A Giant Yellow Cat That Is Also A Bus

Cat bus in question. It’s more yellow in the stage production.

The stage adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro begins with two children and their father moving into a countryside house, while the mother is dying (/maybe not dying) in hospital. It then ends with two children and their father still living in a countryside house, while the mother is dying (/maybe not dying) in hospital.

In between a narrative arc that arguably could be summarised as nothing happening at all, the two girls meet some forest spirits who are delightful, yet ultimately exert little effect on the life of the physical characters. It all seemed deeply Japanese to me, though knowing little of Japan, I would probably just say this of anything from Japan.

The big pull of the production is the forest spirit Totoro, who I can best describe as a 4 metre tall Furby. He is orchestrated by a brigade of ninja-clad puppeteers who manage with comic timing to roll the beast’s eyes or manipulate his mouth into an expansive Cheshire Cat smile. Totoro is accompanied by a bunch of cronies who are essentially smaller Furbies, but at one point he summons a giant yellow cat onto the scene, a cat that has ten legs, and of course that is also a bus.

The ten legged cat bus takes the children on a ride to see their dying (or might she live?) mother in the hospital and it’s hard at this point not to get carried away with them. There’s the emotion of the children desperate to see their dying mum (or is she?) and then the sheer production value of the ten legged giant yellow cat puppet that is also a bus.

It was actually too magic, and that saddened me. I became deeply disappointed that in the real world there is no actual magic or cat buses. I looked at all the poor children watching the show, allowing false fantasy to seep into their dreams for the world, and wanted to scream Get out! GET OUT!

It took moments to realise I was being foolish. Not only for wanting to scream at a hundred children during a matinee performance at the Barbican, but for even cultivating the idea that magic does not exist.

We live in a world of novelty, where as sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke put it “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” You walk out of The Barbican to see towers that could once only have been created by the gods, cars that have erased the ancient bind of distance, and smartphones that show you teenagers dancing on TikTok from anywhere in the world.

I’d take Clarke further and say any phenomena at all is magic if you’ve never been exposed to it. Look at liquids for example, some planets don’t even have liquids. If somehow lifeforms were to exist there, they would be almost as amazed by the state of liquid as they would by a giant yellow cat that is also a bus (unless these lifeforms are already giant yellow cat buses, in which case they would be more amazed by liquid).

And conversely if as a teenager you were to have a giant yellow cat bus take you to school each day, it would quickly stop to be magic. The cat bus would say something chipper to you as you got on, and you’d be like “jeeze that was such a lame thing to say cat bus,” and then go vape at the back with your peers.

Roald Dahl’s tales are known for fantastical figures, beasts and foods. The Big Friendly Giant forfeits eating humans for snozzcumbers that are striped black and white, large enough for a child to hide inside and have seeds the size of melons. It is the snozzcumber that is magic to us, but when he is introduced to the wholesome carrot, it is our foods that are magic to him.

Beyond the thousands of foods we have, it’s more extraordinary to consider all those lost to time and the infinite varieties that never evolved. A man on a wine course told me grapes almost went extinct. One thing is to imagine a world today without wine, another is to imagine all the wine-like phenomenons we did lose, and another to imagine all the possible ones that exist along infinitely divergent evolutionary paths.

Wine was sacred to the ancient greeks, who believed divine intervention was required to transform grapes sitting in an amphora into a mind-altering cup of goodness. The preservation of tinned tomatoes is instead sacred to myself, built upon multiple layers of magic (that multicellular life evolved, that they organised themselves into plants and into animals who eat plants, that plants produced fruits to entice these animals, that humans cultivated wild plants into agriculture, that tins can be mass produced) and I wouldn’t bare a winter without their frequent use.

Long time followers of Sam’s Good Stuff will know tomatoes have held a dear place in my heart. For some time I’ve hoped to have written on my tombstone “he worked magic with tomatoes” (And was a loving husband and father, etc.) But in the light of what I’ve gleamed from that giant yellow cat bus, I’d find it more fitting to have it written “he understood that tomatoes are magic.”

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Papa Al Pomodoro

Here’s something to drum up whenever stale bread presents itself, and a couple of tins of tomato are in the cupboard (which should be always). Buy peeled plum tinned tomatoes rather than chopped, as we should respect nature’s intended form where we can. The better the quality of tinned tomato, the better the result, though I will admit my tins of tomato are mostly from supermarkets.

An ask before the recipe…

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Ingredients

• 2 tins of tomatoes

• 1/4 load good quality bread

• Olive oil

• Garlic

• Chilli

• Basil if summer, a few leaves of sage or sprig of rosemary if winter

• ~200ml stock or water

• Salt, pepper, sugar

Method

Drain the tomatoes from the tins, preserving the liquid a part.

Timings below aren’t exactly important.

In a good glug of oil, lay to simmer some chopped up garlic and the chilli (dried or fresh) and - if using - the sage or rosemary. Let those bubble very gently on a low heat together for five minutes or until the garlic has turned a little golden, then add the tomatoes with a big pinch of salt and another big pinch of sugar, raise the heat to medium and let them cook for 10 minutes or until they have broken down and have lost that slightly insipid raw flavour.

Add the bread and enough stock to cover (any stock will do, meat or vegetable, or even a good quality vegetable stock cube).

Let simmer gently for 15 more minutes, stirring occasionally and when the bread is soft through and the whole thing has started to amalgamate into a single entity, serve up, and if using basil, stir in plenty of fresh leaves.