The cat in the hat goes splat

The sun was not out, it was too wet to play
So we sat in the house on that cold day in May.
We sat and we sat and I thought, “How I wish
I wasn’t indoors with this spoilsport fish,
And Sally who never says boo to a goose,
I've got to get out, I have to cut loose.”

But we sat there and stared, just Sally and me;
Our mother was out for the day on a spree.
Our mother was out on her own spending money
And she did not care that the sun was not sunny
Or that we were at home all alone on our own,
Just Sally and me and our fish with the moan.

Then Sally said “Yikes!” and she pointed like that
And who should we see but the cat in the hat
Outside on the kerb, looking cold, drenched and soggy
A miserable, hat-cladded, sad looking moggy.

But our fish said, “No, no”
Make that cat go away
You know what he does
When he comes here to play.
He should not be here,
He should not be about.
He should not be here
While your mother is out.”

But I cut him short there
And I threw the fish out.
I threw the fish out
Of the house to the cat;
In one gulp he was gone,
In one gulp that was that.

“Have no fear” said the cat,
“I will not make a fuss”
And he stepped off the kerb
straight under a bus.

SPLAT! went the cat
In the hat as we sat.
How that hat cat went SPLAT!
Just like that as we sat.

And Sally and I did not know what to do,
The cat just a corpse and and our dreary fish too.
So we sat and we sat on that cold English day
Too bored to converse and too cold to play.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Cat in the Hat, the cat comes into the children's house, makes a huge mess, makes another huge mess with Thing One and Thing Two and then clears everything up before the children's mother comes home. The fish is, I suppose, the moral conscience in the story. It's the fish who tells the cat he should not be there while the children's mother is out and it's the fish who tells the cat to stop his high jinks. The fish also shakes with fear when it sees the children's mother returning home. The fish takes on the role of fishy guardian (but then after all, he's a fish and has good reason to be wary of a cat in the house).

I've borrowed the itialicised lines from the original, but the others are my own. My apologies to Dr Seuss.

Originally published on Blogger on 3rd October 2008 at a time when my three year old daughter was seriously into Dr Seuss.