A Clever Invention (part one)

You may have noticed that many houses in this country have placed in their front doors small rectangular holes with various sorts of more or less moveable covers. They remind me a little of cat-flaps, though they are generally far too small for a cat to squeeze through, and somewhat the wrong shape being wide enough for a cat, but not tall enough, I would think, even for a baby cat, and in any case they are usually too high up for a cat small enough to climb through to jump. Grown-up cats can jump, definitely, I’ve seen them, but a baby cat couldn’t jump that high, I’m sure. But this lack of accessibility to cats is, far from being a design flaw, actually very clever, as the purpose of these apertures is not to admit cats, but rather to allow a man to visit my house almost every day and push a variety of paper-based items through my door and onto the mat, where I can collect them later at my convenience. The beauty of this hole-in-the-door system is that it works even if I can’t come to the door, for example if I am on the toilet, or even not in the house at all, for example if I am at the shops.