it's the loneliness that's the killer...

The cat seems to be going through a phase of hunkering down low with her chin on the ground peering underneath things: she spent a couple of days staring under the fridge and has most recently taking to looking intently underneath the table that holds the television.  As far as I can see, there's nothing there.  Mind you, she once spent a few days staring down a drain in the road outside, where we assume she may have seen a rat, so perhaps this is just another normal day for our cat.  As it's autumn now and we seem to be in the middle of the annual migration of the spiders into the house, I thought she had probably chased some poor arachnid undercover.

We do have a huge spider in the house at the moment.  We call her Aragog because she's one of those spiders that's so big you can pretty much hear her footsteps.  The cat was chasing her around - at a respectful distance - the other day when Aragog suddenly changed direction and started moving towards her.  The cat - perhaps sensibly - backed up and then ran away.

Anyway.

There was a slightly funky smell in the front landing the other way.  It was a sort of cheesy mustiness, so I assumed it was probably my trail shoes (which have been in some pretty boggy places this year).  I picked them up and gave them an exploratory sniff, but then went to fetch the vacuum because the act of picking them up revealed that I should really get on with some rudimentary domestic tasks before my wife got home from France.  I carefully moved all the shoes in the hallway, hoovered, and then put them all back and nice and tidily.  I then moved on to vacuum the rest of the house (I like to call it hoovering, even though I know that's a brand name and not the makers of our particular vacuum cleaner.  I persist in using the word because I know how much it would irritate James Dyson, and he's the sort of person who needs this kind of low-level trolling).

The next time I was in the hall, the smell was worse.  By the time C got home, it was positively rank... so the first thing she did after dropping her bag was to hunt about to see what might be causing it.

She quickly found out.

It was a beautiful little mouse, quite dead and curled up neatly in one of her old running shoes that was next to the radiator.  Who knows how long it had been there.  Long enough, I guess. I suppose my moving of the trainers released the full bouquet of decay.  It was quite heady.

Our cat is not a killer, but she seems to have some dormant instinct that has taught her to chase things, but she has no understanding of what she is supposed to do if she should catch them.  Her track record with mice is somewhat limited and restricted to tossing one poor thing around in air because she wasn't sure what else to do with it and holding another one down until it died of fright after emptying its bowels and trying to gnaw its way through the carpet.

How this one wandered in, I don't know.... but I rather suspect that it tried hiding from the cat underneath the fridge and then underneath the telly but eventually took refuge in that shoe where it quietly died trying to avoid a predator whose fundamental ineptness it couldn't possibly know.

Poor little thing.

What a smell, though.

to the left, to the left...

I've developed a twitch.

It's not quite as dramatic as Robert Lindsay's character Michael Murray in GBH, but it's getting there.

It's my left thigh, and it seems to happen mostly in the evening.  I'll be minding my own business, sitting on the sofa or lying in bed or something, and my left thigh will suddenly jolt as the muscle contracts. If I'm sitting with my feet up on the coffee table, this will quite often send my leg flying up into the air and off the table.  As you can imagine, it's quite irritating.... not least for the cat when she's sitting on my lap.

I've had problems with my calves cramping for a little while now.  That seems to happen mostly at night, usually when I'm asleep in bed.  I'll wake up, wonder why I've woken up and then suddenly realise that my calf muscles are cramping and I'll hobble out of bed to desperately try and stretch the muscles out.  It's not much fun and I'm not sure what to do about it.  I've been taking magnesium supplements before I go to bed, and I usually have a pint of orange and tonic water with my tea because the quinine is supposed to help.  Maybe it does help, but I'm still cramping.

The muscle twitching is new and troublesome development.  My left leg is my weaker leg, of course. During the summer months, I usually spend my Wednesday evenings doing some interval training on the Embankment organised by my friends at Colwick parkrun.  It's the kind of training that you would never really do on your own. It's horrible, but fun all at the same time.  We often have lots of different exercises each week to try and keep things fresh.  This week, we some of those little hurdles that you use for quick feet exercises.  They're only three or four inches off the ground, but they're designed to work on your speed and agility.  We ran over them as part of our warm up, leading with the right leg first, then the left leg and then both feet. I couldn't help but notice that I found it significantly harder to pick up my left leg over the hurdle than I did my right.  It's only a small loss of mobility, but it's a noticeable one and I'm afraid that it might be getting a little worse over time.  I seem to be having an accumulation of little issues in my left leg.

Still.  At the moment, most of this is annoying but not much more.  I can't be spending my life worrying about what might happen and if this might all get worse, because equally it might not.  It's a total waste of time.  That's not to say that I haven't noted that it's happening though, or that I don't find it irritating, because I do.

Probably not as irritating as the cat does though...she cocks her ear at me in a most dissatisfied manner with every twitch.

I suppose there's always this....

so mystic and soulful....

Vienna is a beautiful city. It might even be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It’s one of those places where history permeates the very streets: whether it’s wandering through the cobbled mazes behind the Stephansdom, imagining that you’re Orson Welles in the Third Man or looking at the Hofburg Palace and imagining the might of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On a much smaller scale, you can appreciate this history in how the long Turkish influence on the city – they laid siege to Vienna in 1529 under Suleiman the Magnificent and were only really finally turned away at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 – means you can get a damn good cup of coffee (even if many tourists still inexplicably flock to Starbucks). It’s the city of Mozart, Beethoven, Hayden, Strauss; of Freud, Wittgenstein, Schrödinger and Mendel; of Klimt, Schiele and Hundertwasser. It’s a great place for a weekend break.

In fact, we’re just back from doing exactly that…. Only we didn’t really do anything much to take advantage of the cultural attractions of this fascinating city. We were there for the best part of four days, and I didn’t really do anything cultural beyond going for a run on the Prater past the Riesenrad. Even then, I was thinking of the milkman with exploding balloons from the Living Daylights rather than the significantly more highbrow scenes from The Third Man.

It might mean nothing to Midge Ure, but I love Vienna, but it’s for much more personal reasons than any of that cultural shizzle listed above: we have some really good friends there. These are people that C has known for longer than 30 years, dating back to the school pen-pal scheme that first introduced her to her best friend. That family became her second family when she was au-pairing in Vienna and a long way from home and they also welcomed me with open arms when I first rolled up some years later. It’s no coincidence at all that we got married in Vienna and it’s why we keep going back.

So, I didn’t spend my long weekend absorbing culture in one of Europe’s great capitals, I spent it eating wurst and schnitzel and drinking beer and wine with some of the finest people there are. Plus they have cats.

It was great.

cute little heartbreaker....

In the small hours of Saturday morning, we were awoken by a strange noise.  For a moment, I thought it might be a cat fight, but as I lay in bed and listened, I realised that the noise was more of a kind of bark/whine and was far more likely to be coming from a fox.

I like foxes.  We used to have loads of them around here, and I have a very fond memory of the time when I sat by the ground floor window of my bedroom in a shared house and watched two fox cubs playing on a flattened cardboard box right underneath me as their mother watched me closely from the bottom of the garden.

It was a magical few minutes.

We don't see them so often any more.  The council switched to wheelie bins a few years ago now, and I guess their food supplies just dried up now that we don't have bin bags piled out in the street.  I don't suppose anyone misses the mess, but even so, it's almost a shame.  I used to love watching them running up and down the streets in the middle of the night or if you bumped into one first thing in the morning.  I don't know about you, but I love these little glimpses of nature in our man-made world.

On Saturday morning, I got out of bed to peek out of my window, and in the dawn light, I saw a young fox just on the other side of the street.  He was fussing over something and letting out these strange little yelping whines.  I watched for a while and saw that he was playing with something that looked like a ball.... then it dawned on me: he had a hedgehog.  I had no idea we had any hedgehogs around here.  Not surprisingly, the hedgehog had rolled up into a ball, and the young fox was experiencing the pain and frustration of trying to bury his nose into the spikes as he tried to find a way in.  He looked like he wasn't having any luck, and he gave up once, but soon came trotting back to have another go.  A few minutes later, he gave up for good and trotted off down the street as if he had other urgent business that required his immediate attention.

I watched for a bit longer to see if the hedgehog uncurled himself and wandered off, but he seemed reluctant to move until he was quite sure the coast was clear... and who could blame him? I pulled the curtain back and went back to bed.

Next morning, the hedgehog was still there.  I popped out for a closer look and saw that he was still curled up in a ball, but he was missing his head.  He'd frustrated the fox, but for him is was no more than a pyrrhic victory.

As I watched that scuffle in the early morning light, I had a quick look around for my cat. If all the noise had woken me up, she was hardly likely to have ignored such a noise on her territory and was bound to have gone to investigate.  Sure enough, she was nowhere to be seen.  I should imagine a fox would know better than to tangle with the spitting ball of muscle, claws and fury that is an angry cat, and I also would think that most cats are smart enough to stay out of the way of a hungry fox.  Mind you, our cat is not the shiniest pebble on the beach, bless her....you never know what's going through her little head.  As she was nowhere to be seen, I imagine that she was watching the whole thing from a distance and a safe vantage point off the ground with BIG eyes.

You can't trust these foxes, you know. As any fule kno.

some of those that work forces....

butter wouldn't melt....

I took the cat to the vet on Saturday morning.  Two hours later - two hours! - I emerged with a problem:  I was going to have to attempt to put a pea-sized drop of ointment into her eye once a day for the next week.  You'll have seen the jokes about giving a cat a pill, I'm sure.  Let me tell you... I don't think putting ointment into a cat's eye is much easier.  You're no doubt better at this than I am, but for us, this is a two-person job and involves swaddling her up like an egyptian mummy and then holding this squirming bundle tight as you attempt to hold one eye open long enough to apply the ointment before the whole thing escapes and a seething mass of claws and swearing.

This is bad enough, but unfortunately it didn't end there as the vet also asked me to collect a urine sample.  If you're anything like me, then you'll be wondering how on earth you do that.  Do you just pick up and squeeze or what?  Well, no.  I now know that you get some special,  non-absorbent litter and then simply shut the cat in until she pees and you can collect the sample.

Easy, right?

No.

Our cat is - and always has been - very fastidious.  She has a litter tray, but ever since she was a kitten she has always preferred to go outside.  She finds the whole process distasteful, I think.  When she was small and was shut inside during the day, she used to wait until we were back from work before hopping onto the litter tray.  As soon as the deed was done, she then wanted the whole unpleasant mess cleaned up as soon as possible, her disgust visible to all.  As soon as she was old enough, we installed a cat flap and no one was happier than her.

So.  At about 5pm last night, I shut the cat flap and put the special litter in the tray.  The cat fairly quickly wanted to go outside, of course, and stared balefully at the cat flap for a while, complaining.  I introduced her to the tray to remind her it was there and hopefully what it was for, but she wasn't interested.  Too soon.  I tried her again several hours later, before going to bed, but again she wasn't interested yet.  I was half expecting to be woken up at about 4am by a cat anxious for an al fresco toilet visit, but nope.... at 7am when I got up, the cat was fast asleep on a chair without a care in the world.  I had a quick check around for suspicious wet patches.  Nothing.  After a bit, she came down for her breakfast, but although she clearly needed to pee, and cast the odd baleful glance at the litter tray, she was appeared damned if she was going to use it.  As we had to go to work, we simply shut the kitchen door and left her to it.

As we walked past the kitchen window on the way to the car, the cat was already on a work surface staring at us with a look of "Yeah?  So I'm on the worktop.  What are you going to do about it?  Fuck you!"

C. popped home at lunchtime - so some 17 hours since we shut the cat flap - and the camel-bladdered little madame still hadn't gone and still wasn't interested in the litter (although by now she wasn't keen on being picked up and having her tummy pressed).  Fuck you, I won't piss where you tell me.   Defiant to the last.

An hour or so later, and still shut in the kitchen, she finally gave up.  After much scratching and pawing at the litter, there was suddenly a sound like the bathroom tap being turned on, followed by the sound of a disgusted cat trying to get the hell out of there as fast as possible, scattering litter everywhere, such was her haste..... the sample was duly collected and delivered to the vet whilst it was still warm.  Mmmm.  Delightful

As the front door was finally opened, the look on the cat's face was apparently a sight to behold: she was simply incredulous that this could not have happened five minutes earlier and spared her the unpleasantness.

Mind you, as it's been raining here all day, since she's been freed, the cat hasn't actually been outside at all.  She's fast asleep on a chair, secure in the knowledge that she could go out if she wanted to.  That, apparently, is enough.

[a cat post, Internet.  You're welcome.....]

breeding ignorance and feeding radiation....

Having shown pretty much zero interest in these human trivialities before, after discovering the television last week, my cat is now fully multimedia.  I'll go into the front room and turn the light on to find that my cat is way ahead of me and is sitting about a foot in front of the TV, looking over her shoulder at me expectantly, waiting for me to turn it on.  Nature documentaries remain her favourite, but apart from that, she's not especially fussy about what's on.  She watches it all.  Mesmerised.

Mind you, she's not a fan of adverts: when the ads are on, she loses interest in the television, idly washes a paw and then perhaps hops onto my lap.  This is usually short-lived.  When the ads finish and the programme resumes, she'll hop off my lap and resume her position just in front of the TV.  She does the same thing with end credits too.  Strange cat.  Mind you, I don't really watch them either, so who am I to criticise?

She's obsessed.  I've started finding her alone, in front of the switched off TV, just waiting for something to happen.  If it magically comes on, she'll be ready.

It's not just TV programmes either: she's taken to sitting like a sentinel on the footstool next to me when I'm playing Dishonored on the Playstation.  I think she likes the menu screens the best and probably isn't all that bothered about my struggles to be the only assassin in town that doesn't kill anybody.  I don't think C. cares much either.  Pff.  My achievements seemed doomed to go unrecognised in my own house. Mediocrities everywhere... I absolve you... I absolve you... I absolve you... I absolve you... I absolve you all.

Another cat post, Internet.  I'm really spoiling you.

I'm not just wild, I'm trained, domesticated....

My cat seems to like wildlife programmes.

She was intrigued by the baby polar bears as they left their den on the TV yesterday, but not enough to do more than lift her head up on my lap and perk up her ears.  She seems to find David Attenborough's "Africa" in High Definition today altogether more interesting.

She really liked the lions - she wasn't scared at all and got as close to the screen as she could.  When she was listening to them, it's almost as though she could somehow understand that they were cats.  By the time the mountain gorillas were on, she was chatting away at the screen and reaching up to try and touch the screen.  Perhaps she was wondering where the lions went.  Cute, but on an HD plasma screen, probably not to be encouraged.....

She's been absolutely gripped by it.

Worth the price of the licence fee on its own.

There you go, internet.  A cat post.  Enjoy.

black and hairy, very small....

I’ve always known that spiders are Scottish. It’s not something that I find easy to understand or to explain, it’s just the way things are and I know it to be true. I’ve never spoken to one, of course - your average spider doesn’t really strike me as much of a conversationalist. But even if I had, I’m not so stupid as to think that any spider would bother to give me the time of day. But still I know them to be Scottish, or if not Scottish born, then of direct Scottish lineage. Just look at the way they walk. Can’t you see it too?

My wife thinks I’m mad, of course.
“How can they all be Scottish? There are spiders all over the world!”
“There are people all over the world too.”
“Yes, but spiders can’t travel as easily as people, and even if they could, why would they all be Scottish?”
“Well, if all mankind is descended from a single female ancestor from the Rift Valley, then why shouldn’t all spiders be descended from a single, Scottish ancestor?”
At this, she just shook her head. If she can’t see the obvious truth with her own eyes, why would I think that logic might open her mind?

The weather is turning. The disappointing slosh of summer is subsiding glumly into the muted drabness of autumn, and as the seasons change, there has been a sudden influx of spiders into our house. Heaven knows how they find their way in, but suddenly I find them scuttling purposefully across the living room floor, clearly on a mission, some big enough that you can hear their footsteps on the floorboards. As I watch them go, I can almost hear them mumbling grimly to themselves, cursing the weather and their ill-fortune as they head to a warm, dark nook somewhere inside my house.

What they don’t realise, poor unsuspecting fools, is that the changing seasons also see a change in the hunting habits of our cat. During the dog days of summer, she will happily spend her evenings hunting moths and bringing them carefully back into the house through her cat-flap for a leisurely dismemberment. As winter approaches, moth season ends and spider season begins. Judging by her face, she doesn’t much like the taste, but they do seem to provide a boundless source of entertainment, especially if they are foolish enough to run under her nose. We used to pride ourselves, my wife and I, on running a spider-friendly establishment. Even the biggest, hairiest man-eater was welcome in our house or would at the very worst be carefully and respectfully ushered off the premises rather than unceremoniously washed down the sink. That changed with the cat, and the house is now largely arachnid free for 10 months of the year. Spider hunting season is brief, but warmly celebrated in these parts, at least by the cat.

Nature is cruel, of course…. But I do fancy that the occasional gnarled survivor, perhaps missing a leg or two, is able to stagger outside, cursing all the while, to pass the word on to other wanderers in the great spider migration south of the vicious Sassenach cat that dwells therein. Maybe they mark the house with some inscrutably Celtic spider symbol of warning?

Who is to say that they don’t?

open the door and let'em in....

Whenever I open the front door, whether I'm coming into the house or just leaving, I often find that my way is obstructed by our cat barging past me.  We have a cat flap, but it seems that she finds the whole process of using it somehow beneath her dignity and would rather wait for someone to save her the trouble.  By the same token, if the cat is outside and I'm inside, I will often hear her pitiful cries as she sits in front of the cat flap begging me to spare her the indignity by opening the door.  She'll often cry to be let in/out of the back door too.  Anything, it seems, but face the cat flap.

This morning, as I got ready to leave for work, the cat lined herself up to escape the house as soon as I opened the door.  She knows that when I put on my shoes, I'm about to leave, and she makes all due haste to get into the best possible position to nip in front of me as I swing open the door, often swerving her body back slightly to allow the door to actually open past her. 

Today, she nipped out in front of me and stopped dead in her tracks as she got into our little storm porch and realised that it was pouring with rain.  She arched her back and then started tip-toeing backwards into the house around my legs.  Once inside, she turned on her heel and shot upstairs to spend the rest of the day curled up tightly on my duvet.  I can't say I blamed her, really: isn't that exactly what you or any other sensible person would have done if they had the choice?  Fool that I am, I smiled at her back as she disappeared up the stairs and then made my way to the office.

After the day I've had, I wish I'd followed her lead and turned on my heel to spend the rest of the day in bed.  More proof, if it were needed, that cats just know stuff.  Never mind the rain, the shower of drizzling nincompoops at work that are wearing me down.

Work is proper bobbins.

and he carries the reminders of every glove that layed him down....

I’ve dived with sharks.
I’ve petted a lion.
I’ve thrown myself out of an aeroplane 10,000ft above the Namibian desert.
I’ve stood 10ft away from an adult male grizzly bear.
I’ve gone down an Olympic bobsleigh run.
I’ve skied (slowly) down double-diamond black runs.
I’ve stood on the side of an erupting volcano.
Hell, I've even eaten a tarantula.

None of these things – not a damn one – has prepared me in any way for attempting to put drops into my cat’s left eye.

Muhammed Ali turned 70 today.

As the great man once said: “I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick; I'm so mean I make medicine sick”

He’s a pretty amazing guy and has lived an incredible life…..but I’d still like to see him try it and take on my little cat twice a day armed only with a tube of Fucithalmic ointment.

There's only one winner.

your ladbroke grove looks turn me on, yeah...

Middle class problems, part LVIII.

When we first got our cat, the RSPCA rescue shelter advised us that it was always better to keep her on dry food and not to get her started on wet food.  Fine by us.  We went to the supermarket and picked up a big bag of kibbles, assuming that all kibbles were more or less the same.

Fast forward a couple of months, and we were dropping our dear little treasure off at the cat hotel for the first time.  When asked what we fed her, the crazy cat lady who runs the shelter/rescue/cattery told us off in no uncertain terms for scrimping on the kibble we bought.  Supermarket own brand, it seems, is definitely not as healthy for a cat as more expensive brands like Hills Science Plan or Royal Canin.  Stung, and feeling like bad cat owners, not only have we always fed the cat the most expensive dried food since then, we even go to the trouble to buy several different types and to create her a custom kibble mix.  She prefers it fresh, you know.  She can tell.

Anyway.  Here's the middle class problem:

Some empty boxes have been appearing around our office, with a plea for people to put in some sort of cat food that will then be collected together and taken to a local cat rescue so that all the poor little rescue cats can have plenty of food over Christmas.

As a cat-tragic household, we were always going to be making a donation.  On my very next trip to the supermarket, I made my way down the pet food aisle.  I don't have to do a great deal of thinking when shopping for my own cat, other than to make sure it's all organic, fair trade goodness for my little princess.  This time though, I hesitated.  Did I really want to spend £12 on a bag of kibbles to donate, or would it be better for everyone if I just spent £5 buying two big bags of supermarket own brand?

After a moment's consideration, I went for quantity over quality.  Partly this was because the brands that I usually buy aren't on sale in the supermarket and I would have to make a stop off at Pets at Home on the way back home, but mostly it was because I thought that rescue cats probably won't be that fussy and more is better.

I've been feeling guilty about this decision ever since.  I can't help but feel bad about the fact that I have tacitly accepted that a rescue cat is not as important as my own cat.  The rescue are presumably grateful for the free food that will enable them to look after more cats for longer, but meanwhile I'm wringing my hands about the whole thing and agonising that I didn't buy them Royal Canin  Poor little mites.

Ridiculous, but true.

---

In other cat related news, my wife has been pining somewhat for our cat to sleep on the bed a bit more.  Our cat goes through definite phases of where she likes to sleep: at this time of year she likes the beanbag in the living room that is pressed up against the radiator, but she also likes a good lap and has been known to spend time on the nice, scrunchy duvet on our bed (especially when she's dirty and wet and we have clean bed linen).   Like any self-respecting cat, she won't be put, of course, and has to choose to hop on of her own free will.  Of late, she hasn't been hopping on.

...except when C. was in Monte Carlo last week, when the cat made a point of curling up on the bed and having a snooze against my legs.  Now that C. is back, she's stopped.

My wife is starting to take this personally.

are you ready boots? start walkin'....

I’ve got a favourite pair of work shoes. I’ve had them since 2004 and worn them almost every day that I’ve been in the office since. I suppose they’re probably a bit like Trigger’s broom: they’ve been resoled and re-heeled so many times that I’m not sure that all that much of the original shoe actually remains. I’ve worn them so much that there are parts where the dye has completely gone and they have what looks like permanent scuffs that can only partially be covered with shoe polish. In addition to that, the inside behind the heel on each shoe has almost completely worn through. I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that they might be a bit scruffy to wear to work and might need retiring and replacing.

That makes me irrationally sad…. I can still buy a more or less identical pair after all…. But these are the magic shoes that I used to wear when we couldn’t find the cat when she was very small. I’m very hard-wearing on the heels of my shoes, so I tend to have steel quarters put in to make them last a bit longer. The cat learned to recognise the “clippety-clop” noise that these shoes made as I walked down the street, and she used to come out to meet me, wherever she had wandered off to. To her, it’s the sound of me coming home (and her tea about to be served).

She still comes running now. It’s very sweet.

Mind you, she recognises the sound of my car engine too, and was very confused – and more than a little put out, I think - the other day when she dashed out of the house to greet us, only to find someone else parking a mini in our street and not me.

I’m pretty sure that she’ll get used to another, identical pair of shoes right enough… and we’re in London this weekend, so I’ll be able to pop to RM Williams to put in an order….but you know, I’m kind of attached to these ones.

poor, poor pitiful me....

In case there was ever any doubt about the outcome, the cat won. 

The original plan was to keep her indoors for at least a couple of weeks to make sure that she knew where she was after the big move back from my parents' house.  It was a plan that the cat was always going to hate, especially after spending nine months enjoying a large garden in rural Buckinghamshire backing onto some fields.  It was a battle of wills in which there was obviously only ever going to be one winner. 

A short but effective campaign of pitiful yowling followed, accompanied by a lot of fuss about having to use a litter tray and some tactical charging about the house in an apparently permanent fit of pique at the manifold indignities imposed upon her.

In short, we gave up.  There is surely nothing that can convey disapproval more effectively than a cat looking at you sternly with her ears slightly pinned back to indicate her distaste for you and her dismay at all your evidently cruel and unreasonable rules.

In the end, she escaped; leaping through the rungs of a stepladder as it was dragged -- too slowly! -- through the front door.  When she was recaptured, after a short struggle, and dragged back inside, she made such a fuss by her cat flap that we ultimately gave up and just let her out.  We locked the catflap again that night, but one final campaign of yowling incessantly in front of it made sure we didn't try that one again the following night.

It was all over.  She'd won.  Several days ahead of schedule, the cat can come and go as she pleases again.  She doesn't go far, and actually spends most of her time indoors anyway, or within about 15m of our front door, but that was never the problem.  The point is that she is CHOOSING to stay indoors and isn't being FORCED to by her cruel and unreasonable owners.

We had our revenge this morning though: worming drops.

Muah-hahahaha.

How people manage to cope with teenagers is beyond me.  I can't even manage to control a cat.  She has me wrapped around her paws and everyone knows it.

litter on the breeze....

One of the best things about coming home after being away for so long has been the chance to reclaim our cat. Given that she's spent the last 9 months living with my parents and their huge garden that opens out onto fields, I'm not sure that the cat would agree with me, but it's not as though she had any choice in the matter, and we came to claim her as soon as we could after we got back from our last trip to Austria and Switzerland and we took her back home with us.

In spite of her protestations to the contrary, I rather think that my mum is going to miss the cat too. It's funny how quickly these little conceited, self-interested creatures worm their way into your affections. We've travelled to some really amazing places this year, and although it has been brilliant to escape from the mundanity of our normal daily routine, we've both really missed our little cat, sulky madame that she is. My mum actually rang me the day after we took the cat home to ask if she was settling down okay and to tell me how she kept listening out for the sound of the cat's bell in the garden. Having been quietly around for the last few months, there's clearly now a cat-shaped hole in their house.

Once she'd recovered from the car ride north (she's not a great traveller), Minou pretty quickly showed signs that she remembered where she was: she was pawing at her favourite piece of carpet at the top of the stairs, rolling around on her back in the dining room to have her tummy tickled and then staring neurotically out of her catflap. We may not have a huge garden, but we do have one thing that my parents do not: a cat flap. Unfortunately for the cat, this will be remaining shut for the next couple of weeks as we try to re-acclimatise her to living back with us. It's not that I think she doesn't know where she is, it's just that I don't want her compass to get scrambled when she's outside and have her try and look for her OTHER garden and get hopelessly lost.... besides which, she probably hasn't even seen a car in the last 9 months, and it's not as though she was very good with them before that, having something of a tendency to sit in the middle of the road and expect the cars to stop for her. Which, to be fair, they generally did).

This lack of access to the outside was always going to be a problem. Ever since she was a kitten, Minou has shown a healthy desire to want to do her business outside. She hates litter trays and she hates being stuck indoors. When she was very small and was confined to the house, she used to wait until one of us got home from work before she approached her litter to do her business. You can understand this: it smells bad, and who wouldn't want that taken away as soon as possible? It's pretty unpleasant to my human nose, nevermind what it must smell like to the much more sensitive and discerning nose of the average feline. When the day came when we could let her out, I don't think anyone was happier about the situation than the cat. From that day onwards, when the catflap was open for business, there was no problem. With the catflap firmly locked, however, this unfortunately presents a problem for everyone: the cat is stuck indoors and we're stuck with an angry and frustrated cat that probably needs to pee (or worse).

It quickly became apparent that the cat wasn't using her litter. After 12 hours, this tends to arouse suspicion in even the most trusting owner's mind. We had a good look around, but luckily, it didn't look as though she had relieved herself secretly somewhere she shouldn't have. This impression was somewhat reinforced by the fact that the cat seemed to have something of a a look of desperation about her as she stamped about the house complaining. She clearly needed to go. She would sniff around her litter, pawing it occasionally, but she would clearly only go there as a last resort, often turning around to see if she could find somewhere else nearby that wasn't as distasteful. We found ourselves watching her very carefully and trying to follow her as she explored some of the darker corners of the house.

It became a battle of wills, with us knowing that she needed to go, and the cat apparently determined not to go where she was supposed to. After a couple of days of this, with the cat eventually giving up and using her litter, I realised that she was simply being incredibly fastidious and more than a touch neurotic about the whole routine. As the day wore on, she would assume a look of grave dissatisfaction and would hare around the house yowling. Upon gaining my attention, she would lead me to the kitchen, where she would paw and snuffle at her litter before walking away again with a look of great distaste. I would then clean the litter tray and put some fresh litter in, at which point the cat would hop straight on and empty her bowels gratefully before hopping off and pawing at the ground around the litter tray making noises of disgust and running away My job was to now remove the offending articles as quickly as possible before it stank out the whole house (an exercise, by the way cat, that is distasteful to me too). A scatter of fresh litter on the top, and about five minutes later, once the anguish and trauma of the whole process began to subside in her mind, the cat would hop back onto the litter for a pee before running away in disgust and relief. 24 hours later we would go through the whole process again.

It's great to have her back, but do I need to say how much we're all looking forward to the time when we can open the catflap and let her go outside?

It's good to have her home.

(just like) starting over.....

The last day at work is finally done.

I'd say that I managed to get away entirely unscathed, but as I somehow managed to dislocate my left thumb before leaving, that wouldn't really be accurate (.....don't ask).  In the end I skulked off at about 5pm as my increasingly impatient wife tapped her foot beside me as I sat at my desk, firing off those last few emails and setting that gloriously satisfying voicemail message ("...if you can wait until September, then please leave your message after the tone.  Otherwise please bugger off."  Or words to that effect, anyway). 

I would probably have stayed longer, but we had an important mission to complete: we had to take our cat down to her country estate, where my mum and dad will be looking after her for the next few months.  They have a nice, big garden that opens out onto fields, and they've been cultivating the birdlife with feeders and tables and the like for several years... so I have a feeling that she's going to be just fine.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that we'll miss her far more than she misses us.

Once she gets used to my mum and dad's geriatric, almost blind and pretty much deaf dog, anyway..... She's the apple of our eye, and she has known something was up for a few days now, so getting her into her travelling box was a bit of pantomime.  In the car, she also vigorously voiced her dislike of Beyonce's "All The Single Ladies" by miaowling loudly three times and promptly throwing up, although I suppose that could also have been the winding country roads making her feel a touch travelsick and not just her opinion of Mrs. Z.....  We stayed the night, and by this morning she seemed to have largely realised that the dog was nothing much to worry about and that she was going to be fine.  She'd elbowed her way through to eat the dog's breakfast, anyway.

 

Well, in a minute we're off down to stay with some friends near Gatwick before heading out to Austria tomorrow to go skiing for a week.  Given my current track record with injuries (as well as that dislocated thumb, I also currently have a fractured hand and a broken toe), let's hope that I'm still all in one piece when I get on that flight for Hong Kong in 10 days time, eh?

I wonder how long it will take to hit me that I'm not going to be working now until September.  It took C. a good 10 days to decompress after she finished back in December, so I reckon it will hit me on the Monday after we get back from skiing.  We booked this holiday some eleven months ago, so really it's going to feel just like a normal short break away from the office.  I think it's going to be the Monday when I would have been going back to work that I'm really going to start to feel free.

Just the thought of it is making me smile.

Sorry about that.

like a cat in a bag....

It's been a bit gloomy around here recently, so how about we change the subject, eh?

Look! It's a cat in a bag!



Can't you just feel your blood pressure coming down already?

She quite often wakes me up first thing in the morning by jumping on the bed with a little chirrup, poking her nose in my face and wheezing her breathy little purr over me. It's pretty much the best possible way to start your day. No problem feels too big when your cat wants a cuddle.

I'd heartily recommend it.

our castle and our keep...

The world is in recession; banks are being dragged under by bad debt and are being bailed out with Government money; shares are plummeting; people are being laid off in their thousands; the property market has collapsed.... Meanwhile, in my middle class world, we're having a loft conversion done.

People tend to raise their eyebrows when I tell them this, and they then leer at me suggestively and ask if we're feathering the nest. Nudge, nudge. Wink wink. Say no more. At this point, I generally feign confusion and ask them to spell out whatever it is that they're insinuating. It's a jovial way of asking if we're planning a family, apparently.

No. Not at the moment.

We actually talked about getting the loft converted from the very first moment that we looked around the house with a view to putting in an offer, but for various reasons, we never got around to doing anything about it. We actually considered moving somewhere bigger about 18 months ago, but in the end settled on getting our little garden sorted - last year's project - and getting the loft done. So why now? Well, the reason for the building work is that we've finally managed to entice our Austrian friends and their two kids over from Vienna for a week in the summer. We're going to try to repay the kindness they showed us when we got married (and every other time we've been to Vienna) by taking some time off work and showing them around the country. We've arranged to borrow my dad's big car so that we can shuttle everyone around in go. No, please don't ask why my dad used to ferry my two brothers, my mother and me around in a Fiat Strada and then bought a massive people carrier as soon as we all moved out. So, an extra room and an extra bathroom are going to be really handy.

Anyway. That's what C told me was the reason for getting the work done, anyway.

Hmmm.

The work has been going on for a few weeks now, but it's only since Monday that the builders have been working in the main body of the house (and not just in the roof), so things have moved on pretty quickly since then. I've got new stairs and things.

I'm hardly Kirstie Allsopp, but here are a few photos of what's suddenly appeared over the last couple of days.



This is the view from our bedroom. You can see the door there on the right hand side of the picture, and you can see how we've lost a chunk out of the corner of the room where the stairs turn and head up into the attic. Apparently our ceiling is in a terrible state, and bows towards the middle of the room, so the builders are actually going to completely replace it. Free. It makes their lift a lot easier, apparently. It will come down a couple of inches to accommodate that new landing you can see hanging down, but will still be tall enough that I will only just be able to touch it with my arms above my head. Plenty of headroom. They're also cutting down one of our tall wardrobes so that it will fit underneath the new stairs.



Apart from the photos that C. took though the hole in the floor last week, it was only on Wednesday evening, when I came home to find the stairs had been put in, that I was able to see what the builders had been up to for the last few weeks. It's somehow much bigger and more airy than I was expecting. I was also a touch worried about how much headroom I would have under the slant of the roof, but it's plenty high enough. The velux windows are absolutely huge too, and when the rain started to hammer down onto them, I was thrown back to my old bedroom in the house where I grew up, where the partially flat roof used to make a hell of a noise when it rained. I found the sound very soothing at the time, and apparently I still do.



Look at the size of that window! And there's our missing stepladder (on the left).



The room was looking quite a lot less spacious when I got home this evening, but only because the builders had started to box in the bathroom. There's another velux window to go in yet, and obviously none of the bathroom fittings have gone in yet, but things are taking shape really quickly.



It seems that C. isn't the only member of the family who is intrigued by the new room. Minou is staring into one of the cupboards that will provide us with storage space underneath the eaves, and it's surely only a matter of time before she explores these new and interesting places more thoroughly. Luckily, she is currently finding the remains of the builder's lunches more interesting..... She's in the habit of rolling around on her back, displaying her fou-fou to the world, and as a result has been filthy dirty since the moment the builders first arrived.... the little tart. Like everyone else she meets, Minou appears to have the builders wrapped well and truly around her little paws. Trollop.

More exciting middle-class building expansion news as it happens!

poison pen

We had a note pushed through our door the other day. It was in a plain brown envelope with "FROM A NEIGHBOUR" written across the front. C. was hopeful that this might be someone returning the tax disc she managed to lose between the front door and her car, but I've seen things like this before and had an inkling that it might be something else entirely. Indeed, upon opening the envelope, I was confronted by a piece of hole-punched A4 paper entirely filled with a carefully handwritten note. Well, I say carefully written, but as it is riddled with typos, appalling punctuation and features the liberal use of correction fluid, perhaps that not quite the right phrase. It's all in capitals and literally every other word is underlined wihth two pen strokes, presumably for emphasis.

I noted all of this, and then read on with a sense of some trepidation.

WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE THINGING OFF HAVING A CAT DOOR ON THE FRONT, RIGHT NEAR THE MAIN ROAD. YOUR CAR DOOR SHOULD BE AT THE BACK NEAR GARDEN. WAY YOUR 2 CATS SHOULD HAVE BEEN BROUGHT UP THE GARDEN WAY. I HAD TO STOP A CAR FOR YOUR CAT THE TABBY ONE WHO IS VERY SCARED OF CARS FOR IT TO CROSS THE ROAD, I DONT KNOW IF YOU WORK IN THE DAY YOU DONT SEEM TO LOOK OUT FOR YOUR CATS, AT ALL YOU LET THEM WANDER. IF YOU ARE NOT THERE IN THE DAYTIME YOUR TWO CATS SHOULD BE KEPT IN. AWAY FROM THE ROADS. PUT YOUR CAT DOOR NR GARDEN END WHERE IT IS SAFE. AND YOU SHOULD BE OUTSIDE SOMETIMES WATCHING THEM. YOU HAVE 2 VERY LOVELEY CATS I WOULDNT LIKE ANY HARM TO COME TO THEM.

(A ANIMAL LOVER)

I read the letter again, scarcely able to believe what I was reading. It didn't really get any better second time around, and now I was just angry. Leaving aside the fact that we only have the one cat, I am struggling to understand where this person gets off leaving us an anonymous note like this. What are they expecting us to do, exactly? Yes, the cat flap is in the front door, and yes, I would have preferred it to be in the back door... but it wouldn't fit on the door. Besides, that cat flap has been in place for more than a year now, and I fail to understand how they think that having it on the side of the house would prevent our cat from wandering onto the road. What the hell is "the garden way" anyway? When we got our cat, we made some choices for her. Among those choices was our decision that she should have free access outside. We can close the flap, but we choose to let her come and go as she pleases during both day and night. We do both work during the day (again, something that's not very difficult for all but the most casual of observers to work out), but we consider it better for our cat's welfare that we don't shut her up indoors whilst we are away. Actually, I rather think she spends most of the day asleep on her beanbag, but she can go outside whenever she likes. She's not very road smart, I agree, and I wish she wouldn't sit on the road as a car approaches, but what exactly can I do about that? Most of our other neighbours know her well, and because she's friendly, they pick her up and move her when they need to. Rather than imprisoning her indoors, I'd much prefer that she lives as free-range a life as possible, even if that does perhaps introduce a risk that she might get hurt by cars on our (reasonably) quiet suburban street.



But why do I feel I have to justify our choices at all? What gives this anonymous note sender the right to be so damn rude and yet so apparently keen to remain anonymous? They have felt moved enough to write out this note, but they haven't even taken the trouble to check their facts before shooting from the hip. If they really cared about our cat (and I find it hard to believe that anyone could care about the welfare of that cat than we do - she's positively doted upon), then would they not just have a word with us? What, exactly, is this note supposed to achieve?



I know I'm wasting my energy just thinking about this, but sometimes people really piss me off.

rule the world....

At some point in the first episode of "Guns & Germs & Steel" that I watched the other day, Jared Diamond holds forth on the part of his grand theory that reckons that one of the reasons that Eurasian societies conquered the rest of the world was because we lucked out by having the most easily domesticated species of animals nearby (sheep, cows, goats, horses and the like). According to him, it was this fact, coupled with the equally convenient presence of easily domesticated and long-lasting crops like wheat and barley, that helped us move away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and into a more settled agricultural existence with the kind of specialised roles in society that enabled us to focus on things other than our next meal. So, obviously, with all that extra time on our hands, we built some really cool weapons of mass destruction that we then inflicted on the rest of the world.

Well, I'm not about spout off about Diamond's theory - although, if you ask me, it all sounds a little convenient, and besides, QI told me the other day that horses originated in the Americas, and if Stephen Fry says it's so, then it must indeed be so....

As Diamond was talking though, I did look over at the sprawled shape on the beanbag by the radiator and idly wonder at what point in history the cat had been domesticated. It didn't take me long to realise that, in fact, the cat has never been domesticated. They turned up one day, liked what they saw and found a way to wrap us so tightly around their little paws that we happily provide them with everything that they need and then ask if there is anything else we can possibly do for them. It wasn't the cat that was domesticated by humans, it was humans that were domesticated by cats.

This came to mind in the very small hours of this morning when I awoke to find myself distinctly marginalised in the bed. This isn't all that uncommon an experience, to be honest, but as C is currently in Paris, it took my sleep and Night Nurse addled brain a few minutes to work out what had happened and why I was now hanging out of the bed and slowly freezing to death.

It was a cold night, so as I had made my way up to bed, I'd made myself a hot water bottle (yeah? what of it?). The cat, it turns out, is no fool. She doesn't often sleep on the bed, but her special cat senses must have told her that there was an extra-warm patch to be investigated tonight. Upon discovering the source of this hot spot, she had proceeded to methodically elbow me off the hot water bottle and practically out of the bed all the better so that she could curl up and benefit more directly from this new heat source.



And so what did I do once I had worked out her little game? Did I boot her off the bed and resume my posession of the hot water bottle? Did I hell. I tried to grab as much of the bed back as I could without disturbing her, and then went back to sleep in a really uncomfortable position.

Cat's rule the world. Or if not the whole world, then at least the most comfortable parts of it.

the most beautiful girl in the room (the whole wide room)

Our cat seems to pick up adoring fans wherever she goes. She rather likes sitting just outside the house, either on the wall round the back or on the pavement in front of our bedroom window. Many is the Sunday morning that I have woken up to the sounds of passing strangers cooing over our cat as she rolls around on her back in front of them, showing then her tummy like the love-slut she is. Just in case anyone looks like they may walk past without giving her any love, she'll let out cute little yowling noises to catch their attention until they do. Barely anyone ignores her.

Tart.

I got home yesterday evening to discover a note from our cleaners*.

"Sorry to be cheeky, but do you think you could leave a note next clean with your cat's name on it please? She is so gorgeous and I don't like just calling her cat :-)"

Honestly. Our cat doesn't even like hoovers, and she still finds time to charm the cleaners as they go about their business. I'll leave a note next time they come, but I'll feel a little bit dirty doing it; sort of like the cat's pimp. It's all so sordid. The day is fast approaching where I am going to give up my job to dedicate myself to looking after my supermodel cat whilst my wife travels around the world earning millions in the boardrooms of the world like some kind of attractive and unbearded intercontinental Alan Sugar.

I know my place.

Actually, that doesn't sound so bad.

* yes, I'm aware that this makes me sound painfully middle-class, but they only visit once a fortnight and they do an unbelievably thorough job. Plus it means that I don't have to clean the toilet, so......