The Annotated Pratchett File, v7a

The Unadulterated Cat

- [p. 7] “The Campaign for Real Cats is against fizzy keg cats.”

Parodies the aims and objectives of the Campaign for Real Ale, a British organisation dedicated to the preservation and promotion of traditional beer-making in the face of the threat from mass-produced ‘love-in-a-canoe’ fizzy keg beer foisted on an unsuspecting public by the large national breweries.

- [p. 18] “[...] good home in this case means anyone who doesn’t actually arrive in a van marked J. Torquemada and Sons, Furriers.”

See the annotation for p. 137/88 of Good Omens if you don’t know who Torquemada was.

- [p. 28] “Or perhaps there is now a Lorry cat undreamed of by T. S. Eliot.”

T. S. Eliot, 20^th century poet and critic. He wrote the book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which the musical Cats was based on.

- [p. 28] “[...] growing fat on Yorkie bars.”

See the annotation for p. 130/119 of Truckers.

- [p. 35] “You need a word with a cutting edge. Zut! is pretty good.”

‘Zut’ is also a French exclamation, meaning Damn or “drop dead”.

- [p. 44] “[...] sitting proudly beside a miniature rodent Somme on the doorstep.”

The Somme is a river in the north of France, which has been the scene of some extremely heavy fighting in both World Wars. In 1916 for instance, a French/British offensive pushed back the German lines there, at very heavy cost to both sides.

- [p. 73] “It’s bluetits and milk-bottle tops all over again, I tell you.”

Refers to a well-known evolution-in-action anecdote concerning a particular species of birds which collectively, over a period of time, learned how to open milk-bottles that the milkman left on the doorsteps each morning in a certain English rural area.

- [p. 84] “[...] the price of celery is eternal vigilance.”

This paraphrases “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”, nowadays usually associated with Kennedy. It was in fact first said by John Philpot Curran in his “The Right of Election of the Lord Mayor of Dublin” speech in 1790.

- [p. 86] “a garden that looks like an MoD installation,”

MoD = Ministry of Defence.

- [p. 92] “Owing to an unexplained occurrence of Lamarckian heredity [...]”

Lamarck was a contemporary of Darwin who became the symbol for what was for a long time a very strong rival of Darwin’s own natural selection as an explanation for the mechanism of evolution. According to Lamarckism (simplification alert!), changes acquired by an individual of a species can immediately be inherited by the next generation, thus accounting for evolution. Lamarckism has by now completely disappeared as a serious evolutionary theory, in favour of modified versions of natural selection.