My Tommy Fluffpants is in bother again as Jos Biggs will tell you. Enjoy.
Mr Tommy Fluffipants is a manipulative mass of black and white fur built on the lines of a very small very fluffy carthorse.
He rules his domain with a ruthlessness that a full-size tiger would be proud of. Strays are sought out and terrorised into pathetic pleas for mercy and promises never to do it again.
He bullies his mother without any twinges of conscience, though if she retaliates he will turn and walk slowly away with a look of total innocence on his fluffy little backside.
He manipulates me remorselessly, though not totally. If caught out in a crime (usually picking on his mother or trespassing into the bedroom to steal her food) he will fix me with an unblinking lemon yellow stare and assert in a plaintive tone that it Wasn’t me.
This is usually followed up with a demonstration of affection and the phrase How could you possibly think it was me - I’d never do something so wicked. It must have been another cat that looks just like me.
However, there are a couple of chinks in his armour of invincibility: Thunder and Strangers. He is terrified of both.
The other day we had a fully fledged crash banger of a thunderstorm. Enter Mr Fluffipants at the gallop in desperate need of safety from whatever he thinks a thunderstorm is.
He ensconced himself in the living room under the sofa, secure in the knowledge that he was now invisible, and therefore safe.
While the thunderstorm was still at full decibel level José from Fontalmanzora arrived to fix my shower room toilet.
José was undampened both literally and metaphorically by the meteorological turmoil outside, and went about his work singing a jaunty melody in Spanish.
And here was Mr Fluffipants’ problem; Unnamed dangers outside and inside a stranger - worse still, a singing stranger!
He partly emerged from under the sofa, peeked left and right, hesitated, assessed the comparative dangers posed by the singing stranger against the dangers of the thunderstorm, took his courage in all four paws and fled.
His route to the door was not straight; he was forced to make a corner in his flight path so as to circumnavigate José. He approached the turning point at top speed, turned towards the safety of the door and fell over.
His velocity carried him onwards on his side over the tiled floor for a couple of feet before he could regain his feet.
However, by now he had lost momentum and purchase on the tiles. He had to scrabble frantically in the manner of a Disney cartoon until he once more achieved forward motion.
He approached the catflap at maximum velocity; unfortunately for him the cat flap is quite a tight fit for his portly frame, so his progress was slowed by the relative proportions of the catflap and his girth.
He squeezed through, much like icing sugar through a piping bag, but for one glorious second I enjoyed the magnificent fluffiness of his back view framed in the surround of the catflap.
I might be cruel, but it was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long while!
