Bear break

I've got an unusually huge amount of writing to do at the moment, so I'm going to take a break from doing @MYSADCAT tweets for the time being. The Bear also tells me that he'd like time to work on his latest volume of goth poetry under conditions appropriate to an artist of his seriousness (i.e. without me poking a camera into his face). Thanks for all your lovely messages over the last couple of years and we hope to see you again before long.

P.S. To those who've asked if there is a new book about The Bear on the horizon: there will indeed be a follow-up to The Good, The Bad & The Furry, which will be published by Little Brown in October this year. Also, The Good, The Bad & The Furry will finally be published in America in April.

The Cat: A Winter Folk Tale

Once upon a time, a man, a woman and a cat were walking through a deep forest. All three had walked for what felt like a thousand miles and each but the smallest member of the party balanced precariously on blistered, swollen feet. Night had fallen only an hour ago but its polished granite blackness above the treetops seemed to hint at a stark permanence and corresponding adjustments to the way life would be lived. Just as the man and the woman felt they could not possibly walk any more, they chanced upon a stone bothy at the edge of a small clearing. The bothy showed few signs of recent occupation: the man entered first and found only a strip of dirty unspecified cloth, a broken tankard and the decayed skeleton of an apple core on its mud floor. Its roof had a hole, but this was covered by the thick twisted limbs of ivy, which for now would go some way to keeping out the advancing weather, which the woman could feel in her finger joints. “Here?” she said. “Here,” nodded the man.

   They bedded down in the lone draughty room beneath an old threadbare blanket given to her by her late mother, their tunics spread on top of it for extra warmth. An enchanted dancing spell of mist rose off the cold forest floor, covering the world in doubt. The cat began the night sitting in the doorless doorway, listening to the nearby hoot of owls, then, having spied the tunics, nestled on top of those instead. By the time night had ended, the cat had somehow commandeered 85% of the sleeping area while the man and woman, who were each roughly nine times the creature’s size and largely furless, were squashed into the remaining 15%, their limbs contorted in an awkward and painful fashion. Rising and inspecting the tunics, the man found welded to them a matted mixture of small leaves, hair and soil.

   “You fucking wanker,” the man said to the cat. “We only washed those last month.”

   Later that morning, the man ventured out into the forest, killed two rabbits and filled a pail with water from a clear rushing river a mile away, surrounded by mossy boulders. The cat sat and watched with wry curiosity as the man and woman skinned, cooked and ate the rabbits, then the man threw him the leftovers, which the cat gnawed on with something approaching enthusiasm. The woman poured the cat some of the clear river water into a bowl, which he refused, instead choosing to drink the rainwater from a rusty trough behind the building, which had all manner of unidentifiable old crap in it. They could feel the dark teeth of mid-winter gnashing at them now. Here was the final heavy push towards Solstice’s new hope. The next day the man caught three more rabbits, roasted them on a bigger, angrier fire, and offered the cat a larger portion of the leftovers than before. The cat sniffed at this, then looked up into the man’s eyes in a way that seemed to say, “Nope, I’ve gone off this stuff already. Do you have anything else?”

   Over the following weeks, the man and woman worked hard to transform the bothy into a home: the man walked to the river and caught fish, which the woman took to the town, some four miles away, on Market Day and traded for crockery, tools, milk, butter and soap. The man coppiced and whittled and hammered and chiselled and extended and improved. The days were long, partly because there was endless work to do, but also because the cat insisted on waking the man and woman up before daybreak by meowing at the top of his voice and knocking stuff off the new shelves the man had built. The three of them sat by the fire at night: the woman working on a poem by the flickering light, the man so tired he could only stare blankly into the flames, and the cat cleaning himself in a self-important manner that suggested he was getting ready for an important yet clandestine cat ceremony in the near future. Sometimes, while the the woman tried to write her poetry, the cat would get on her lap and stick his arse in her face, obscuring her view and smudging her fine calligraphy with his paws. Later he would continue to dominate the bed, leaving more small leaves, hair and soil on the new blankets that had replaced the tunics as bedding. He’d also occasionally pop off into the forest to kill mice, which he would bring back and leave half-eaten on the bothy’s floor. The cat was generally very unpredictable when it came to food: some days he preferred rabbits caught in the part of the forest to the east of the bothy, and some days he preferred rabbits caught in the part of the forest to the west of the bothy, but the man and woman were buggered if they knew why. 

   One morning a visitor came to call: a tall gentleman with an angular face and the tiny eyes of an untrustworthy bird. He said he worked for the Squire of the local Parish and had a proposal: if the man and the woman would concede ownership of the bothy to the Squire, who deemed it a perfect hunting lodge, he would reward them with more money than they had seen in their life. “Take three sunsets to think it over if you like,” said the tall gentleman, jingling some coins in a leather purse. “By the way, did you know you had a mouse’s spleen stuck to your big toe?”

   That night by the fire the man and woman faced a tough decision: they had worked hard on their new dwelling and were looking forward to starting a family there, but, with the Squire’s money, they would be able to set up home almost anywhere they chose. By the glow of the fire, they examined their hands, which, due to a life of constant toil, were as gnarled and wrinkled as those of men and women twice their age born of more noble stock. As they did so, they knew which choice they would make. 

   The night before the man and the woman were due to vacate the bothy, a party was thrown there: a celebration as lavish as any small makeshift dwelling in the woods had ever known. In a gesture of good will, The Squire provided limitless ale, eclectic soups and a freshly slaughtered wild hog. Better still, this was not just any wild hog: this was Big John, the grandest and haughtiest hog of the forest, whom every hunter for miles around had been trying to bring down for as long as memory would allow, and whom the Squire had finally slain earlier that day. A minstrel played songs celebrating the deeds of the afternoon and the bawdy ones of outlaws of centuries past in the Green Wood, and a few of the Squire’s men danced with the woman - though not, the man was fairly sure, in a dodgy way which involved trying to cop a sneaky feel. The cat ate like a Feline King, then bedded down on the large comfortable stomach of one of the night’s early casualties: Edgar, the fattest of all the Squire’s men. Edgar was now paralytic and emitting stale odours from at least two of his orifices, but the cat was largely relaxed about odours, unless they were soapy or astringent, and Edgar did possess an unusually soft tunic. Before this, the cat had spent a good hour or so batting a button that had come loose from another of the men’s tunics around the floor. The woman saw this, and it kind of pissed her off, as she’d spent a lot of the previous week making a cloth mouse for the cat, which he’d indifferently inspected once then totally ignored.

   It had been a grand night, but the next morning, when the man and woman woke up, a discomfort and self-hatred set in, compounded by their hangovers. How easily they’d given away what they’d worked lovingly to make theirs, in exchange for monetary gain. The Squire and his men were still asleep yet the man and woman already somehow felt unwelcome in their home of many months so they gathered their possessions and quietly set off into the cool spring morning. The cat followed a few paces to their rear and they thought about what a good cat he was, how beautiful and plush his fur he was, and how lucky they were that he followed them from place to place like this. When all was said and done, at least they still had his love. The cat, for his part, was sort of torn, if he was being totally honest, since he could still smell the remains of the wild hog and remember how soft that tunic was. But, he concluded, the bothy would not be permanently occupied with feeders, now it belonged to the Squire, and the man and woman were okay sorts, especially when you considered how many cat-hating scumbags there were out there.

   In time, the man and the woman found a new house, made it their own, and raised a family in it. The money wasn’t quite as much as it had seemed at first and soon ran out, but they found other ways to get by. They didn’t quite live happily ever after, since people never actually do. It would be more accurate to say that existence was made more enjoyable than not by an ample sprinkling of fleeting, epiphanic moments of happiness, which were rendered more meaningful by being set against a more customary backdrop of mundanity and grey struggle. Fortunately, they lived with a cat, and living with a cat has a way of helping prepare people for life’s peaks and troughs.

   The cat lived to a ripe old age. But that was no big deal for him. He’d lived numerous times previously too and had seen some dark shit you could not even dream of.

Read my latest book The Good, The Bad And The Furry

@MYSADCAT goodies for people who'd like to get to know The Bear better

Here are a few links to @MYSADCAT stuff for people who've started following The Bear recently and would like to get to know him better. I've included amazon.co.uk links below purely because I know that a lot of people find that the most convenient place to buy from, but, if I'm honest, my ideal choice would be that you buy from hive.co.uk, who support independent bookshops and represent a fairer, less soulless future for the publishing industry. If you're outside the UK, wordery is an independent site which does free worldwide delivery (and, unlike fellow free international deliverer The Book Depository, is not owned by amazon).

Under The Paw is the first book about The Bear and friends.

Talk To The Tail is the second book about The Bear and friends.

The Good, The Bad And The Furry is the third - and most recent - book about The Bear and friends.

There is also a 2015 @MYSADCAT calendar and some @MYSADCAT Christmas cards available. Both are best purchased direct from the publishers, Graffeg, who will deliver anywhere worldwide.

If you're outside the UK, wordery is an independent site which does free worldwide delivery. That said, it has sold out of The Good, The Bad And The Furry right now, unlike The Book Depository, who also do free worldwide delivery.

(NB: For those who have asked recently, there will be a fourth book about The Bear next autumn, published by Little Brown.)

The Good, The Bad And The Furry is published today!

Order The Good, The Bad And The Furry  from Waterstones.

Order The Good, The Bad And The Furry from amazon.

Order The Good, The Bad And The Furry from Kobo.  

The Cat With Seventeen Lives

A Guardian column about The Bear.

The Bear Gives A Rare Interview

Me: "Good morning, The Bear."

The Bear: "Technically speaking, we're thirty seven minutes into the afternoon, but hello."

Me: "Well, a lot of people these days seem to still say 'Good morning' if it's still any time before lunchtime. Most folk just accept that."

The Bear: "If 'most folk' told you to lick clean the bonnet of Jeremy Clarkson's sports car after he'd driven recklessly through a muddy ford near his Cotswolds hate palace, would you? I'm just saying: accuracy never hurt anyone, and can alleviate a lot of very harmful confusion in the world."

Me: "Ok. I'll remember that. So, The Bear. Readers of Under The Paw and Talk To The Tail know your story now: your humble beginnings, being found in a carrier bag on the side of the motorway, then being rescued, moving to Norfolk with me and my ex, constantly having to put up with Shipley whacking the top of that cardboard box used to sleep in... right up until now, living with me, Shipley, Ralph, Roscoe, my girlfriend Gemma, and that muntjac deer who sometimes hangs around in the garden."

The Bear: "Hold on. So you're saying that I was struggling a bit, and you came along, and made everything better, by putting me in a couple of books and posting photos of me on the Internet for thousands of people to see?"

Me: "No. I wasn't saying that at all. I'm sure if you'd been rescued by someone else, who didn't go on to live with someone who had a career as a writer, you'd also have had a very nice life. I'm just stating the facts: you were once heartlessly abandoned. Now you live in quite a nice warm house. Constant supply of biscuits on tap. Several Peter Ackroyd books within easy reach. Lots of comfy surfaces. That sort of thing."

The Bear: "I would like to point out at this juncture that they were the wrong kind of biscuits until recently. The cheaper brand with the weird green ones in that I hate. I mean, who ever heard of a green cat biscuit? What's in it? Spinach?"

Me: "I'm sorry. These are austere times to be a writer. My house had needed lots of maintenance recently. I admit, however, that trying to save money on biscuits was a mistake. I have now rectified it. Moving on... How do you feel about the way I've portrayed you in the books? Is it accurate?"

The Bear: "I think the best I can say about it is that it is an accurate portrayal of a few aspects of my character: the aspects, perhaps, that face you, or at least those that you choose to see. I have many other aspects, but I can appreciate that you have an agenda, and may choose to ignore them. I'm used to being misrepresented, though. I mean - look at me. I was named The Bear, yet it would be patently obvious even to a myopic person in their eighties who'd neglected to get checked out at Vision Express for several years that the animal I am most reminiscent of aside from a cat is an owl.

Me: "I noticed that on the day that I finished writing Talk To The Tail, I'd only left the manuscript unattended for about four minutes, but came back to find you on top of it. You had very muddy paws at the time. Was that some sort of comment on the content?"

The Bear: "I felt, at first, a little disappointed that I didn't have a bigger role in the book, that you gave a little bit too much time to Shipley's swearing, Janet's thyroid condition, and Ralph's habit of meowing his own name at the top of his voice at 4am in the morning. And those horses? What was all that about? I calmed down afterwards, and saw that I'd perhaps overreacted. Later on, though, I was disappointed with the paperback cover. You've never even met that kitten on it. It was just some actor kitten. Let's face it: the book doesn't even have a kitten in it."

Me: "I've come to kind of think of it as a Trojan kitten whose job it is to sneak all the animals in the book into readers' houses."

The Bear: "We both know that's nonsense. Your publishers chose the cover, and you had more or less zero say in it. You and I both know I should have been on the cover, cleaning my arse, or looking dolefully into the readers eyes and winning their hearts with my torn ear, and that that would have been a truer reflection of the book's content."

Me: "I notice that you caught your first mouse not all that long ago. You're seventeen now. That took you a while, didn't it? At least, I think you caught it. I can't be sure, as I only saw you with it when it was dead. You could have just claimed it, after Shipley or Ralph got bored of kicking it around the front room."

The Bear: "I caught it. It was pissing about by the compost heap, and I happy-pawed the little gobshite senseless. Nextdoor's cat Biscuit will back me up."

Me: "Speaking of Biscuit: How's that working out for you?"

The Bear: "Good, actually. I'm making progress. I pressed my nose against the kitchen window and stared at her the other day and she didn't even do a projectile grass vomit on the tiles. We've had a couple of scraps recently, but it's that kind of play-fighting that you do when you fancy each other."

Me: "Sure. How are your legs today? You seem to be doing that slightly camp walk quite a lot recently."

The Bear: "It's not "camp". It's just arthritis. We all get it. I'm actually in fantastic health, for my years."

Me: "It is true: You've never looked better. Those scabs on your ears have cleared up, and the many expensive tests the vet recommended earlier this year that I shelled out for turned out to be for nothing."

The Bear: "You've not had much luck at the vet's recently, have you? Y'know, what with that, and the feral you took to have his balls cut off and get tested for FIV, who then ran off?"



Me (coughing): "Changing the subject. You're my cat now, b..."

The Bear: "No, I am my cat."

Me: "Ok, I'll rephrase that. You live with me and my girlfriend now, but before that you lived with me and my ex, and before that you lived with my ex's ex. Do you feel there's any kind of stigma attached to that?"

The Bear: "Not really. You're the one who keeps going on about it."

Me: "You get on well with Gemma, though. We sometimes joke that if the two of us ever split up, she'll have to take you, to keep the trend going.

The Bear: I guess that could happen. I like her very much. Plus, she doesn't listen to those terrible 1970s folk albums that you do, or voice what she presumes to be my thoughts in a fake posh accent that makes me sounds like I'm some ageing homosexual ex-presenter of Jackanory who's never done a hard day's work in his life."

Me: "I wouldn't feel too singled out on that front, if I were you. I talk to a lot of animals in a fake posh voice. I'm always saying a braying pretend upper-class "Hellooo!" to that horse who lives down the road.

The Bear: "The one who looks like Todd Rundgren? I know. He told me, and he thinks it's WEIRD."

Me: "Really? I didn't realise you wandered that far any more, what with the arthritis and everything."

The Bear: "There are a lot of things you don't know."



Me: "I'm currently working on my third cat-themed book, to follow Under The Paw and Talk To The Tail, and there is a pilot for a prospective sitcom inspired by the books being written in America. Do you have any hopes for the content of these?"

The Bear: "I would hope that you might not go into too much detail about my irrational dislike of rain, or my more experimental bowel movements, particularly the incident earlier this year with your original vinyl copies of Neil Young's Doom Trilogy. I'd hope that, if such a sitcom happens, the cats in it still have their claws - both metaphorically and physically speaking. More generally, I would also hope that that small novelty Santa Claus hat you bought from Pets At Home the other week will not be coming out of the kitchen drawer at any point in the near future."

Me: "Thank you for your time, The Bear. I'll let you get back to sleep now."

The Bear: "That's ok. I see it's raining out. Before you go out to get me that turkey you mentioned earlier, could you just move that piece of protective cardboard you've had covering the "Y" section of your record collection? No big reason. I just feel it makes the room look a bit shabby."

Read more about The Bear in Under The Paw and Talk To The Tail

Happy Birthday To The Bear (Sort Of)

It's The Bear's 17th birthday today. Well, it's not technically his birthday, because, since he was found in a plastic bag at the side of the motorway as a kitten (before being rescued by a kind stranger and taken to a pet shop), nobody really knows his exact date of birth. But he should have one, and we know he is definitely 17 some time in 2012, so here at Under The Paw HQ, we have decided to make today the day, and buy him some treats. He's a touch arthritic these days, and sometimes Shipley gives him a little bit of a hard time, but he looks pretty good for his age, don't you think?

Read more about The Bear in Under The Paw and Talk To The Tail

The Bear Photobombs Ralph

The Bear And His Question Mark Face

Sometimes, just sometimes, the heartbreak can get a bit much...

How To Irritate Your Most Wise And Devious Cat: A Photo Essay

More and more, in his autumn years, The Bear likes to use the balcony of my house as a kind of bachelor flat: a place where he can sleep, groom himself, avoid those of a more lowbrow persuasion, and cogitate over the issues of the day. As the following sequence illustrates, he does not appreciate disturbances when he is in this domain, especially if they do not happen to be meat-themed.









Read more about The Bear in Under The Paw!

The Bear Asks A Pertinent Question

The Bear: "Is that bloody book done yet?"
Me: "Almost. I'm on the home straight now. Just a few more days."
The Bear: "You've been messing about with it for ages."
Me: "I know. Well, it's been difficult to write. Books always are, and this one especially."
The Bear: "You don't know you're born. You think you know hardship, try being dumped on the side of a motorway with your brothers and sisters in a plastic bag."
Me: "I will certainly take your advice and give that a go. It will probably be quite good to write about."
The Bear: "No need to get sarcastic. Anyway - do you have any more of that gammon you had the other day?"
Me: "Maybe when the book's done and I get the next part of my advance."
The Bear: "God. COME ON! It's not exactly War And Peace."
Me: "Well, you can pre-order it, if you're feeling impatient."
The Bear: "Neh. To be honest, I might not even read it. I'm exclusively in a Chekhov phase at the moment."