As everyone knows, the world
is a huge flat disk that is supported by four huge elephants, who in turn
stand on the back of a gargantuan Star Turtle - the Great A'tuin.
Reports that Christopher Columbus, amidst others, have managed to prove
otherwise are false - Columbus really fell off the side of the world trying
to prove his false claim...
...Or at least, he would
have, if we were on the Discworld.
As imagined by Terry Pratchett,
the Discworld is as described above, and as you may imagine, things
are different - but still hauntingly familiar - to this world. Magic
is rife, the gods are real, as are wizards; and so is Death...
But as this is a feline tribute
page, I'll focus on the cats - and the attitudes to them by some of the
denizens of the Disc...
Greebo
The beloved cat of Nanny
Ogg, one of the three witches of Lancre. Nanny calls him a big old
softie, but I'm not sure about that description...
Dogs avoid Greebo.
Wolves avoid Lancre because
of Greebo's prescence.
He is the undisputed leader
of the feline population - mostly because he fathered the vast majority
of it.
If it moves - and even if
it doesn't - he'll try to play with it, eat it, or rape it.
He is a tomcat that resembles
a patchwork rug more than a cat, owing to all the scar tissue he's carrying
around.
When times were bad, and
there was no other solution open at the time, the witches ended up having
to turn Greebo into a human - a scary prospect, given his hobbies!
What he ended up like was a tall, lithe, black haired man with a patch
over one eye who oozed a sexuality so thick that it affected people rooms
away. He now has a tendency to turn back into that man when he's
stressed (which makes travelling with him on the back of the broomstick
interesting!), but at least he can get a saucer of milk from any woman
he wants (and a few men)!
"Wwwwaaannt miiiiilllllluk nnnaaaooooooow!"
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Who would have guessed that
Death - yes, the Grim Reaper, the Stealer of Souls, the Hope of the Hopeless
- was in actuality a cat lover? Despite the fact that cats are considered
to be second only to elves for being nasty buggers that kill and maim with
heaps of style, Death has a soft spot for them - and you've got to accept
that it's got to be difficult for a seven foot skeleton to find ANYTHING
soft inside!). They can see him, for one thing, and they accept him.
One of the few things that makes him truly angry (a skeleton has no glands
- therefore emotions are fairly rare) is to find a bag of kittens drowned
because they weren't wanted.
I knew there was a reason
why Death was one of my favourite characters.
"I COULD
MURDER A CURRY..."
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Images
are from the Pratchett Portfolio by Paul Kidby