There’s a Moose Loose Aboot this Hoose!
In an effort to cheer up Her Royal Highness Sayyida al Hurra, Queen of the Mediterranean, otherwise known as Si, or if I’m annoyed, Psycho, I bought her a yellow squeaky mouse.
I did my best to interest her in the mouse; I squeaked it, bounced it, rolled it along the floor, left it strategically placed so that she would encounter it when no-one was watching and likely to laugh at her, but all to no avail – she studiously ignored it.
She was altogether above such trivialities. She would favour it with a look so caustic that I’m surprised that it didn’t spontaneously combust.
After she had refused to acknowledge its presence for a couple of weeks I began to look for someone else who had a cat that might find it a suitable replacement for a real mouse!
The very next day I heard her bouncing off the doors. Checking to see what had caused all this frivolity I found her in the little hallway between the bedrooms, taking a running jump at the doors, cartwheeling back to earth, landing on the mouse and swatting it all over the place.
After a short while the noise stopped, so I went to investigate; she was in the hallway doing an impersonation of the Egyptian goddess Bast, the Cat Goddess, the one that sits regally in profile on all the best Egyptian tombs.
The mouse was nowhere to be seen, so assuming that she had either eaten it or lost it underneath a piece of furniture I looked, and sure enough it was underneath a chair.
I thought it was unlikely that she’s eaten it – it’s about the size of a golf ball, which would be quite a swallow for a cat.
She was playing with it yesterday, leaping at the doors and bouncing back onto her prey like some domesticated leopard when silence broke out. I went to investigate, but I couldn’t find the mouse anywhere. I looked underneath all the furniture, even under the cushions on the sofa. I looked under the beds, behind the linen basket; I extended my search to the kitchen where there is ample opportunity for mice to hide, but no yellow rodent could I find.
She can’t have eaten it, can she?
No, I think the more likely scenario is that it is in the same place as my kitchen scissors, which disappeared before Christmas, and which still haven’t come back!
*If you can’t remember, or don’t know, this is the sort of tune that stays with you for hours. I remember it as played by Waccy Maccy and the Lairds of Rock. And I defy you to listen to it without tapping your feet and smiling!
That Cat is Pushing It!
As a cat who needs comfort and solace she has certain privileges: mainly these are that she is allowed in the bedroom, where she has ‘her’ mat upon which is placed ‘her’ food bowl and ‘her’ water bowl.
She also has a specially purchased bed, which is on the bed next to mine. It’s actually a dog bed, but it is the only one I could find of the right size and with soft sides but without an embarrassingly tasteless design of things like a spacecraft, or the Eiffel Tower, dolphins, motor bikes or any other such unsuitable artwork for a cat of her refined tastes.
Her bed is on top of the other bed for the simple reason that she likes to lie on the other bed. As I don’t like the amount of hair that she leaves behind I put the bed under the cat, rather than try to prevent the cat getting onto the bed.
Her bed is perfectly adequate, but will, in the fullness of time, require washing. I have a feeling that, once washed, it will become shapeless and floppy, and will no longer serve the purpose for which it was bought.
Also, she likes to sit in it and knead imaginary dough to make imaginary bread, which is certain to lead to its disintegration – dogs don’t knead dough, so the fabric from which it is made will certainly not withstand the onslaught of a cat’s claws.
So in order to add to the bed’s longevity I bought a piece of fluffy fabric in white to use as a blanket to go inside the bed. She loved it, subjecting it to rigorous kneading on a regular basis. However, being white it very soon needed washing, so I bought another one, brown and with random bones integrated into its pattern.
She loved this one as well, so I removed the white one and put it in the washing machine. It came out lovely and fluffy and white, and in due course, when the brown one became wash-worthy I swopped it for the original white one. She spent the whole day sitting beside her bed with a look of disapproval such as only a cat can master. Come bed time I substituted the white one for the brown one, and she graciously condescended to enter her bed once more.
Next morning I returned the brown blanket to the wash pile and replaced it with the white one, upon which she resumed her pose of offended majesty next to her bed – In comparison to her Queen Victoria would have looked quite chummy!
However, come bed time I decided to call her bluff – I left the white blanket in, turned out the light and settled down. I should have known better – five times she woke me in the night demanding to sit on me, or at the very least to sit on my bed, while her own bed remained unslept in. I now have a Judgement of Solomon to make. Do I tough it out and tell her to make the best of it, or do I replace the offending white blanket for the brown one?
It’s a matter of who blinks first!
The Innocence of the Guilty
Her Royal Highness Sayyida al Hurra, Queen of the Mediterranean was suffering, so acting on advice from the very pleasant young vet at Nexxo I turned the house upside down to pander to her whims.
My house has four rooms – kitchen, living room, the spare bedroom and my bedroom; I’m not counting the shower room and the bathroom. The rules are few and simple: No cats on the work surfaces. No cats in the bedrooms. However, due to her distressed mental state the rules had been redefined: No cats on the work surfaces. No Tommy Fluffipants in the bedrooms.
He did ask me why his mother was now allowed in the bedrooms when he wasn’t, and I explained that it was because his mother wasn’t well. He thought about that for a while, then decided that it Wasn’t Fair. He suggested that maybe he wasn’t well either, but I explained that if he wanted to be Not Well he’d have to go to the vet and get official permission to be ill.
He quickly changed tack and informed me that he was a cat, and it was unreasonable of me to expect him to understand. Upon which he left, taking his fluffy pants with him. ‘Anyway,’ he stated as he departed, ‘Cats don’t do rules.’
Later I was in the kitchen when he passed me with an extremely innocent expression and continued towards the bedroom. I’m a cat, his receding backside informed me. I don’t understand that I’m not allowed in the bedroom – my mother is in there!
I let him get as far as the doorway and then I shouted ‘Tommy!’ He left the ground vertically to a height of around six inches, turned, and with as much dignity as such a comical looking cat can muster went into the living room and sat on the sofa as if nothing had happened. ‘I wasn’t going in the bedroom, honest!’ He assured me with a steady yellow-eyed stare. ‘I was just taking the scenic route.’
I’ve caught him in there a couple of times now. Each time he flees from the scene as if the hounds of Hell were after him until he gets into neutral territory, when he will stop and fix me with an expression so innocent that any jury in the land would pronounce a verdict of Not Guilty, no matter what the evidence suggested.
‘It wasn’t me,’ He’ll insist. ‘It was another cat that looks exactly the same as me.’
Those cats! I can’t call my life my own!
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