la belle et le bete

By Deidre Wheeler

For every fairy tale there is a furry tale equivalent and this is one of them....

Once upon a time, in the Land of the Grinning Cat, there dwelt a fair Somali princess. Although she was now a cat "of a certain age", her hair still shone like silk, her eyes were lustrous as limpid pools and she had retained her hour-glass figure.   In fact, she was often described as the feline Joan Collins and, like her famous alter-ego, she had a penchant for handsome young studs.

This vision of delight was known to everyone as Belle, meaning in English, Beauty.

When the winter solstice had passed and gone and the days very gradually began to lengthen, Belle's thoughts turned away from the bright lights of show business towards the perfection of love.

She had heard that there dwelt on a hillside in Derbyshire a prince of unsurpassed splendour and so one day at the beginning of the year she set off with her entourage towards the distant peaks.   But, when she reached those far-off hills, it was so cold and desolate that she found her ardour had quite cooled.   Suddenly, there appeared a sight to make her heart miss a beat, a cat whose golden ruff surrounded his majestic head like a halo of light.    Yet he seemed to tremble at her approach and turned a lighter shade of sorrel before her eyes.   "Go away! Go away!" he shrieked, but then he stopped suddenly and said in a calmer voice "Forgive me, dear lady, for a moment in this dim light I thought you were someone else, my worst nightmare in fact"    And then Belle realised that this must be Prince Potty, whom her minx of a granddaughter, Leyla, had teased so mercilessly the year before.   She felt very sorry for the poor fellow and, even though her amorous mood had now completely gone, she decided to spend some time with him to make up as best she could for Leyla's bad behaviour.   When the day came, a week later, for her to return down to the Cheshire Plain, she had more than restored his self-confidence.

As Belle was leaving, she saw her friend Ruby arriving to linger with the handsome Prince and she winked at Ruby and mouthed the message "I think you'll find him all right now". Sure enough, when Easter came, Ruby had five little sorrel kittens to remind her of her excellent time with the handsome prince.

As for Belle, when the spring was really on its way, one sunny morning in early March, she set off again for that distant hillside and this time both she and Potty were in the mood for love.   He remembered everything she had taught him and when she returned home she wrote to her naughty granddaughter to let her know that soon she would have some new little uncles and aunts to prove once and for all that Potty was certainly no poofter.

And this was how it came to pass that Beauty turned the Handsome Prince into a ravening beast - to the delight of Somali maidens everywhere.