smallhobbit | Thirty Days Meme: Day 2 - The Ocelot Tales (Reply)

Having been away at the weekend, today being a Bank Holiday is being used for catching up on the housework (aka if I don't do something I'll have no clothes to wear to work this week). Maybe further on in the thirty days I shall be reduced to writing about ironing, but for now I shall talk about The Ocelot Tales.

I'm a member of

sherlock60 in which every week we read one of the canon ACD Sherlock stories and write 60 words as inspired by the story. We are currently coming to the end of the second complete read through. Having already written for most of the stories on the first round I decided that this round would have a theme and so chose to use one of the animals that was present, or could be construed to be present. At first it was easy: Victor Trevor's dog, a spider in the Musgrave vaults, Jefferson Hope's horse. At times it has been a struggle to find something appropriate, but I have kept going and with the end now in sight I am determined to finish.

The ocelot originally appeared in the first round in The Veiled Lodger:

“I see you made mention of the lighthouse and the trained cormorant,” Holmes commented one morning.

“You said I had your permission to do so,” I replied.

“You did indeed. But you omitted the ocelot wearing a tutu.”

“I felt the former two were sufficient for the purpose. And to be fair, the ocelot wasn’t directly involved in the case.”

From there I conceived the idea of The Ocelot Tales, in which the ocelot (see my icon) arranged for the submissions to be made. They subsequently became The Return of the Ocelot Tales, following the untimely death of Mr Sherlock Holmes and his fortuitous reappearance three years later.

The ocelot again appears in this year's week for The Veiled Lodger were we learn a little more about its involvement.

My association with Mr Holmes goes back many years to when the man in the flat above was a newly elected backbencher. I wore the tutu to distract him whilst Mr Holmes was investigating his flat. Since then I have been able to render some other slight services, which for obvious reasons Dr Watson has felt were better not documented.

Occasionally animals reappear (there's at least one spider which I suspect annoys Mrs Hudson), one of which is Mouselet. Mouselet is extremely fond of Stanley Hopkins, who for reasons that I blame entirely on impishtubist looks like Richard Armitage as John Thornton in "North and South". Mouselet has even contributed a longer story on AO3 The Case of the Beloved Inspector due to the fact that it is clear that Dr Watson did not record all the stories where Holmes and Hopkins worked together and Mouselet felt a need to rectify this.