and weird version of the game Bopit.

So that’s the story of when Sean and I tried to pull a man in his sixties in King’s Lynn. Well, that’s that story of when Sean and I tried to pull a man in his sixties in King’s Lynn; I might tell you the other ones some time.

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We are doing a couple of festivals this weekend. If you’re at Shepley Festival on Friday then you will have the opportunity of seeing our first gig with a married man in the group, as this will be Sean’s first gig since his wedding. See if you notice any difference in terms of the performance. Fear not, if you are worried about The Young’uns becoming really bland as a result of this matrimony, I am still single, and so will still be showing off in a desperate bid to impress and be liked.

Returning to gigging will probably result in quite a few more visitors to this website and blog. The numbers always seem to rise whenever I’m gigging, and then dip down again after a period of none-gigging; how quickly they forget. When we won the folk award this year, the number of visitors to my website quadrupled. Yes, very funny, I can hear you making your own rubbish jokes about quadrupling meaning that I got ten visitors to my blog, but actually the joke’s on you, because I got twenty, so there. Anyway, on the day of the folk award win I got loads of people flocking to my website, and the same for the day after, but within a week, the numbers had returned to normal. This might be because these people are very fickle and quick to move on to something new, or it could just have been that these new people found my blog, read that day’s entry, thought “that was a bit rubbish, but I’ll come back again tomorrow and see if he produces anything better,” which they did, only to find that blog post was also rubbish and so eventually gave up after a few tries. If only they’d stuck it out a bit longer, then they’d have got to hear me saying good morning to people in the street at 3 in the afternoon, and ruminating about killing and cooking cats. It is clearly their loss.

But it does generally seem that visitors do pick up when I’m gigging. Obviously this is partly caused by people seeing us performing and then searching for “David Eagle blind” or “David Eagle autistic.” Maybe I’ll try and deliberately engineer people’s curiosity in order to bring more people to my site. I could, for instance, speak with different accents during the gig, causing people to Google me in order to find out where I’m from. Or could hobble around the stage, leading people to search for “David Eagle leg” or “David Eagle limp.” Actually, maybe that’s not such a good idea, as I’d rather people didn’t type “David Eagle limp” into Google, as it will probably take you to a rather humiliating revenge porn video of me that an ex put up. In my defence, I was very tired and under the weather.

I really don’t understand the concept of revenge porn. I think that if I put a video of me having sex with someone on the Internet, surely I’d just be humiliating myself just as much as the other person. Unless you’re really confident in your sexual ability and truly feel that this video will paint you in a good light, then it’s a bit of a risk to put it out there. Before I could publish the video on the Internet, I’d have to sit down with someone and get them to watch it with me first, and I’d have to ask them to give me an audio description of what was happening, and ask them to be really honest about whether I’d be massively humiliating myself by posting this.

“And be honest, do I look big in this.”

“No, sadly not, not at all. And I’m not sure about the part when you shouted, “the eagle has landed,” I think that just makes you come across as a really big prick, which is ironic considering …”

I’m pretty good at audio editing. So if it was audio revenge porn then I’d be confident about being able to make it more flattering towards me. I could extend and loop certain sections to make it seem like the event had lasted a lot longer than it did. I could probably take her very occasional noises or statements of encouragement and paste them into the audio at various intervals, to make her sound as if she’s enjoying it a lot more. I could also overdub some bits after the event, so that I said things like, “Could you handle another hour of this?” and “OK, so that’s what I can make you feel without moving, now I’m going to start moving.” But when it comes to video, I couldn’t do any of these clever editing tricks, and so it would be massively humiliating for me if I released a video. So don’t worry, your secret is safe, Michael. Having said that, if CD and gig sales are flagging then we might be forced to release it in order to boost interest in the band and get the sales picking up again. Sometimes my jokes make me feel a bit physically sick; that was one of those times.

I wonder if anyone finds this blog by typing in “blind porn,” “David Eagle porn,” or maybe even just “eagle porn,” which is something very different. Sorry to have wasted your time if you clicked on this website hoping to see some hot sexy bird-based action. Keep popping back from time-to-time though, as you never know.

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After yesterday’s social experiment, in which I walked down the street at 3pm and said “good morning” to people, to see if they would unquestioningly say good morning back, I have been thinking about ways of developing this fascinating social study. Some ppeople would be happy to stick with the tried and tested format which has clearly been a massive success with the audience (I don’t want to brag, but I got 3 Facebook likes for yesterday’s Dollop) but I am not the kind of person who sees that sort of success and then becomes afraid to change and develop things, getting stuck in a rut; I am constantly reinventing myself and evolving. Who knows, the next time I do this new and improved version of the Good Morning game, I might even get four Facebook likes, or, maybe even five! I don’t want to get too carried away, still, I suppose it’s important to aim high and dream big.

“So yesterday’s results indicated that out of everyone who spoke to me in the street, all of them said “good morning” back. Oops, sorry, maybe I should have issued a spoiler alert for those people who hadn’t got around to listening yet, perhaps saving that particular episode for a special occasion; maybe you were planning on having a David’s Daily Digital Dollop party and inviting all your friends to join in the fun with you.

I think that next time I play the game, I should push things even further. The first part will be the same. I will go out onto the street at about 3 in the afternoon, and say good morning to people. Then, when someone says “good morning” back, I will ask them for the time, and then, once the time is given, thank the person and say “good morning” to them again, and see if they still respond with “good morning.” I think this will be both entertaining and a worthwhile social experiment. I would imagine that some people will still say “good morning” the second time, perhaps just out of politeness or maybe simply as an automatic, unthinking response. Perhaps I could then put my findings from this research to a psychologist and we could discuss them on the Dollop. When I first set up David’s Daily digital Dollop, it was very much with the Reithian philosophy in mind, of entertaining, informing and educating. And I’m sure that if you are a regular Dollop reader/listener then you’ll agree that you’ve all learnt some valuable lessons over the last 4 and a half months, even if what you’ve learnt is simply how much of your life you’ve wasted listening to and reading all these hours worth of Dollops; although I think some of you might have suddenly had that collective realisation yesterday – three Facebook likes indeed.

When I was talking to my housemate Ben about yesterday’s social experiment, he reminded me of something that happened when we were both at university together. We were on a walk, and there were lots of cyclists on our route. Every time a cyclist drew level with me, I would wait about a quarter of a second until they were just passing me, and then shout, “excuse me, do you have the time?” Most of the cyclists would look round, surprised. Some would give an apologetic shrug, and others would scowl at me. But quite a few of them actually tried to glance at their watches and shout back. Looking back now, I suppose it was a bit of a reckless thing to do, given that it could have caused a cyclist to have an accident, as they had to look back over their shoulder and then glance at their watch before shouting the time back at us. This is why I was surprised by the amount of cyclists who actually managed to do this.

Ben was trying not to let his amusement show, and kept hiding his face, brimming with tears of laughter at the sight of the suddenly startled cyclists. But then, one time I did it and a man looked back over his shoulder, completely surprised to hear a voice from behind him, and nearly toppled off his bike. Ben involuntarily burst into loud laughter and fell to the ground and began helplessly rolling around in hysterics. Ben’s reaction caused me to also start laughing really loudly. The cyclist threw his bike down and came running towards us, shouting and swearing, and saying that he was going to kill us. Ben, sensing the danger, tried to get up off the ground, grab me and make a run to safety. But he was laughing too hard to manage the getting-up-and-running part, although he did succeed in grabbing me, which caused me to fall to the ground, and we both promptly began to roll to safety, down the hill and into some bushes.

We both lay there while the psycho cyclist yelled that he would find us and sort us out. Fortunately, the man must have eventually got back on his bike, because the shouting stopped, and we deemed it safe to crawl out of the bushes.

Hopefully the man doesn’t find this Dollop and decide to come after me, because it would be very easy for him to find me, given that my gigs with The Young’uns are advertised very publicly all over the Internet, plus I broadcast what I’m doing every day in this blog. If the man does still feel angry about that episode and wants to get his revenge on me, then it would be simple for him to strike. If he was able to be a little patient and wasn’t in a big hurry to get his revenge, then he could simply wait until I was in his local area and strike then, saving him the need to even travel. I mean, he’s waited for twelve years, so what does another few months matter?

Please, if you care about me at all, then make sure you don’t mention this Dollop to anyone you know who is a cyclist, especially if they were likely to have been cycling around the Scarborough area in 2004. Thank you.

So, providing that I’ve not been killed by a psycho cyclist, (or by anyone else who wanted to kill me and decided that now was the perfect time to do so, given that they’d likely get away with it because all the suspicion would be focused on cyclists in Scarborough) I’ll be back tomorrow.

After the “success” of Friday’s walking audio Dollop, it’s time for you to once again come with me on another audio walking adventure, as I take you down the mean streets of Sheffield. During our journey I tell you a story about an odd experience with a taxi driver, and I conduct a social experiment with members of the public.

Download it here

Download the audio version here

Today I accidentally knelt on my phone and severely cracked the screen. I was surprised to note how calm and unbothered I was, baring in mind that bits of the screen were starting to flake and fall off. I merely brushed them onto my desk and put them in the bin, before coolly returning to my phone to inspect what was left of my screen. I was surprised by my level of Zen-like collectedness and coolness. Perhaps it’s the therapeutic influence of all those cats on Saturday. If so, then it was well worth the £5 and the salad stealing. Maybe we could drag Trump to the cafe for a day and see if it can sort him out a bit.

Apple have tested the Iphones for durability by doing tests that involve dropping them from a variety of heights, and there are bold statements that brag about their resilience, seemingly supported by videos with titles such as, “An Apple iPhone survives the ultimate drop test, plummeting 9300 feet out of a plane.” There are loads of these videos: people encasing their phones in ice, people dropping their phones from the top of really tall buildings, and even one where the phone is dropped from space. I suppose the idea is that if the phone can survive a drop of over 9000 feet, then it can survive anything. However, this is far from the truth. Granted, if you are the kind of person who is clumsy enough to drop your phone from 9000 feet, then it’s reassuring to know that Apple has you covered; but if you’re the kind of reckless buffoon who does something really stupid like kneeling on their phone for half a second, then I’m afraid you won’t be so lucky. I think I might join the geeky tech reviewers, and set up my own YouTube channel reviewing phones, only I will focus on putting the phones through their paces when it comes to being knelt on for half a second. I accept that it won’t be as exciting and dramatic as dropping a phone from a plane, but I would argue that it is more practical, and that more people are likely to briefly kneel on their phone than drop it from 9000 feet, or accidentally freeze it in ice for a week. I think Apple could do with sorting out their priorities a bit.

In Dollop 95, I mentioned that I’d done an interview with the Big Issue about The Young’uns. That article has been released today, as I discovered due to a tweet which declared that they had an interview with Dave Eagles from The Young’uns. I cannot understand how they’ve managed to get my name wrong. I emailed the answers back to them via david@davideagle.co.uk. I have a signature at the bottom of my email that includes my name, David Eagle, my website, davideagle.co.uk, and my Twitter name, @thedavideagle. Also, at the very top of the document I sent them, in bold letters, it said, “answers by David Eagle, The Young’uns.” Even after all those clues, if you still weren’t entirely sure, a second’s-worth of Googling would soon tell you that I am called David Eagle. So how and why have they abbreviated my first name and pluralised my surname?

On my first day at my office job, about six years ago now, I was given my own email address. Great, I am officially part of the team, I thought. Except, my email address started with, david.eagles. I immediately notified the person who had created my email account, but she didn’t seem bothered about changing it, and so I was just stuck with it. At first, whenever people referred to me as David Eagles, I would correct them. But I communicated with so many different departments and people from different organisations, that it became too time consuming and tedious to keep putting them right. Also, it was getting people confused. I was getting phone calls from people complaining that I hadn’t replied to their email, and then I’d discover that the reason was because they’d emailed david.eagle instead of david.eagles. I mentioned it to my managers several times, but nothing ever got done about it, so in the end I decided that it would be a lot easier if I would just change my name to David Eagles. So while I was at work, I was David Eagles. I mean, this job had already managed to rob me of my dreams and my sense of optimism and hope, so they might as well rob me of my identity too.

Another thing that the editor at the Big Issue has somehow managed to do is get the name of our podcast wrong. It is down as The Young’s Podcast. You’d have thought that the most cursory of reads would have highlighted this mistake; given that the name of our band is The Young’uns, it’s unlikely that we’d call our podcast The Young’s Podcast. I don’t know how they’ve managed to make this mistake, given that I wrote the answers. The answers were typed up by me, and so all they had to do was leave what I’d written in tact and it would all be accurate. I’ve checked the email I sent them, and this is what I wrote: “listen to our podcast, The Young’uns Podcast. I’m sure you can work out how to find it. You seem like a clever bunch.” But for some reason, this is how the published article reads: “listen to our podcast, The Young’s Podcast. I’m sure you can work out how to find it. You seem like a clever bunch.”

Well, they’ll have to be even cleverer now, as they’ll have to deduce that this information is incorrect. If you type the Young’s Podcast in Google then you are unlikely to find it. You get Jimmy Young’s Podcast, the Young Entrepreneur Podcast, Kirsty Young’s Desert Island Discs podcast, Young Lion’s Dancehall Reggae Bashment (DRB) podcast, Tim Young’s Contrast podcast, etc etc. If you do type Young’s Podcast into Google, we’re not even in the first 100 search results, and then I gave up after that.

All I can assume is that they’ve put it through a spellchecker and it’s corrected the name. So all they have done by spellchecking, is make the article less accurate and misspelt. I’d already spellchecked it, and it was all fine. I have employed Jools as my secretary (A lovely in-joke there for the old time dollop fans).

There may be people reading that article who’ll assume that it was me who made that stupid mistake, and they might then jump to the conclusion that, if I’m stupid enough not to be able to spell my own band properly, then it was probably me who also wrote my own name wrong. Well, I’m putting the record straight here: it’s all the Big Issue’s doing, not mine. I think you should all boycott the Big Issue and refuse to support any of the homeless people who sell it, until I am given a written apology, and it better be spellchecked properly. Perhaps when they see the devastation and hardship they have caused among the homeless community, they will come to realise their wrong-doing, and address their failings. If a few homeless people have to die in the process, then so be it. It is a small price to pay for ensuring long-term editorial integrity.

P.S. That was David eagles who wrote that last bit, whereas David eagle would not encourage any such thing, so if you found that last bit offensive, address your comments to David.eagles@theyoung’s.co.uk.

You can read the article here.

Downloadthe audio version here

The Kitty cafe was enjoyable, although probably as a one-off experience. Disappointingly though, there were no cats zooming around in wheelchairs. The house rules didn’t do much to make the human diners feel welcome. The first line of the rules basically told us that we should remember that we have entered the cats’ home, and that we should be mindful and respectful of that at all times. We were also informed that the cats weren’t there purely for our amusement. We then got a list of things that we weren’t allowed to do: no picking up the cats, no pulling the cat’s tail, don’t push the cats off chairs, don’t prod or poke the cats. I was starting to think that this would be no fun at all. I mean, I’d come all this way, and I wasn’t even allowed to pull the cats’ tails or knock them off chairs? We were also told not to feed the cats, yet there was a sentence later on which informed us that our food was our own responsibility, and if the cat’s jumped on our table and snaffled anything, then that was our own look-out.

We were then charged £5 upon entrance, which was simply a fee to sit in the cafe, and didn’t cover the price of food. When I first entered the cafe, I didn’t begrudge this £5 charge – after all, wheelchairs for cats can’t be cheep – but the fact that there wasn’t a wheelchair-bound cat present made me feel a bit cheated out of my money. Perhaps if I’d paid a bit extra they’d have let me pull a tail or two or knock a few cats off some chairs. If you do go to the Kitty Cafe, it might be worth enquiring. Also you might want to check in advance of going whether they’ve actually got any feline wheelchair users currently in their care.

When we arrived at our table, there was a cat lying on the chair at our table which I was meant to sit on. I knew that it was frowned upon to knock the cat off the chair, so I considered that I might be standing and eating, while the cat sat on my chair, and probably stole my food. But then I realised that there was nothing in the rules about not sitting on the cats. I remembered that the rules had stipulated no prodding or poking, and so, not wanting to break the rules, I made sure that there were no sharp objects in my back pockets that could potentially come into contact with the cat, thus causing it to be poked, and then I sat down. The cat quickly vacated my chair. David Eagle one, cat nil.

I met all the stars from yesterday’s Dollop: toffee, muffin, marmalade, pumpkin. I thought about trying to get a photo for the Dollop of the four cats standing around me, or perhaps I could have the cats lying on the table, while I held a knife and fork poised over them, as if I was about to eat them. But I couldn’t think of a way of getting all four of them in this pose, without breaking several of the Kitty Cafe’s house rules.

I managed to eat most of my food, before a cat bounced onto my table and ate the rest of my salad. I only got into trouble once from a member of Kitty Cafe staff, as I forgot about their “no stroking with your mouth full” rule. Ruth got into trouble for leaving the table before the cat had finished her meal, which apparently was terrible manners.

We overheard a bit of a spat between one of the diners and a member of Kitty Cafe staff. The man must have yanked one of the cat’s tails, because the waiter bounded over and said, “get your coat, you’ve pulled.” Unless the man had actually been propositioned by one of the cats, and the poor bloke, in spite of his complete sexual disinterest in cats, was forced to go upstairs to the cats boudoir and make love to it, which may have been one of the rules written in the small print section. I would have asked, but I didn’t want Ruth thinking that I was interested in having sex with cats, so I remained silent on the subject. I can always go back another time.

So, if you don’t mind sharing your food with a load of cats, and being treated as a second class species, where cats rule the roost, then the Kitty cafe is the place for you.

No, I am being a little facetious here, it was actually quite fun, principally due to its novelty value, and the staff were very hospitable. Although, I have to say that, otherwise I’ll be breaking one of the Kitty Cafe tenets which stipulates that anyone who speaks ill of the Kitty Cafe shall be hunted down and set upon by a pack of ferocious cats.

You can visit the Kitty Cafe’s website here.

Another audio only Dollop (have I learnt nothing?) only this time I actually do manage to get around to talking about the Kitty Cafe.

Download it here