Feline diet: the alternate version

I'm sure this will come as a terrible shock to you, but it is not Mac alone who likes to eat ... unusually.

Barry is entirely convinced that he was put on this planet to eat metal things.

Lord knows why - it can't be pleasant for his teeth, surely? - but when he first moved in he was monstrously destructive. He chewed his way through a pair of my glasses, before I learned to put them securely in a drawer at night; a radio aerial; several electrical cables, once he'd figured out that they were wire inside.

These days he is more temperate, but I have a metal waste-basket in the bedroom which he likes to chew on of a morning before breakfast. My paperclips I have had to lock away, so securely that now I cannot find them. And - particularly, immediately, and every time - those little wire ties that secure cables and so forth? He can sniff those out from miles away. And I have to take them away, for they are sharp and swallowable. And then he is out of love with me, and stomps away all disgruntled.

"Hidden Cities" revealed!

It's publication day. Just sayin'.

Interview!

Whoops, that was nearly embarrassing. I was just sitting here in my bathrobe, in my jetlagged state, thinking about going to bed - and the phone rang, and it was the nice man from the radio station to do the interview that my publisher arranged weeks'n'weeks ago that I had forgotten about entirely...

Still, he caught me and I wasn't asleep and I don't think I sounded too stupid, though I probably chased all the wrong rabbits in the wrong directions, because I have no sense of what is proper to say and what not. (The interview was with Sohaib at Fictional Frontiers, and I can't remember when he said it'd be going out live but I will link to it via the website when it's up, promise...)