Bob and Mitchell RIP

They say you should never meet your heroes and I'd agree with that, unless your hero happens to be a) a cat-lover, or/and b) a keyboard-playing man of the people, who once sneakily ate a whole curry live on stage and cheerfully turns up at in your local town every December to turn on the Christmas lights. With this credo in mind, I recently played golf with the prog-rock raconteur Rick Wakeman. I'd always thought of Rick as a Dog Bloke, but it turns out that he and his wife have three rescue cats, all of which wake Rick up at quarter to six every morning by crawling all over his still-impressive seventies rock mane. Rick kept me entertained with lots of rock'n'golf anecdotes*, not all of which were about cats, but nearly all of which left me laughing so much that I spent much of the round in serious danger of falling into the course's numerous greenside bunkers. He also told me one very sad story, which concerned Bob, the club cat at Diss Golf Club, the Suffolk course local to the two of us where Rick is now a member and which I used as a practice facility whilst conducting my year as the UK's most inappropriate golf professional for my book Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia.

Bob was not a conventional golf club cat, in that the club didn't own him in any official sense (not, of course, that you can own any cat in an official sense). He simply wandered over from a house in the nearby village one day, liked what he saw, and decided to stick around. There was always at least one bowl of milk, wet cat food or biscuits waiting for him outside the pro shop, and during 2006 I spent many an afternoon sitting on the practice ground tickling his neck: time I should really have been devoting to a different kind of grooming - that of my own swing in preparation for trying to qualify for The Open. Had it not been for the fact that the editor of Bring Me The Head Of Sergio was a card-carrying mogophobe (and, very sensibly, saw little correlation between overfed tabbies and the rigours of PGA life), I imagine Bob might have played a fairly prominent part in its early chapters.

I've previously written about how the not particularly animal-friendly nature of my favourite sport can frequently put me off it, but I was far from the only golfer at Diss who was regularly cheered up by Bob's bright-eyed presence. Further proof of this is the fact that, when he was facing an operation a year ago, the club had a whip round, and came up with a total sum £1200 greater than the one required.

When I stopped playing at Diss, last year, I knew I'd miss its signature hole, the vertiginous dogleg par four 13th, not to mention its par three predecessor, where I'd had my first hole in one, but I also knew I'd miss Bob more. Heartbreakingly, though, a few months ago Bob was hit by a car on the road that bisects the course. According to Rick, by the time a kindly member had rushed him to the vets, there was nothing to be done to save him. But as the news of his demise funneled its way down the fairways, each and every golfer there - a sizable club tournament had been in progress at the time - abandoned his or her round and made their way back to the clubhouse in tribute. Nobody wants to be reduced to a wibbling, pathetic globule of fruit preserve in front of a titan of mystical man rock, less than an hour after making his acquaintance, but as Rick conveyed this information, it took all my steeliest inner resolve not to break down right there, over my tricky eight foot par putt on the fourteenth green - even more so when Rick added that he had recently inaugurated a competition called The Bob Cup in memoriam. I asked if I might be permitted to play in it. "I'll see what I can do," he said, "but it's heavily oversubscribed."

More sad news: my condolences go out to littlecatdiaries reader Jane, whose beautifully dunderheaded Mitchell (see below) was killed by a car recently. Those who followed littlecatdiaries' recent Most Witless-Looking Cat competition will remember Mitchell as one of the three charismatic winners. I never met him in person, but felt like I knew him, so wonderfully, effervescently bonkers did he appear in Jane's photos. Anyone who, like me, read Jane's Facebook status updates with a lump in their throat in the days following his disappearance would have been left in no doubt whatsoever that here was a cat who was, in his unjustly curtailed life, truly loved and cherished.



*If Rick is reaching his anecdotage, rest assured it is a vastly more entertaining, discerning kind than that experienced by the rest of his musical generation.

Vicky Halls

Vicky Halls, the UK's foremost cat behaviour counsellor, came over to my house the other week. We had a very pleasant and enlightening afternoon together, and I wrote a piece about it for the Daily Telegraph, which ran today, and you can read HERE. I had been a bit worried, since beforehand Vicky had read Under The Paw, which is not exactly a "how to" manual of feline ownership, so it was a relief to find that she didn't think I was the feline-loving world's answer to Fagin. Vicky sort of reminds me of the mystical golf coach who moved my right hand half an inch on my club and had me hitting the best shots of my life within seconds: her technique is all about lots of observation (she can watch a cat's actions in great detail whilst looking almost 90 degrees in the opposite direction), and a few small but crucial adjustments. The Bear must have sensed he was about to be commercially exploited again, since he disappeared as soon as she arrived, but my other five cats all took turns attempting to get inside Vicky's magical (and self-confessedly grungy) bag of unknowable cat treasures. I can honestly say I've never seen them as mellow as they were for the week following her departure.

Vicky's new book, The Complete Cat, has just been published. Her others are Cat Counsellor, Cat Detective and the classic, bestselling Cat Confidential.

Bean Bag Mayhem Almost Scuppers Radio 4 Interview

A fairly eventful catty week, this one. On Thursday, I found myself in the BBC's very 1970s* Manchester studios being interviewed about Under The Paw for Radio 4's Woman's Hour, which was holding a discussion regarding "a pet's place in the family" in the wake of a recent survey that had found that around a fifth of all mothers loved their pets as much, if not more than, their children (!). Before that, however, I had a bit of a domestic disaster: my bean bag exploded.

I don't mean this euphemistically: one of my bean bags actually did explode. I'd taken the cordouroy cover off to wash some particularly adhesive cat vomit off it, and it turned out that one of the bags inside holding the beans had come undone. I'm not sure if this has ever happened to you, but the carnage is quite mindboggling. Who knew there were that many beans in there, that they could be so hard to get out of the bristles on a vacuum cleaner head, or that they could move twenty feet across a room of their own volition, jump into the air, and secrete themselves in a plate of quiche? Janet - whose love of budget, alternative playthings has already been documented here - was very impressed, and celebrated by jumping into the middle of the vast, seemingly ever-expanding puddle of tiny beads on my dining room floor. Sadly, I couldn't find the camera in time to capture him leaping joyfully through this "indoor snow" - a particular disappointment, in the case of the moment when he looked up at me with his tongue sticking out and three beads stuck to his chin, nose and forehead in a perfect line. The experience made me realise how Woody Allen must have felt in Sleeper when he had to tackle that giant instant pudding. Of course, Woody had sort of an advantage, in that he didn't have three small dumb animals attempting to variously bat, skate on and eat the pudding: had The Bear, Bootsy and Ralph not been asleep downstairs at the time, the mayhem that ensued could have been enough to put an end to this blog, my love of mogs and, well, me. It took me almost two hours to clear up, and I made it to my Manchester-bound train with only about 30 seconds to spare. I didn't find the last bead until I ran my hand through my hair somewhere in the region of Macclesfield.

I've done quite a lot of radio in the last couple of years and always look forward to it - in a way I can't ever imagine myself doing with TV - but I was oddly nervous in the run-up to entering the WH studio. Perhaps it was because Woman's Hour was the first programme I'd been on that I could actually imagine members of my family and friends listening to. I forgot to say most of what I wanted to say, simultaneously probably said a bit too much about the way I talk to and about my cats, but still had a very nice chat with Jenni Murray, who's got a lovely soothing, familiar voice. Apparently Jenni is allergic to cat hair, but not, weirdly, the hair of black cats. Has anyone else heard of this condition? I'd never encountered it before, but it seems to be more proof of the magical nature of the darker feline. Jenni admits she does refer to herself as the "mummy" of her dog and cats. However, I didn't get chance to ask her whether she sings to the latter animals, and, when she does, she sings the same song that littlecatdiaries reader Natalija admitted to singing to hers this week.**

* I didn't think there was anywhere in Britain that still had that Life On Mars lighting in its corridors - bar the Life On Mars set - but I was wrong. When I went to the toilet, I half-expected to find one of Joy Division in there, smoking a cigarette and looking shifty.
** James Brown's 'Say It Loud (I'm Black And I'm Proud)'.

Janet Joins Bill Bryson's Keep Britain Tidy Campaign!

It's now been a few weeks since empty sweet and crisp wrappers started turning up outside the backdoor of my house, and the mystery of their source has caused much paranoia. The way that the building is positioned dictates that, barring the event of extremely high wind, if there's a packet of spicy tomato Wheat Crunchies on the flagstones outside my study, it's almost certainly the result of someone sitting on the flagstones outside my study, eating a packet of spicy tomato Wheat Crunchies. Disposing of soggy Mr Kipling packets (the litter is almost always soggy) and crinkled, greying Sunblest bags has recently become no less an intrinsic part of my morning ritual than making coffee, turning on the kitchen tap for Bootsy and shouting at the presenters of BBC Breakfast for speaking to me as if I'm simple.

What is almost as spooky as the appearance of this litter is its notable vintage quality. I mean: I know that there are some fairly timeworn products knocking around the market town where I live - one of the kebab shops only recently got rid of the last of a supply of bright red coke cans that my wife and I suspected were "retro" in a worryingly genuine way - but some of the brands currently residing in my flowerbed haven't been widely available in supermarkets since 1998. "Do that many people still really eat Curly-Wurlies?" I found myself asking, last Thursday. At one point over the weekend, I half-expected (well, hoped, really*) to see a packet of salt and vinegar Odd'Uns.

Of course, I'd seen Janet lazing about next to the rubbish as it appeared, but it didn't occur to me at first to connect the pile of litter with the pile of cat alongside it. Janet, who's more of a dozer than a sleeper, can do his lazing in a remarkably eclectic array of habitats, and his penchant for hard surfaces is one the major quirks of his middle-age, right up alongside his ever-loudening yawn and the new "fart-hiss" he has been perfecting for times when he is angry or frustrated**. Even now, I haven't actually caught him with any rubbish between his jaws, but since I saw him loitering just inside the house, with a full, sealed bag of pre-Lineker Walkers sitting behind him on the tiles, I have come to the conclusion that the only explanation for the fly-tipping is this: he is fishing the litter out of the lake of the bottom of my garden.

If so, this is very kind of him, since I usually spend an hour or so each month doing the same thing, particularly at rainy periods such as now, when the lake gets high and washes its innumerable crap up in the reeds beyond my lawn. Though in many ways the most uncomplicated of my cats, Janet has always been an enigma, from the summer romance he once sustained with a decrepit neighbourhood fox to the strange way that he drops to the floor, jellylike, when you tickle in him in a particular spot behind his right ear. My best explanation for his actions is that his litter picking is his form of "presents": a feline pacifist's (with the possible exception of a meddlesome polystyrene bead, he's never killed anything in his life) version of the headless voles Pablo leaves at the beneath my work desk. This explanation also accounts for the plaintive wail I heard him making the other night, as he sat alongside his latest stash of archaic firelighter packaging: a wail not dissimilar to the one Ralph makes when he has a mousetache. Where will this end? I do not know, but I spotted a faded can of Lilt in the gutter near my front door yesterday, so it's possible he could be expanding his repertoire.

*Does anyone lament the 1985 demise of these on a daily basis, or is it just me?
** Particularly baffling to be around, considering the amount of time he now also spends actually farting as well.

The Rescue Cat Of The Year Awards

When a person thinks of the term "cat show", they might be forgiven for thinking of musty smells, displaced mothering instincts and simmering caged fury anthropomorphised as competitive pride. You will not, however, find any of these things at The Rescue Cat Of The Year Awards. In fact, there’s another notable absence from Cats Protection’s alternative cat ceremony: the competitors. This might seem to defeat the object of a celebration of the feline spirit, but probably only if you’re the kind of person who’d claim that your Brown Tabby Maine Coon genuinely appreciates the Breakfast At Tiffany’s theme you’ve given his diamante-studded carry case. While not altogether averse to the idea of the day trip, cats traditionally tend not to be huge fans of the package version. This probably goes double for the kind of moggies that vie for the Rescue Cat Of The Year Awards, many of whom not only have numerous missing body parts but probably have minimal interest in receiving a personalised food bowl from Sally Gunnell OBE.

Gunnell, who recently adopted three kittens found in a box in the car park of her local Tescos, was one of five ailurophile celebrities presenting the prizes last week at the fourth annual staging of what Cats Protection have dubbed “The Feline Oscars”. The term is not strictly accurate, since you won’t find any moggy Clooneys or Paltrows here (although the inclusion of a feline Daniel Day-Lewis is not completely out of the question). The only nips and tucks are medically necessary ones: those, for example, performed on Felix, who lost his tail and one of his back legs when he got caught in the blades of a combine harvester, or Oliver, who had to have his right eye removed after being shot repeatedly at point-blank range with an air gun.

The awards are divided into four categories: Ultimate Survivor, Best Friends, Hero Cat, and Most Incredible Story. A couple of years ago, I entered my own “troubled and artistic” moggy The Bear into the fourth category, but he didn’t make the shortlist. Watching videos of Noah from Leeds and Lucky from Amersham, I began to understand why. Being found in a plastic bag on the hard shoulder of a motorway then becoming allergic to both fleas and your flea treatment is fairly remarkable, but it’s arguably not as remarkable as escaping from the 2007 floods on a raft or surviving a 280-mile journey from France to England whilst trapped under a car bonnet. As Mandy, the owner of Ultimate Survivor winner Felix, told me: “the problem is that when you enter, you have to tell your cat’s story in only 200 words, and that’s not much, when you consider what these cats have been through.” By the time she’d described Felix’s combine harvester horror, Mandy was already up to 198, so how would she find space to explain that he subsequently suffered from (and, unbelievably, conquered) near-total paralysis from tetanus – a disease that cats aren’t supposed to be able to even contract?

In a week when the RSPCA announced a 24% increase in cases of animal cruelty in the UK, stories such as Felix’s and that of overall winner Speedy – a remarkably intelligent-faced tabby who provides endless comfort to his severely disabled owner and is able to alert her parents when she is about to suffer an epileptic seizure – seemed all the more poignant. Presumably both of them were curled up on a duvet somewhere at home as their victories were announced, but the roaring, lionish presence of Hero Cat category presenter Brian Blessed endowed proceedings with a certain amount of feline authenticity. After an anecdote about having his kitchen invaded by a Shetland pony, Blessed also very publicly offered a saucy, purring come-on to Ultimate Survivor category presenter Prunella Scales. The Supreme Cat Show might have the 3D fluff, the extra-strong imported catnip cigars and the spangly cages, but as far as winningly unrefined feral behaviour is concerned, The Rescue Cat Of The Year Awards would seem to have the market well and truly cornered.

Witless-Looking Cats: The Winners

This was difficult. Not just Tough Cats Competition difficult, but REALLY difficult. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because witlessness is a slightly more subtle feline trait than straightforward hardness. Or maybe it's because I'm having a particularly indecisive kind of week (I went to the Rescue Cat Of The Year Awards a few days ago, and I wouldn't have been able to pick a clear winner out of the nominees there either). Whatever the case, after much deliberation, and experimentation - things really got desperate when I showed each of the top three photos to my own King Moron Pablo and ask him to headbutt the one he liked best, only for him to simply look vacantly at me with his tongue sticking out and fall asleep on my keyboard - I've decided that, instead of awarding first, second and third places, joint first place will be awarded to the following three beautiful simpletons (although it should be stated, just for the record, that when it comes to littlecatdiaries' "special" achievers, every feline cretin is a winner).

So, in no order whatsoever:

1. Spam (okay, so maybe the bag was placed there by his owner, Bill, but we have no proof, and it's very funny anyway).





2. Mitchell (don't you just sense that Mitchell has a totally demented meow?).





3. Murrt (one littlecatdiaries reader remarked on the resemblance between Murrt and Zoe Wannamaker, which is indeed uncanny: no insult to Mrs W herself, but it takes a special cat cretinosity to be that wonky-eyed, and I speak as one with daily firsthand experience of some pretty bozzed up moggy peepers).



A huge thanks to everyone for their pictures, and congratulations to the respective winning owners, Bill, Jane and Lisa. You'll each be receiving a signed copy of Under The Paw: Confessions Of A Cat Man very shortly.

The latest instalment of Simon's Cat

Of course, the whole thing's genius, but it's the tone of that meow that really makes it: Who is responsible for it? (The sound is credited to "Shrooty" but a quick Google search reveals that this is a sound design services company, and not, in fact, a cutely named mog.)