![]() Having forgotten about her cat-flap door, Mog meowed until someone let her in. Several weeks ago in a posting about Judith Kerr – Tigers Who Came to Tea, and other Cat Tales – I’d mentioned that I hoped to do a follow-up about some of Kerr’s cat books too. ![]() With all that in mind, I thought perhaps we could use more cats on the Cotsen blog this week. Thus, the cats all, unwittingly, got their “fifteen seconds of fame”… (There was one dog too, and a puppet, but mostly cats – cats must be a librarian thing.) Lasting literally seconds, this non-agenda event eased the rest of our (otherwise serious) discussion in the same the way that a meeting-opening “ice-breaker” often does. Several of us hijacked our own cats from their early afternoon naps, held them up, and shared the view with our colleagues. Those of us in the conference all had more or less the same spontaneous reaction as those seeing the BBC video clip – we could all relate. At one point, somebody’s cat sauntered across the desk. ![]() As the Cotsen Library and the Princeton Library has been largely closed in the last week because of health precautions, those of us in Special Collections have been working from home and holding daily video conference meetings via Zoom as part of our work. We all need a break from grim tidings and we could also all relate to the incident. “Library Cat” offering assistance to her working-from-home (WFH) erstwhile servant - or wondering “What are youdoing here?” Perhaps even more surprisingly, the video clip of this escapade went viral – and I really wish I could use another term – on CNN, BBC, and YouTube and was widely reported and commented on in news broadcasts and TV or cable talk shows. Just the other day, a coat-and-tie-wearing professor being interviewed live on the BBC from what looked like a professional-looking setting - a world wall map and glass-fronted library bookcase behind him – was astonished when his two little children crashed the interview by bursting into the room (thereby unmasked as a home office) and temporarily disrupted the proceedings the kids just wanted to see the person who, to them, was “Daddy,” not a world expert. But real life intrudes in surprising and, thankfully, not always bad ways. Many of us (the lucky ones in many ways) find ourselves working from home, trying to do our jobs as best we can and keep up some semblance of “normalacy” to our colleagues, often in makeshift work-from-home arrangements. The news being what it is these days, we all have a lot on our minds, no matter where we live. Judith Kerr’s Mog the Forgetful Cat (1970)
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