Night of the Living Box

A big parcel arrived for me yesterday.

It was very exciting. Big parcels are the stuff of which dreams are made.

They are on a par with rainbows and sunbeams and chocolate.

For me, at least. For certain felines (naming no names), they are the embodiment of nightmares.

Mouth took one look at the box and was filled with a mix of terror and incomprehension.

His initial reaction was to panic and flee.

I knew better than to go after him. Sympathy would only reinforce his despair.

Sure enough, eventually he slithered back downstairs with a look of forced bravado. He gave the box a tentative sniff.

When this did not result in his immediate demise, he got brave enough to jump on top of it. (This process alone would be a separate post; Mouth believes he is built for climbing rather than leaping. He never really got past the curtain-clambering kitten phase. When he tries to propel himself upwards with his hind legs, like a normal creature, he becomes a flailing mess of limbs and claws and fur.)

For a while, Mouth sat bravely astride the box. He kept giving little show-off grunts in Tail's general direction.

When at last he hunched down like a tabby blancmange, I knew he had conquered the box, and I was proud of him. It was a small step for a cat, but a giant leap for Mouthkind.

I did a few jobs around the house, and when I came back downstairs I noticed how much the box was cluttering up the hallway.

Mouth had abandoned his new cardboard friend and was busily growling at an ant, so I moved the box into the lounge.

Little did I realise how catastrophic this act would prove to be.

In its new surroundings, the box was a greater and more deadly enemy than Mouth had previously imagined. With thuggish conspirators like sofas and tables, the threat multiplied a thousandfold.

You can guess what happened next.

When, some hours later, his pride got the better of him, Mouth slunk back into the lounge.

He sat on the beanbag, a safe distance away, and regarded the box the way a banana might regard a smoothie-maker.

G-r-a-d-u-a-l-l-y, he inched closer to it.

When he was about a metre away from the box, an unfamiliar expression crossed his face. It was an expression of vague recognition.

Needless to say, the expression was accompanied by the Sideways Head of Confusion.

Even comprehension confuses poor Mouth. He does not expect to understand things.

I'm pleased to say that Mouth has now come to accept the box. He rubs up against it. He licks it. He uses it as a sunbathing pedestal.

I hardly dare tell him that I need to open it.

"Lay On, MacFluff"

Sometimes my morning wake-up call can be quite theatrical.

I have to get up quickly in order to avoid a tragedy of an entirely different magnitude.

What Miaow from Yonder Window Breaks

My house is full of cat noises.

Here are some of them.

The 'play with me (or die)'

Mouth is very good at looking cute when he wants something. He lets out this odd little two-part brrrrrrp, generally while patting my knee or face with his paw. He's like an excited child putting his hand up in class. "Pick me, Miss! Oh, me! Oh, I know the answer! PLEASE Miss!"

Usually when he does this, he wants me to wiggle his aerial about for him.

If he doesn't get what he wants, he can transform instantly into a terrifying hellbeast.

The 'where are you?'

When I'm not around, my boyfriend tells me Mouth wanders around the house listlessly, occasionally emitting  forlorn miaows.

His miaows have never been melodious, but this one is particularly ridiculous. It starts off all waily, but then he seems to remember he is a cat and tries to surreptitiously convert his wail into a cat sound.

Possibly his mother was a banshee.

The 'THERE IS A BIRD THERE IS A BIRD THERE IS A BIRD'

Like most cats, Mouth and Tail make weird chattery noises when there is a Thing that they want to eat.

Traditionally it's a bird (Tail excels at bird-chattery), but I have caught Mouth chattering at wholly un-chatter-worthy things like woodlice and fluff.

Tail's chatters are superb. I'm convinced she is skilled in ventriloquy and a qualified voice projection instructor. Even through double-glazed glass, they make sparrows at the other end of the garden quake with fear.

Mouth's are rubbish. They sound like a broken power drill. Woodlice flock to my house purely for the entertainment.

The 'NO'

This is the feline equivalent of a toddler stamping its foot and throwing a tantrum.

When Mouth and Tail have a stand-off - usually because Mouth has muscled in on Tail's dinner, although once it happened because he sneezed on her bottom - growling inevitably ensues.

They always make up afterwards. Mouth is a master of the Apologetic Ear Groom.

The 'service announcement'

This is my favourite cat noise, and a peculiarity of Tail's.

Whenever she's about to do something she feels I should know about, like jump onto the bookcase, she gives a little chirrup.

It's very courteous.

Why I Feed My Cat in the Toilet

Of my two cats, Mouth is the dominant one.

I have no idea how this happened.

He is far jumpier and wimpier than Tail. When we got them both, he was smaller than her, too. I can only think Tail didn't want to be boss.

Being Top Cat means that Mouth starts eating his dinner first, and he gets to lick out Tail's bowl when she's finished. The bowl lick is strictly symbolic - Tail wouldn't dream of leaving any scraps.

Last week, however, a strange thing happened.

We've always fed both cats in the hallway, which has a nice wipeable laminate floor. Tail's bowl is at the end of the hall near the lounge, and Mouth's bowl goes by the kitchen door, like this.

This has never been a problem.

But last week, at dinnertime, I heard an odd growly noise.

It was no ordinary Oi, Tiddles, get out of my garden growl. It wasn't even the lesser-spotted THERE IS A NOISE AND I DON'T LIKE IT growl. This growl was deafening. There are no windows in my hallway, but I pictured neighbours clutching their children and adjusting their picture frames. Extreme weather warnings would soon start appearing on TV.

I went to investigate.

Mouth was bolting his food and growling. It was the most absurd thing I have ever seen a cat doing, and I have seen cats do some extremely absurd things. (My parents' cat once woke itself up by sleep-miaowing.)

"Oh dear, Mouth," I said. I knew this day would come. Life is a continuous struggle for a creature of Mouth's simplicity, and he had finally broken himself.

I tried picking the bowl up and putting it down again. The growling resumed with renewed vigour.

I tried moving it along the hallway. No change.

Tail had abandoned her portion of whitefish and was watching with interest.

There was nothing I could do but spectate as Mouth inhaled the remainder of his dinner, then moved onto Tail's.

Tail looked up at me, stricken.

"No, Mouth," I said, shooing him away from Tail's bowl, but Tail didn't want it anymore. It was evidently besmirched with boy germs.

Washing up both bowls, I had a think. I'd read a few books on cat psychology, but Mouth was a law unto himself. Perhaps he had spontaneously decided that the hallway was a terrifying place.

To be on the safe side, for their next meal, I shut Mouth in the downstairs loo. It was a warm, quiet room where he could eat undisturbed.

It meant Tail could get on with her dinner in the hallway, uninterrupted by tabby-shaped hoovers.

With painstaking care, I knelt down and peered under the door at Mouth.

The growling continued, but it lacked conviction.

As I'd hoped, it dwindled as the meal progressed.

Eventually, it was replaced by the happy lip-smacking grunts of a feline polishing off his final few mouthfuls of Whiskas.

When the grunts had given way to a noise that could only mean Mouth was cleaning his bottom, and Tail had devoured every last morsel of her rabbit-flavoured supper, I opened the door to the downstairs loo.

A newly refreshed, confident Mouth strolled out, fully recovered from his growly episode and ready to take on the world.

He seemed none the worse for it, but ever since then he has expected to eat his dinner in the downstairs loo.

I don't question it. I just put his food in there, and do my best to remember to let him out afterwards.

Tail accepts this state of affairs.

I love Mouth dearly, but I don't pretend to understand him.

My Cats Sleep in Parallel

My cats do a weird thing. Wherever they are in the house, they are usually in parallel.

I first noticed it when Mouth and Tail were in the same room. It would often make sense that they were both facing the same way, because they were waiting for me to dish up their dinner or wiggle a toy.

But then I started to realise that they are nearly ALWAYS pointing in the same direction.

Sometimes they will be hunched up.

The 'north-south'

The 'east-west'

Sometimes they will just be sitting there.

The 'centre of gravity'

Sometimes they will be splatting about and generally looking untidy.

The 'mess'

It doesn't matter if one of them is upstairs and the other is downstairs.

The 'whole-body-plant'

My boyfriend and I like to think that they are tapping into mysterious invisible forces. Maybe they are acting as feline compasses or weathervanes of some sort.

But it is more likely that Mouth wants to do whatever Tail is doing.

He is a very impressionable animal.

The Taping of the Cat

In our house, there are wooden banisters beside the stairs. The wood is covered in glossy off-white paint.

Our house is three storeys tall, so there are lots of banisters.

Before we moved into this house, we lived in a flat, so Mouth and Tail didn't know what banisters were.

They were delighted to find that the new house came equipped with a multi-level cat playground.

Once they had got over their New House Fear (another story), they began to investigate.

Soon, their antics became increasingly daredevil.

However, although Tail is as agile as the average high-rise tightrope walker, Mouth is a simple beast with no comprehension of 'up'.

Eventually, the inevitable happened.

My boyfriend and I sighed. We should have seen this coming.

As is often the case, we needed a strategy - to protect both the cats and the woodwork.

We pondered. And we hit on an Idea.

The Idea involved sellotape. Lots and lots of sellotape.

Yes. We taped up the banisters.

We taped them sticky-side-up, so that the cats couldn't climb on the banisters without getting their paws stuck.

We felt a bit mean, but it was the kindest way to dissuade Mouth from subjecting himself to a catastrophic twenty-foot fall. The tape wouldn't hurt their paws, but it would tweak them a bit.

We surveyed our work. Then we waited.

After a while, our patience paid off, and Mouth approached the banisters. You could see the Naughty Thoughts filling his rather gormless tabby head.

He lifted a paw.

With what seemed like excruciating slowness, he placed it on the banister. It landed squarely on the tape.

For a moment, he didn't realise anything was amiss.

Then he tried to move his paw.

When several paw-moving attempts proved fruitless, it started to dawn on him that all was not as it should be, and he let out a long, plaintive miaow.

It was heartbreaking to watch. But he had to learn.

At long last, he managed to extricate the paw, minus a small proportion of its fluff.

Mouth was aghast. His comrade! His number one ally! Cruelly sabotaged by this peculiar yellow floor! Why didn't the floor behave itself?

This paw had stuck with Mouth through thick and thin, and the fact that there had been no 'thin' to speak of was immaterial. Mouth vowed never again to honour the horrible yellow floor with his paw's presence.

I'd like to say that this was the end of the Banister Battle, but Mouth's memory is not one of his greatest assets.

Of course, Tail grasped the situation after her first adhesive encounter. She licked her paw better and pretended nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

But for Mouth's benefit, the tape remains to this day.

It is largely effective, and has certainly prevented any tabby-themed splats, but Mouth occasionally forgets.

The tape currently looks like this.

We love Mouth dearly, but survival is a continuous challenge for him. He is not a creature that would thrive in the wild.

I'd say he has the temporal awareness of a goldfish, but at least our fish remember when feeding time is.

The Time We Nearly Stole Someone's Cat by Accident

One day a few months ago, a cat turned up on our doorstep.

This isn't an entirely unusual occurrence. Lots of people on our road have cats and I know most of them by sight. "There goes The Fox," we say knowingly, as a fat ginger tabby lumbers past. "I see Hoover has been at the bins again," we tut, appraising the tortie-shaped holes in our rubbish bags.

But this cat was new. He was a black-and-white tuxedo cat, like Tail, but he had a permanently worried expression. He looked like he had wandered out of a posh dinner party and lost his way.

We named him Blum. It seemed to fit.

Being the nice, hospitable people we are, we invited Blum in for a quick bite to eat.

He seemed very grateful, and - having cleaned his plate - headbutted his thanks politely before heading off. He was frightfully sorry, but he was running late for his next meeting and it was very important.

Over the coming weeks, we saw quite a bit of Blum. He knew we were always good for a dish of kibble and a saucer of cat milk, and he frequently stopped by on his way to host some charity gala or social function.

He had a curious habit of jumping up to headbutt things. If you held your hand just below waist height, he would bounce up and give it the full force of his nose.

We called this move 'the Blum'.

We soon found ourselves getting Blummed with alarming regularity, and we began to wonder whether he had a home to go to.

We were growing rather fond of him.

After pondering for a while, we decided to buy him a collar with our phone number on. That way, if anyone was looking after him, they could get in touch. And if they weren't, well ... maybe we could step in.

The collar was a quick-release one in fluorescent green. It wasn't easy to miss.

Blum evidently wasn't used to wearing a collar, and he wasn't very impressed by it. But he seemed to give it the benefit of the doubt.

That night, Blum pootled off, cheery as ever, sporting his new accessory with indifference.

We didn't hear anything for a couple of days. We didn't even see Blum in the street.

Then one afternoon at work, my mobile rang.

"Hello?" I said.
"WHO'S THIS?" came an angry-sounding man's voice.
"Who's this?" I said.
"THERE'S A GREEN WHATSIT ON ME CAT!" the man roared, clearly enraged.

Suddenly I realised who he must be.

"Ah, sorry about that," I said quickly. "We'd just seen him around and wanted to check he had an owner."
"HE DOESN'T LIKE COLLARS," growled the man.
"Well, I do apologise," I said. "Next time he's about I'll take it off."
"NO YER DON'T. I'M TAKIN' IT OFF MESELF," the man said, with an air of finality.
"Um, OK," I said.
"BECAUSE 'E HATES 'EM."
"Alright."
"AND HE'S MY CAT, YER SEE."
"I quite understand."

I thanked the man for calling and we hung up. Well, I was glad somebody was taking care of Blum, and cat people come in all guises. I thought that would be the end of the matter.

But the next day, Blum was at the door. He was still wearing the collar.

Smiling, I reached down and took it off.

You never know when we might need it again. An 'owner please call' collar is a key item in a cat lover's armoury.

Not wanting to hijack the scary man's cat, I sent Blum packing without his usual dish of Whiskas, and he scampered off happily. He probably had a tombola to run or an exhibition to unveil.

We still see Blum around sometimes, although he tends to keep to Scary Man's end of the road.

If you see him, you can bet he'll be headbutting the hand of a well-meaning passer-by.

Old habits die hard.