A mouse who was on the spot on the night of the grand ball is not as taken as humans are with this classic fairy tale of mating success. You are a species that has lost touch with itself, he tells us. Your big brains have outgrown you. They have taken you into a world in which you are not really at home and made you strangers to yourselves there. Any animal shows more common sense in its daily life than you humans do. And don’t tell me, he adds, that a mouse is in no position to comment on human affairs. None of you has ever been a mouse but I was once a human. Remember the footman on the pumpkin coach? We had a grand night of it that night that Puss, Fido, the frogs and we mice took Sinda to the ball and we learned a few things there before the bell tolled midnight. Jake van der Kamp is a Hong Kong-based financial journalist and novelist whose fiction on the theme of ‘old stories told anew’ explores organised religion, social dilemmas stemming from the rapid pace of technological change and the likely ordering of society in the Space Age of the future.
