baroque_mongoose | Entries tagged with cats

I have said a fair bit about the remarkable Minsky so far, but not very much about his brother Chomsky, who was, I'm afraid, perhaps the most embarrassingly misnamed cat ever. They looked very similar, both of them being big tabbies; but there the resemblance ended. Chomsky was, in fact, even bigger than Minsky; there was Siamese in them somewhere, but it showed much more strongly in Minsky, who had the slim build, the brains, and the slightly kinked tail end. Chomsky wasn't overweight, but he had a much more cobby sort of build.

I always used to say about those two that there were two cats, and there were two brains, and Minsky got them both. That was an accurate summary, but it also wasn't the half of it. Minsky also got the astonishing reflexes, the sheer determination, and the physical strength, whereas his poor brother basically drew the wooden spoon in the genetic lottery. Even his health wasn't great. Chomsky was very prone to cystitis, and he died quite young from a previously unsuspected heart problem. But for all that, he was an adorable cat; he was very affectionate and would get into my lap at every opportunity. Of course, being so dim, once he got there he had no idea what to do with his legs, so I would have to sort them out for him; and he would purr most gratefully.

Anyway, back when Chomsky was alive, I was married, and therefore we had a double bed. As you do. And this double bed had been slightly damaged during a house move; it was a drawer divan, and it had taken a whack to the frame which meant that one of the drawers could no longer be inserted into its slot (so it lived at the bottom of the walk-in wardrobe). And one New Year's Eve, so long ago now that it was before anyone had the idea of setting off fireworks at midnight, I went to bed at the usual time; I don't recall what my husband did, but he was much more of a party animal than I was, so he probably went out and got squiffy with his friends.

Some time between 5 and 5.30 am, I woke up, rather muzzily as one would at that time of the morning; and I realised I had been woken up by a noise. "Who on earth," I thought blearily, "is revving a motorbike at this hour on New Year's Day?"

Husband also woke up. I put the same question to him, not really expecting he'd be able to answer... and, as I was asking it, I realised something.

It wasn't a motorbike. The noise was coming from inside the bed.

Husband, very kindly (since he'd almost certainly been drinking the night before, and must therefore have been even muzzier than I was), got up and reached inside the hole left by the missing drawer. To be fair, I probably wouldn't have had a chance; he was not only stronger than I was, but, crucially, he had longer arms. Even then, it took him a bit of time and trouble, but eventually he managed to extract Chomsky from his impromptu nest among the bedsprings. That cat had a very loud purr in any case, and when it was being amplified by the bed's framework it was... quite something.

Chomsky was duly evicted from the bedroom, the door was closed behind him (I can't think why it had been left open in the first place), we both went back to sleep, and all was well.

Happy New Year!

Current Mood: relaxed

I had quite a bad setback overnight, so at the moment I feel about as bad as I did on Saturday. This is not merely infuriating in itself, but it also means that (barring a miracle) I'm not going to be able to help at food bank tomorrow; I have e-mailed the co-ordinator, so hopefully she'll have time to find a substitute, but I am not happy about this because it's always crazy in there in the run-up to Christmas. I usually do alternate weeks, but for reasons of other people's availability I did last week and then was supposed to be doing this week (and not till January after that). And last week was a mad rush, so I have every expectation that it'll be the same this week.

On which note, if you want to help your local food bank but you're short of money yourself, bring in your spare bags. Honestly. They'll be welcomed with open arms. (I hear this is true in the USA as well as over here.) Food banks invariably struggle for bags, which, of course, is why I make the string ones. We do ask people to bring their own if possible, and in fact the Afghan refugees who needed the food bank while they were settling in were great because they all had shopping trolleys, which made sense for large families. But people don't usually think of that if they're coming in for the first time, and even if they're not they often forget. It's not surprising. If you're worried about where your next meal is coming from, you're not necessarily going to think about things like bags. So they're a really easy way to help well beyond the actual cash value of what you're donating.

Anyway. Yesterday, someone on one of my Discord craft servers was annoyed about something, and she wanted calming down, so she said to me, "Oh - tell me one of your silly cat stories to help me get my blood pressure down!" I was tempted to say I'd be very happy to average that out with her, but I think she's based in Finland so that wouldn't really work. So, instead, I obligingly told her a silly cat story.

This one is about Klinsmann. Klinsmann was a little ginger thugling who had only one virtue: he was punctiliously tidy in the litter tray. Other than that, he bullied other cats (except Minsky, who was un-bullyable; Klinsmann certainly did try to challenge his authority, but it never worked), got his kicks out of terrifying the largest dogs he could find, fought or raped everything that stayed put long enough, and generally made a perfect nuisance of himself. He did, at least, like humans. In fact, as it turned out, he liked humans so much that he collected them; I eventually found out he was being fed and petted at six (or possibly more) different houses. But, basically, the only sensible explanation I had for his general behaviour was that Greebo had somehow got into our world from the Discworld, begotten Klinsmann, and then departed whence he came. I'm sure the completely inoffensive footballer after whom he was named would have been horrified.

Well, my ex-husband had a guide dog. This one was his second, the German shepherd having sadly had to retire due to hip problems; this second one was a lab-retriever who apparently kept his brains in his harness - great guide dog, but completely goofy when he wasn't working. And even when he was working, he had a tendency to eat stuff he shouldn't. Guide dogs are trained not to scavenge, but you can't fully train that out of a lab mix. So, inevitably, every now and then he'd get a stomach upset; and if that happened at night, he couldn't get out, so there'd be a mess in the kitchen in the morning.

One night, this happened. Along came Klinsmann and saw the mess, and he thought: "Oh dear. Silly dog. He doesn't know you're supposed to bury it. I'd better help." And, in the finest tradition of the house, he proceeded to improvise with whatever was to hand.

That was one doormat we never used again...

Current Mood: sick

Before I became disabled, I was in the St John Ambulance; and since I lived in Sheffield at the time, that meant I was usually covering a home match at the weekend, either at Bramall Lane or Hillsborough, and quite often also midweek. I enjoyed that a good deal. It was nice to be able to help people (we were primarily there for the crowd, not the players, though we might occasionally get drafted in to help stretcher someone off); there was a lot of camaraderie; and there was football, of course, though the standard of that did rather vary. I used to joke that the football was very much like the sandwiches. At Bramall Lane you'd get big no-nonsense Yorkshire cobs, with a choice of maybe four plain fillings; they were definitely not posh, but they were good, hearty, fresh sandwiches. At Hillsborough, on the other hand, you'd be handed a silver platter (or at any rate a decent imitation) with a whole selection of effete little sandwiches cut into triangles and with, for some reason, the crusts cut off. They'd be presented on a bed of cress, or something of the kind, and they always tasted as if they'd been made at least two days before the match.

Very similarly, you tended to get plain but pretty solid football from United, whereas Wednesday always gave the impression that they were trying a bit too hard for their actual ability. And then they bought Paolo Di Canio.

That bloke was undeniably good. So was his little friend Benito Carbone, who arrived at around the same time; but Di Canio had real star quality. He'd run the length of the pitch with the ball apparently glued to his foot, then execute a beautiful pass to a team-mate... who, as often as not, would fluff it. And, after a while, you could see Di Canio getting frustrated. After all, since he was Italian, his body language tended to be in unusually large print. Not only was he a first-rate player in a mostly rather third-rate team, but also if the team did badly he'd pick up more than his share of the blame, because the fans tended to think he should have done better, given how good he was. Well, no; he was doing his level best. But if you're used to passing to team-mates who are around your own level of ability, and then all of a sudden you're dealing with team-mates who just aren't that great at reading the game, then you're up a bit of a gum tree.

I felt sorry for him. So I decided to give him a comic fictional sidekick; and this sidekick was Mac the Cat. Mac, as he put it himself in the first story, "was born in a wheelie bin jist off o' Sauchiehall Street", latched on to Di Canio while he was at Celtic, and decided to follow him to Wednesday because he was enjoying the high life. He was a lovable but entirely disreputable alley cat, who got into all kinds of entertaining scrapes which he narrated in the first person. These stories were all very short, no more than about 1000 words a pop, and they were published in one of the Wednesday fanzines. I have no idea if Di Canio ever saw them, but if he did I hope they made him smile. He needed it.

The whole business ended rather sadly. After a while, I found myself sitting on the touchline at Hillsborough thinking "that man has depression"; since I'd had it so often myself, I knew very well what it looked like. I shared my opinion with the fanzine editor, who had not had depression and therefore didn't take it seriously (also, I think, he wasn't that great at reading people). Di Canio struggled for a few more matches and finally bowed out, unable to handle it, at which point all the fans got very annoyed with him. I kept telling anyone who would listen that he had depression, but nobody listened until, perhaps six weeks after I'd originally noticed, the news emerged from the club that he'd been diagnosed with depression. He didn't last too long there after that. And that, I'm afraid, is what you get when you stick a brilliant player into a so-so team.

I can't remember exactly where he went after that - somewhere in Italy, I believe. But I like to think Mac the Cat stowed away in his luggage.

Current Mood: pensive

I slept the laptop overnight, and it's still working so far, albeit on borrowed time. The new one is due tomorrow, and I just have to pray it shows up before the taxi does.

Meanwhile, I think it's about time I introduced the fine fellow in the icon. His name was Minsky, he is no longer with us, but he was the most stunningly intelligent cat I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. When I lived in Sheffield, I had four cats; there was Minsky, there was his brother Chomsky (the most embarrassingly misnamed cat ever, since there were two cats, and there were two brains, and Minsky got them both), and then there was a pair of ginger siblings called Klinsmann and Heidi who were about eighteen months younger. They could not have been more different characters if I'd written them.

I also had a lodger. I didn't especially want a lodger, but I had this friend who inherited his mother's lingerie business and it went... er... it failed, shall we say. So he had to sell his house, and nobody else would take him in, so he ended up in my spare room. We will call him Bob the Lodger, which is not his name. He was not exactly easy to deal with for a whole slew of reasons, not the least of which was that he tended to have a lot of extremely fixed ideas. One of these ideas he had was that it was impossible for a cat to be intelligent (because he didn't especially like cats). In his mind, dogs could, but not cats. So when I kept telling him how bright Minsky was, he thought I was just imagining things, because he could be rather patronising like that. However, unfortunately for him, he voiced his opinions about cats in front of Minsky.

So Minsky decided he would show this silly human. One day, Bob the Lodger parked his car outside my house and was walking to the gate when Minsky spotted him. He ran into his path and angled his head as if to say "follow me, human"; and Bob thought grandly, "Ah, the cat wishes me to follow it. I shall humour it!" So he followed, and Minsky led him up a narrow lane between two rows of back gardens. In one of these gardens, there was a dog.

Minsky positioned himself where the dog could see him, so of course it set about barking frantically. Minsky then calmly moved along to the garden diagonally opposite, where there was another dog, and did the same thing. Next, he moved into the middle of the path where both dogs could see him (and therefore also each other), paused for a moment... and then shot off back to the entry to the lane, leaving these two dogs barking at each other like mad. Cats can't actually smirk, but Minsky apparently managed to give that impression; certainly he looked up at Bob as if to say, "See? I did that."

Bob was flabbergasted. He came in and told me the whole story. "I take it all back," he said. "That cat did forward planning!"

"I did tell you," I replied.

Cats can't laugh, either, but I'm quite sure Minsky was off somewhere doing whatever they do instead.