Cats

Francine is upset about the paintings by local artists we’ve put up around the community centre. Francine, an ex-punk now in her late sixties with short purple hair and a matching shopping trolley, is put out because we hadn’t invited her to put up any of her paintings and she runs a painting class here. I begin to try and explain how Bob the cab driver is responsible for this whole exhibiting local artists idea because he’s also a photographer and…well, that’s a whole other story. Bob may or may not have a neurological condition. We’re not sure. He’s very hard to say no to, that we have found out. Francie doesn’t care. She’s very annoyed.

I start off trying to placate her. “These pictures aren’t permanent. The idea is that we rotate the artists. We could put some of your art up in a few months,” I tell her.

“Well, that’s no good,” she complains, “I won’t be here then, I’ll be on holiday.” For fuck’s sake. There’s no pleasing some people. 

“I don’t even like the art Bob’s put up,” I tell her. “Look, look at this one -” I lead her to the room upstairs and show her a painting of a cat that makes me feel murderous. “I’m glad it’s up here and I rarely have to look at it. If I had to look at this every day I’d start killing people.”

Francine looks troubled by my sincerity. I may have over shared there. “Well, art is very subjective…” she says.

“Is it, though? I mean, look at it. Good art might be subjective but bad art is bad art and this is bad art.”

Francine can see she’s not going to convince me otherwise about this cat painting. I’m hoping she might also be reconsidering wanting us to exhibit her own paintings. Excellent. Job done. Sometimes I find that when diplomacy fails, being honest with people is often the best approach; creating a sense of fear can be an incredibly effective tool when trying to manage people’s unrealistic expectations.

Coincidentally, later that evening, completely out of the blue, a friend of mine had sent me multiple photos of a cat he and his partner had recently acquired and were now clearly besotted with. He even attached an audio file of her meowing. The cat. Not his partner. I’m perplexed. Why would he do such a thing? I’d rather he had sent me unsolicited pictures of his penis. I would have been equally as appalled and offended but at least I could have imagined an explanation. Needless to say, I didn’t respond to his multimedia cat missive. Hopefully my lack of response will have communicated how it felt to be on the receiving end of such offensive material. If not I may have to engage a more direct approach.