The Old Ways

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and likewise there’s more than one way to deal with a gnarly toenail situation. Not that we’re skinning cats these days, mind you – I wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong end of the stick about that. No, the days of cat-skinning are well and truly in the past. They were good days, and very productive in terms of appeasing the Great Horned Beast, but they’ve ended now and that’s all there is to it.

Back to the story. Everyone’s been talking about Clara’s toenail problem, or perhaps it was something to do with bunions… you know how minor details get lost along the grapevine. Anyway, I was told by Helga that it was a case of stubborn toenail fungus, and that Clara had made a podiatry appointment near Cheltenham in order to get it dealt with. The subtext? She couldn’t banish it herself.

Now, don’t get me wrong – Clara is more than competent, at least when she’s working with quality material. Everyone knows that her beloved grimoire is decades out of date, yet she insists on persevering with it come hell or high water. She’s a traditionalist, she’ll have you know, and won’t abide the notion of a new way of doing things.

Whether that be a more contemporary spell-casting technique, an improved processing method or simply an ingenious suggestion from a fellow fungal-footed victim of onychomycosis, it pays to have an open mind with these things. Clara is suffering the consequences of failing in that area. For her, there’s one way and only one way to skin a cat, even if that one way does happen to be rather more of a bloodbath than is strictly necessary.

Let this be a lesson to us all. Become too attached to the traditional ways, and risk being forced to bow to the mundane powers – you know, like podiatry.