The Unadulterated Cat Read online

  On retirement, they set up home with Dotinthecanteen but saunter down to the old firm occasionally and hang around while the working cats are going through a busy patch, telling them how much better they feel these days, wish they'd done it years ago, of course you lads don't know what it was like when Mr Morgan was manager, what a tartar he was, if he saw so much as a mouse doodah he went spare, you were kept at it in those days…

  …and then they saunter back home, and have a nap.

  7. Arch-villains' Cats

  Always fluffy and white, with a diamond-encrusted collar. Other qualifications include the ability to yawn photogenically when the camera is on them and complete unflappability in the presence of people dropping through the floor into the piranha tank. We've all seen Arch-villains' cats. However, it's not the easy life that it appears to be. For one thing, the people who design the megamillion underground yacht bunkers and missile bases in which the arch-criminals live never think to include a dirt box. If they did, it would be surrounded by landmines and have ingenious and unpleasant traps buried in it. And Archvillains' cats never use a cat door. This is because they know what happens to people who go through doors.

  Arch-villains' cats are not Real. This is obvious to anyone who cares to examine the facts. Next Christmas, when once again the TV reminds you that a saviour was born on Earth and his name is James Bond, look closely at the sets. You will find there are no:

  a) dead birds under the laser-driven spy splitting table

  b) scratch marks on the megamissile control wheel

  c) forlorn squeaky toys lying around where people can trip over them

  d) half-empty tins of suppurating cat food in the cryogenic unit.

  Somehow, it's hard to imagine your average Arch-villain owning a Real cat (although some members have pointed out that many Archvillains have leather gloves on their hands, and/or only one eye, so maybe they have Real cats at home they try to fondle after another hard day of holding the world to ransom.)

  8. Cartoon Cats

  Usually black and white. And they often have an amusing speech impediment. If your cat can read newspapers, it is a Cartoon cat. If it can get hold of a stick of dynamite by simply reaching off screen, it is a Cartoon cat. If it wears a bowtie, it's a Cartoon cat. If, when it starts to run, its legs pinwheel in the air for a humorous few seconds making binka-binka-binka noises, it is a Cartoon cat. If you are still uncertain, check to see whether the people next door have a bulldog called Butch who has spikes on his collar and is usually to be found dozing outside his kennel. If they have, you'll know what kind of cat you've got.

  9. The Sub-Post Office Cat

  A sub-species of Factory cat. Can be any colour in theory, are almost always black and white in fact. The significant characteristic of this breed is an ability to spread out when asleep, like a rubber bag full of mercury. They're gradually fading out, made redundant by the loss of the very shops they tended to inhabit and also by the Public Health laws, which are not drafted to accommodate the kind of animal that considers its natural role in life to go to sleep on a pile of sugar bags. I used to be taken into a shop where a Sub-Post Office cat used to sleep in the dog biscuit sack. You'd reach in to pinch a bikkie and there'd be all this fur. No one seemed to mind. (Whatever happened to those dog biscuits? They were real dog biscuits, not the anaemic things you get in boxes today; they were red and green and black and came in various interesting shapes. The black ones tasted of charcoal. That's modern times for you. Our grandparents had oil lamps and gas lights to look back to, we've got dog biscuits. Even the nostalgia isn't what it was.)

  10. Travelling Cats

  Oscar's 2,000 Mile Purr-fect Trip says the heading in the local paper. Or something like that. At least once every year. In every local paper. It's a regular, like “Row Over Civic Site” or “Storm As Schools Probe Looms”.

  So many stories like this have turned up that researchers from the Campaign for Real Cats have been, well, researching. The initial suspicion was that here was a hitherto unknown breed of Real cat, possibly a sideshoot of the now almost extinct Railway cat. It'd be nice to think that there was today an Airline cat, although perhaps not, because warming though the idea is, the thought is bound to occur to you at 30,000 feet that it's probably got a favourite sleeping area somewhere on the plane and it is possibly somewhere in the wiring. Or perhaps there is now a Lorry cat undreamed of by T. S. Eliot. Felis Freubaf, an international creature, loitering in the cabs of the world and growing fat on Yorkie Bars. Or it could be further proof of the Schrodinger theory, since from a quantum point of view distance cannot be said to exist and all this apparent space between things is just the result of random fluctuations in the matter matrix and shouldn't be taken seriously.

  The astonishing truth has not been suspected, possibly because not many people in this country have more than one local paper. But, from hundreds of cuttings sent in by Campaign members, it finally emerged.

  They're all the same cat. Not the same type of cat. The same cat.

  It's a smallish black and white tom. Never mind about the variety of names, which are only of significance to humans, although interestingly the name Oscar does seem to crop up rather a lot. Careful analysis of dozens of pictures of the Travelling cat blinking in the flashlight's glare have proved it.

  It appeared to do a minimum of 15,000 miles last year, much of it in car engine compartments, where only its piteous mewling alerts the driver when he stops off for a coffee. Confirmation will not be achieved until Oscar has been tracked down by researchers armed with a truckload of painful equipment, but the current, rather interesting, theory is that what initially appears to be this piteous mewling is in fact a stream of directions on the lines of “left here I said left, left you twerp, all right, keep going until we get to the trading estate and then you can pick up the A370…”

  Oscar is, in fact, trying to get somewhere.

  The process is a bit hit and miss, and possibly he has underestimated the size of the country and the number of vehicles in it, but he's keeping at it. Certainly, in the best tradition of Real cats everywhere, he's doing anything rather than get out and walk.

  Incidentally, some recent press cuttings suggest that Oscar has given birth to kittens in a car engine compartment. This makes a tiny hole in part of the theory—nothing that a reasonable grant couldn't plug—but leads to the intriguing thought that perhaps there will be a new race of Travelling cats after all. And all growing up believing that home is something that you can only get to by climbing inside noisy tin things that move at 70 mph.

  Perhaps lemmings started out like this.

  In the course of this work one researcher did turn up a fascinating anecdote about St Eric, the 4th-century Bishop of Smyrna, believed by many to be the true patron saint of Real cats. While on his way to deliver an epistle he is said to have tripped over a cat and shouted, “In faith, I wysh that Damned Mogge wode Goe Awae and Never Come Backe!” It was a small black and white tom, according to contemporary accounts.

  11. The Green, Bio-Organic, Whole Earthbox Cat

  This type has been around since the Sixties at least. You may recall stories about cats fed on sweetcorn and avocados (no, really; a local pet shop sells vegetarian dog food). And, indeed, if the rest of the household is on the path of inner wholeness it rather lets the whole holistic business down to have tins of minced innards in the fridge.

  We had vegan4 friends who handled the cat food tin in the same way that people at Sellafield handle something that's started to tick. In the end, they worked out a vegetarian diet with the occasional treat of fish. Their cat was a young Siamese. It thrived on the stuff. Of course it did. It used to go out and hang around the organic goat shed, and ate more rats and mice than its owners had hot dinners, which wasn't hard. But it was very understanding about it, and never let them know. We occasionally saw it trotting over the garden with something fluffy in its mouth, and it used to give us looks of conspiratorial embarrassment, like a Methodist
minister caught enjoying a pint.

  In fact cats are naturally Green animals. After all:

  a) No cats have ever used aerosol sprays. Sprays, maybe, but not aerosol ones. The ozone layer is perfectly safe from cats.

  b) Cats don't hunt seals. They would if they knew what they were and where to find them. but they don't, so that's all right.

  c) The same with whales. People might have fed whales to cats, but the cats didn't know. They'd have been just as happy with minced harpooner.

  d) Antarctica? Cats are quite happy to leave it alone.

  Of course, they have their negative points:

  a) All cats insist on wearing real fur coats…

  Naming cats

  All cats, we know, have several names. T. S. Eliot came nowhere near to exhausting the list, though. A perfectly ordinary cat is likely to be given different names for when:

  a) you tread on it

  b) it's the only animal apparently able to help you in your enquiries as to the mysterious damp patch on the carpet and the distressing pungency around the place

  c) your offspring is giving it a third degree cuddle

  d) it climbed up the loft ladder Because it Was There and then, for some reason, decided to skulk right at the back of all the old boxes, carpets, derelict Barbie houses, etc, and won't be coaxed out, and then when you finally drag it out by the scruff of its neck it scratches your arm in a friendly way and takes a beautiful leap which drops it through the open hatchway and onto the stepladder, which then falls over, leaving you poised above a deep stairwell on a winter's afternoon while the rest of the family are out.5

  It's an interesting fact that fewer than 17% of Real cats end their lives with the same name they started with. Much family effort goes into selecting one at the start (“She looks like a Winifred to me”), and then as the years roll by it suddenly finds itself being called Meepo or Ratbag.

  Which brings us to the most important consideration in the naming of cats: never give a cat a name you wouldn't mind shouting out in a strained, worried voice around midnight while banging a tin bowl with a spoon. Stick to something short.

  That being said, most common names for Real Cats are quite long and on the lines of Yaargeroffoutofityarbarstard, Mumthere'ssomethingORRIBLEunderthebed, and Wellyoushouldn'tofbinstandingthere. Real Cats don't have names like Vincent Mountjoy Froufrou Poundstretcher IV, at least for long.

  The chosen name should also be selected for maximum carrying power across a busy kitchen when, eg, a bag full of prime steak starts moving stealthily towards the edge of the table. You need a word with a cutting edge. Zut! is pretty good. The Egyptians had a catheaded goddess called Bast. Now you know why.

  Illnesses

  Real cats are subject to the same illnesses that unReal cats get, although by and large Real cats tend towards rude health—not counting, of course, the occasional little intestinal problem which could happen to anyone.

  However, there are several specifically Real cat ailments:

  Impatient legs

  Weird, this. We had a cat who suffered badly. The vet couldn't explain it. The cat could climb trees, ladders, anything, it was as agile as you please, but when it tried to run fast it was all okay until its back legs tried to pass. Then it'd get so embarrassed at the sight of its own rear end coming past on the fast lane it would stop and wash its paws in shame. If it forgot itself and really made a dash for it, it was likely to end up facing the wrong way.

  Flypaper

  Well, okay. Not common. But one of the biggest cat ailments we've ever faced. Ho—we said—let's be ecological, remember the ozone layer, have no truck with flysprays, whatever happened to good old-fashioned flypaper. Finally found some, after shopkeepers made mad faces (“man here wants flypaper, keep smiling, desperately signal assistant to call police, will soon be asking for crinoline hoops and a pound of carbide crystals”). Got it home, hung it up in open window, bluebottles soon stuck fast like small angry currants, hooray, paper swayed in breeze, Real Cat leapt… Real Cat becomes spinning furry propeller. Paper snaps, cat falls out of window, begins massive chase across gardens as it tries to escape from unwound paper trailing behind it, finally brought to earth in distant shrubbery because only one leg now capable of movement.

  Panic, panic, where box flypaper came in? This is 1980s, paper bound to be covered with Polydibitrychloroethylene-345, oh god, cat now immobile with terror inside kitchen towel. Fill huge bowl with warm water, drop cat in, swish it around, cat doesn't protest, oh god, perhaps Polydibitrychloroethylene-345 already coursing through tiny veins. Change water, rinse again, brisk towelling down, put cat on path in sun.

  Cat looks up, gives mildly dirty look, turns and walks slowly up garden, lifting each paw one at a time and giving it a shake, like C. Chaplin.

  After all that it was a bit of a let-down to find the flypaper box at the bottom of the waste bin and find that, far from being the complex chemical trap we'd feared, it was just some jolly ecological plain sticky paper.

  Sitting and hiccupping gently (with the occasional burp)

  We've always put this down to voles.

  Eating grass

  Never been sure that this is a symptom of illness. It probably comes under the heading of Games: (“Hey, I'm being watched, let's eat some grass, that'll worry them, they'll spend half an hour turning the house upside down looking for the cat book, haha.”)

  Lorries

  Can be fatal. But not always. We knew a cat who regarded motorised vehicles as sort of wheeled mice, and leapt out on them. It had so much scar tissue that its fur grew at all angles, like a gooseberry. Even its stitches had stitches. But it still lived to a ripe old age, terrorising other cats with its one good eye and forever jumping out at lorries in its sleep. It was probably looking for one that squeaked.

  However healthy the cat, there will come a time when it needs a Pill. Oh, how we nod and look like respectable, concerned cat owners as the vet hands us the little packs (one grey one every five days and then a brown one after ten days, or was it the other way round?) And once we were all innocent and thought, the cat food smells like something off the bottom of a pond anyway. Real cat can't possibly notice if we crumble the damn things up a bit and mix them in…

  As we get wiser, of course, we learn that the average Real cat has taste buds that make the most complex computer-driven sensory apparatus look like a man with a cold. It can spot an alien molecule a mile off (we tried halving the suspect food and adding more from the tin, and kept on doing it until it was like that famous French chemical experiment with the weird water and everything, there surely couldn't have been any pill left, but Real cat knew). Next comes the realist phase (“after all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.”) You take the pill in one hand and the cat in the other…

  Er…

  You take the pill in one hand and in the other you take a large kitchen towel with one angry cat head poking out of the end. With your third hand you prise open the tiny jaws, insert the pill, clamp the jaws shut and, with your fourth hand tickle the throat until a small gulping noise indicates that pill has gone down. You wish. It hasn't gone down. Because it's just gone sideways. Real cats have a secret pouch in their cheeks for this sort of thing. A Real cat can take a pill, eat a meal, and then spit out the slightly damp pill with a noise which, if this was a comic strip, would probably be represented as ptooie.

  It is important to avoid the third stage, which basically consists of Man, Beast and Medicine locked in dynamic struggle and ought to be sculpted rather than described (as in Rodin's “Man Giving Pill to Cat”).

  The fourth stage is up to you. Usually by now the cat is displaying such a new lease of life that the treatment might be said to have worked. Grinding the pill up with a bit of water and spooning it in sometimes does the trick. A fellow Real cat owner says powdering the wretched object—the pill, not the cat, although by stage four you'll entertain any idea—mixing it with a little butter a
nd smearing it on a paw is a sure-fire method, because the cat's ancient instinct is to lick itself clean. Close questioning suggested that he hadn't actually tried this, just deduced it from theoretical studies (he's an engineer, so that explains it). Our view is that an animal that will starve and asphyxiate before taking its medicine won't have any trouble with a grubby paw.

  Feeding cats

  For centuries the idea of feeding cats was as unbelievable as squaring the circle. So was feeding chickens, for that matter. They just hung around, making their own arrangements. The whole point about having them was to keep down vermin and generally tidy up the place. Dogs got fed, cats got scraps. If they were lucky. We all know what it's like now. Feeding Real cats follows a pattern as changeless as the seasons.

  1. Real cat turns up its nose at gold-plated tinned stuff recommended by woman on television.

  2. Out of spite, you buy some down-marked own-brand stuff whose contents you wouldn't want to know about (after all, considering what can be put in beefburgers and sausages… no, you really wouldn't want to know about it…) Cat wolfs it down, licks empty plate across floor.

  3. Out of relief, next shopping trip you buy a dozen tins of the humming stuff.