Proof That Cats Really Do Say "Nom Nom Nom" While They Eat

Who? Me? Completely At Home In The Water. Always Have Been.

The other day The Bear (that's sadly not him pictured above, in otter mode) came home completely drenched, with that eager, faux-affectionate "Get the tissues then - what are you waiting for?" look he favours after being caught in anything more than a mild shower. Nothing out of the ordinary there, then. Except it hadn't been raining for at least twelve hours at the time, and it's not hosepipe season, so there does not seem to be any obvious explanation for the state of his fur. One theory is that he had just got back from a swim across the mere (or "glorified pond" to non-East Anglians) that cuts in at the bottom of my garden. This seems a bit far-fetched - the water is very deep, and about 3-400 yards across at its narrowest point - but on the other hand there are probably plenty of tasty niblets to be found on the other side in the bins of the cafes and pubs abutting the water. It would also explain the time he mysteriously appeared on the opposite bank of the river next to a house I once rented, even though the nearest bridge was more than a mile away. The jury is still out, but this news story from last week and the video below suggest that cats might not be quite as afraid of swimming as we're led to believe.

Postman Pat: "It's All Grounded In Fact" Shocker

In Under The Paw, I wrote about the time that my postman drove off with an intrepid Shipley inside his van by mistake. At the time, I thought this was just another example of Shipley's general nosiness and attention-seeking, but it turns out that he is not alone. Charlie (pictured above) likes nothing better than helping Nick Lock, a Somerset postman, on his round. More amazingly, Nick is not even his owner. Could it be that Charlie and Shipley are special breed of black mongrel cat with a natural affinity for mail? And does this explain why my friend Alison always, bafflingly, insists on calling Shipley "Charles". It is possible. Although it is equally possible that Shipley, who likes nothing better than getting his teeth into a big fat mailer* in the morning, simply cannot help but get overexcited every time he sees that amount of paper and cardboard in one place.

*Jiffy bags not included.

Reality Check For Bootsy

The above pictures show Bootsy, my smallest and most demanding cat, indulging in her latest, most impressive habit: curling up in the wastepaper basket in my bedroom. It doesn't bother Bootsy one iota that she's sitting in what's essentially a slightly upmarket dustbin. And why would it? After all, she lives in a house where random ancient crisp packets and sweet wrappers are often strewn across the carpet, courtesy of Janet. Although she's not asleep in the photographs, she often dozes off in the basket for periods of up to four hours. Admittedly, the first time I saw this I thought it was very sweet. It's also impressive to see the skill with which she manages to nimbly get into the basket without tipping it over. You can see from her face that she's incredibly pleased with herself about it. In her head, she can probably already picture the resulting greeting cards flying of the shelf, the aunts and grandmas making cooing noises.

I see Bootsy in this instance as a little like me, when I won my first local golf tournament the age of 14. I thought I was Seve Ballesteros, but in reality I had simply managed to hole a few more putts than various part-time players from the East Midlands, the most fearsome of which being bloke called Maurice, with a hip problem and a struggling garden landscaping business: there was a big, competitive golfing world out there, and it would soon come to devour my delusions. Because, really, in the grand scheme of things, how cute is Bootsy in this picture? Right now, as we speak, there are cats sleeping in all kinds of unusual and impossibly cute places. Who knows? In the last five minutes - that's right, the last five minutes - a tabby could have curled up on a goat's stomach, or inserted itself knowingly into the family wok. Bootsy, having never been out of East Anglia, is not aware of just how many other cats are in the universe and that many of them are even more deviously adorable and self-consciously "Who? Little me?" in attitude than her. I would be cruel to expect her to be.

But, as regular readers of this blog will know, I like to try and keep my cats grounded, so, for fear that Bootsy develops any warped ideas about her talent for narcoleptic cuteness, I have decided to provide the following examples of sleeping cats. These are not meant to discourage her from future experiments - there's nothing I'd like more than to come home this evening and find her wedged happily inside my computer printer or one of Dee's Ugg boots - but to give her a very real sense of the competition out there. I hope that she takes heed, although what seems more probable is that, when I put her in front of the screen of my laptop to face the hard facts, she will ignore them, preferring to chase the cursor for a few moments before jumping down onto the floor and cleaning her bottom in a loud and disinterested manner.

Samson Likes The Panic Mouse

Did I need more proof that I have brought my cats up wrong, made them indolent and complacent in the face of the finer things in life? Quite possibly, I did not. Nonetheless, Daniel and Louise, the new owners of Samson, the gargantuan ginger mog who used to live across the road, have provided such proof in concrete form (squidgy, corpulent concrete, anyway) with this video of the newest furry addition to their household having fun with the pricey toy that my cats so superciliously shunned. Seeing this behaviour coming from a cat so clearly built for comfort, not speed, makes the truth sting all the more. I would make some excuse along the lines of "Oh, we obviously had a duff model!", were it not for the fact that the Panic Mouse in the video is the exact same one that, until last summer, when Dee found out that Louise was a fellow cat lover, was languishing in our broom cupboard*. As you can see, Samson's front end is working well, but the back end possibly needs a bit of encouragement. He's a bit like a reverse cat version of a mullet haircut: party in front, business in the back. It's good that he's getting the exercise. I suppose the only worry is that he becomes the Amazing Thin-Fat Cat: a kind of smaller ginger cross between a giraffe and the lovable fat-bottomed martial arts-trained panda from the film I watched over the weekend. Actually, what am I talking about? That's not a worry at all. That would be awesome.

* Despite having a broom cupboard, I do not actually have a broom, nor do I know anyone who does. Brushes of many shapes and sizes? Yes. Dust busters? Certainly. Mops? Sometimes. Brooms? No. In fact, I'm not entirely sure I know what one is. Is it halfway between a mop and a brush? And will it clean up those hard-to-reach regurgitated Purina One biscuits in the corners of my kitchen? Someone please tell me.

Ralph And Pablo: We're Closing The Mutual Loathing Bureau (For An Hour)

Yesterday morning I got up and padded across the living room to find a heartwarming site before me: Ralph and Pablo sitting beneath the stairs, both in identical, tucked-limb "zen duck" poses, with a mere eight or nine inches of carpet between them. Of all the long-standing battles between my cats, it has been theirs that, over the years, has been played out with most passion and pain. Shipley still baits and stalks Pablo, in his bored attention-seeker way, but Ralph, although the initial troublecauser in days of yore, increasingly seems to attack the ginger simpleton only through fear, if at all. When the two of them slink past each other, it's like watching two heavies in a film very slowly lowering their guns to the floor simultaneously, each never taking an eye of the other. They're obviously still hardwired for aggro in each other's presence, but I'd recently come to the conclusion that both of them had actually decided that all their fighting wasn't worth it and just wanted to be friends, and the only thing standing in their way was that they were both too proud and manly to be the first to admit it. Dee claimed that this was my anthropomorphism once again getting out of hand, and that they were simply two animals who naturally didn't like the way the other one smelled, looked or walked.

I felt, however, that the earlier scene went some way to vindicating my theory. "You should have seen it!" I told Dee, ten minutes later, by which time they had both moved. "It was like they were going to have a massive snog to say sorry to one another!". Ralph and Pablo often sit in the same place, but never at the same time, and only to wind one another up, but the last time they'd sat even four times this close to one another was two years ago, and that was only because Ralph was so doped up from a vet's injection that he probably thought Pablo was a giant furry tangerine.

My smug mood lasted until an hour or so later, when I was signing for a supermarket home delivery and heard a visceral, bone-shuddering war cry coming from the stairs. The lady driver from Tesco heard it too. "Oh, that's just my cats!" I said quickly, before she came to any conclusions that might be more readily associated with such a sound: that I was keeping Chinese prostitutes chained up in my crawl space, for example, or that my house was haunted by a one-legged karate Banshee whose suppertime had arrived early. By the time I got to the scene of the fracas, Pablo had curled into a ball halfway up the stairs, with Shipley arched over him menacingly, his mohican at full mast, and Ralph a couple of steps below, attempting to quickly spit out around forty percent of Pablo's winter coat. Much of the remainder could be found on the floor beneath him, although, examining the ratio of tabby-to-ginger fur, it's clear that Ralph's much-vaunted sideburns came out of the encounter worst.

I've taken a couple of photos below, which I think only go a short way to illustrating just how much cat was deposited on the carpet*. It's not an encouraging site, as you can see, but I am not going to let it get me down. I'm not quite sure what the next move is, but I have half a mind to keep the fur, and use it to construct an entirely new cat, half-tabby, half-ginger. I shall call him Ralphlo, and, with great skill and diplomacy, he will defuse their (okay, Ralph's) racial prejudices and teach them that, contrary to what aeons of hatred tell us, orange and randomly brownish mogs can live in peace. As an added bonus, what with not having any innards, it is unlikely that Ralphlo will deposit anything smelly or problematic in nextdoor's flower beds.

*It also must be taken into consideration that by the time I got the camera out Janet had stopped by to check out the scene, and had eaten some of the hair, as an "experiment" to find out whether it tasted as good as empty crisp packets.

Thumb Cat

Guest Cats Of The Month here at Little Cat Diaries, when asked the question "What would you do to make the world a better place for felines?", are frequently heard to answer, "Give cats opposable thumbs!" (well I don't actually hear them, but presumably their owners do before filling in the questionnaires on their behalf). Personally, I'm not sure that we should be encouraging this sort of behaviour, since it seems like the next dangerous step to a world completely ruled by cats. That said, I can't help being a fan of the Thumb Cat blog, which follows the adventures of Ike, a real life-cat with, er, well, thumbs. Check it out: those things are not photoshopped.