by Tom Cox
How to Medicate an
Intellectually Challenged
Cat: Instructions
for Housesitters
1. Clear space on kitchen work surface. Scan surface for sharp or burning objects, keeping in mind The Time Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend Set Fire To His Tail By Walking Too Close To A Candle. Arrange food dishes and remove two pills from jar priced erroneously and unfairly excitingly on Internet at ‘50p for 30!’ (actual price: 50p each).
2. Call cats, using special patented Tomwhistle.
3. Place pouches of meaty slop on kitchen counter, carefully avoiding three-year-old packets of Felix As Good as it Looks (aka As Bad as it Smells) at rear of food drawer. Dispense meaty slop.
4. Throw Intellectually Challenged Cat Resembling TV Food Enthusiast Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall off kitchen counter with one hand, while using other hand to carefully place two pink pills inside one dish of meaty slop. If possible, try to insert pills into meaty chunks themselves, rather than just into jelly. While doing this, try not to dwell overly on substance concerned. Think of it this way: yes, it smells, but if you really thought about an egg or some milk, you probably wouldn’t want to go near that either.
5. Wash hands, thoroughly.
6. Dive across kitchen, just in time to remove face of Intellectually Challenged Cat Resembling TV Food Enthusiast Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall from pilled dish of meaty slop.
7. While looking the other way and pretending to be occupied, quickly swoop down and pick up Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend. Pick up pilled dish of meaty slop, and place cat and slop in adjacent room.
8. Remove face of Intellectually Challenged Cat Resembling TV Food Enthusiast Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall from bottom of Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend, and close door, firmly.
9. Feed remaining five cats. For full instructions on feeding, refer to ‘How to Feed Six Sodding Cats: Instructions for Housesitters’ (Under the Paw, Simon & Schuster, 2008).
10. Open door of adjacent room, and release Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend back into kitchen. Collect leftover pills from Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend’s now otherwise empty bowl, and place on kitchen counter.
11. Chase Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend downstairs, maintaining enough speed not to lose sight of Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend, but not so much speed that Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend runs out of cat flap in fear.
12. Carefully circle Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend, feigning great interest in object in entirely opposite direction from Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend.
13. At the count of three (please note: counting should be done purely in own head), dive at Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend.
14. Pick self up off floor, ignoring disdainful looks of suddenly appearing Sensitive Artistic Secret Warlord Cat. Sit down in Formerly Sumptuously Restored 1970s Armchair Now Permanently Jealously Overseen By Attention Seeking Grey Dwarf Cat. Relax and clear mind of feline-related thoughts, being sure to avail self of film collection on adjacent shelf. Please note: for purposes of continued mind-clearing, best to avoid The Complete Bagpuss DVD.
15. Wait ten minutes, then return upstairs. Call cats, using special patented Tomwhistle.
16. Throw Intellectually Challenged Cat Resembling TV Food Enthusiast Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall off kitchen counter.
17. Gingerly creep downstairs, gently calling Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend.
18. Pick Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend’s claw out of back, having not realised that, while you were heading down stairs, looking for Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend, Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend was above you, playing a game of ‘Prison’ (aka ‘Use Bars Of Balustrade As Protection While Violently Batting Soft Parts Of Passing Unsuspecting Humans’).
19. Open fridge, and retrieve Tesco Finest Honey Roast Ham from special minus-one-degree compartment infridge. Place on kitchen counter.
20. Open cat food drawer, and keep Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend’s interest by rustling sachet of meaty slop.
21. Take Tesco Finest Honey Roast Ham to pills. Realise ‘pills’ is now in fact ‘pill’.
22. Pick up Intellectually Challenged Cat Resembling TV Food Enthusiast Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and notice telltale pink smear around mouth of Intellectually Challenged Cat Resembling TV Food Enthusiast Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
23. Wash hands, thoroughly.
24. Secrete remaining pill inside sheet of Tesco Finest Honey Roast Ham, creating pill sandwich. Step boldly towards Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend and sweep Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend off floor, then feed pill sandwich to Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend.
25. Witness small, girlish meow, and realise that, in attempting to follow ‘How to Feed Six Sodding Cats’ instructions, one cat, Prettyboy Tabby Cat, was omitted from melee.
26. Place Prettyboy Tabby Cat on Strange Plastic Grandma Stool, with dish of meaty slop.
27. Watch Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend begin to convulse in corner of room.
28. Grab kitchen roll and dive, belatedly, in direction of Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend.
29. Cautiously examine effluence of Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend, finding no pink pill.
30. Double-bag effluence of Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend and place in dustbin.
31. Sigh, and wash hands, thoroughly. Spot pink pill – now quarter of former size – stuck to trouser leg.
32. Repair to fridge, retrieve butter, and firmly cut off thumb-sized knob. Place pill inside knob.
33. Repair to bathroom, and grab clean towel from rack.
34. Sweep Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend off floor, harshly curtailing second game of ‘Prison’ in ten minutes, and swaddle Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend in towel.
35. Insert buttered pill between Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend’s mouth, and gently but firmly clamp shut.
36. Wait ninety seconds, gently rubbing throat of Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend.
37. Watch as pink and yellow liquid oozes from mouth of Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend.
38. Place Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend on floor.
39. Open fridge, retrieving remainder of Tesco Finest Honey Roast Ham, chicken curry leftovers, spare ribs and kabano sausages (six pack). Open all packaging, and place on floor.
40. Pick up coat and bag. Wipe hands on corduroy jacket belonging to male owner of Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend.
41. Exit house, posting spare keys through letterbox.
42. Receive phone call from owners of Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend. Answer in high-pitched voice of elderly lady called Joan, from Fife, and profess ignorance of any subject mentioned. When subject of cats comes up, begin to talk about son’s upcoming rowing final. Please note: if actually called Joan, elderly, with rowing champion son, and from Fi
fe in real life, choose different identity.
43. Call phone company and request new numbers.
44. Write note to self on hand: ‘Locksmith?’
45. Pour large glass of wine, and run bath.
46. Rummage in bottom of bag, and find bath bomb, bought from popular natural cosmetic company and summarily forgotten about two weeks previously.
47. Gently crumble and add bath bomb to warm, flowing water, savouring aroma.
48. Light candle.
49. Relax into suds, feeling physically and spiritually cleansed, and looking boldly towards future.
Remember You’re a Womble
It is quite possible that, during the 1980s, there was not another man in Britain more worried about the possibility of his house exploding than my dad. Setting off from Nottinghamshire for our annual summer holiday, the routine would always be the same. We’d be about ten miles down the M1, the car weighed down with camping gear and back issues of the Beano, when he would turn to my mum, worry etched across his face. ‘AH SAY, WE DID SWITCH THE HOB OFF, JO, DIDN’T WE?’ he’d ask.
My mum would do her best to offer reassurance, but her response would essentially be immaterial. Sometimes we’d manage to get as far as Leicester Forest East service station while the two of them tried to convince themselves that flames were not licking their way malevolently up their woodchip, but with my dad’s question, the seed of doubt had been irrevocably planted, and we would eventually, inevitably, turn back. Upon arriving home, of course, my parents would find that the hob was not on at all, though this would not prevent the following thing happening next year, and the year after that (the purchase of a family coffee machine in 1993 only complicated matters further).
I used to sigh at such neurotic behaviour back then, but the older I get, the worse I find I get at leaving the house. The main difference is that when I return through the front door to check that I haven’t, for some unfathomable reason, suddenly, without noticing, developed a penchant for candles and left one burning in the living room, I am not worrying primarily about losing my material possessions; I am worrying about losing my cats.
I would like to think that, were my house to begin to fill with smoke, the furry degenerates I live with would have the wherewithal to quickly get out of one of their two cat flaps, but how can I know that for certain? A couple of them aren’t even bright enough to remember to put their tongues back in their mouths after they’ve finished licking themselves. Others can’t get through a day without getting one of their legs trapped in their collar, flicking one of those cat flaps into a permanently locked position, or scalding themselves by experimentally placing their front paws on an electric heater. Do these animals really sound wily enough to distinguish ‘everyday warmth’ from ‘potentially life-threatening blaze’? And what if it happened to be snowing when the house caught fire? Faced with the choice between that horrible cold white stuff and the gentle, sparky simmer of an overfed multi-socket adaptor, I sense that the decision would be a no-brainer, in more ways than one.
Just before Christmas 2008, I read a news report about six Buckinghamshire felines being revived after a house fire. It was simultaneously sad and uplifting, and resulted in one of the sweetest cat photographs of the year, depicting a fireman fitting a ginger and white moggy with a baby-sized oxygen mask. However, it also suggested that the first instinct of a cat, when faced with a room full of smoke, might not be to evacuate the premises, but simply to hide.
It’s not just the image of a neglected flame that lights the touchpaper of my travelling imagination. Often, having already returned to the house once to confirm that Pablo or Janet have not accidentally switched the gas hob on with their tails, I’ve been known to unlock the door one more time, just on the off chance that, while going about my daily business, I have left the sink running, with the plug in, and a live socket has been clandestinely fitted next to it without my knowledge.
When Dee and I went on a rare holiday, to Somerset, in 2007, it was not a conflagration that I became convinced we had left behind us, but a forlorn Bootsy, trapped behind the radiator cover in the entrance hall. On one hand, this was a perfectly valid concern: Bootsy, being so minuscule, had a habit at that point of somehow slithering underneath the wooden radiator cover in question, then not being able to get out, and the entrance hall was the hottest room in the house by some distance – especially in June.
On the other hand, it was absurd to imagine that, even if Bootsy had ventured into the entrance hall, she’d not scampered back into the main part of the house as I loaded the back seat of the car with heavy bags, and traffic whizzed by on the road beyond. Even if she had got stuck, it was also hard to picture a scene in which a cat as vocal as her would not let us know at the earliest opportunity, but I somehow managed to conjure up the necessary imaginative powers to do so. From the moment we left the M25, I drove Dee towards Swindon, and also towards distraction, by repeatedly replaying my final moves in leaving the house, until I became convinced that at that very moment Bootsy’s tiny, grey, dehydrated form was croaking fruitlessly for help. Had we not happened to be paying a lady called Sarah to do some garden maintenance for us on the day in question, and been able to telephone her to ask her to look through the letterbox and confirm the entrance hall was feline-free, I have no doubt that I would have turned the car around and added another four hundred miles to our trip with little compunction.
I have not really had a break long enough to merit the word ‘holiday’ since then. On top of my reluctance to ask friends or neighbours to feed my cats and my belief that if I put my cats in a cattery they would hold a grudge against me forever, there is an additional problem: in early 2009, Janet was diagnosed with an overactive thyroid gland.
I’ve tried various methods of administering the two small pink pills that Janet must be given to keep his thyroid steady. These have included The Towel Wrap, The Throat Rub, The Pâté Treat, and The Pea Shooter. Perhaps the most successful method has been burying the pills in the trays of terrine-style cat food that can be found in some shops. This is not infallible, though. And while I have some very good friends I feel I can count on in times of trouble, I have to ask myself the question: can you ever really know a person well enough to ask them to spend a week dipping their fingers inside mechanically recovered meat?
The Bear and Janet are now officially old cats, but their aging processes have varied markedly. When I first met The Bear, he was already a wizened survivor, an ornery old gentleman of strange, powerful dignity. If he vanished for a few days, you could guarantee he would return with some new ailment or battle scar. Yet, since then, he has become visibly younger.
Certainly, his walk does not speak of youthful vigour: it’s the paranoid scuttle of a cat who believes he has a hellhound – or at least a bored Shipley – on his tail. But his face and demeanour actually seem to be making a bid for the youth he never quite had. His eyes have always looked directly at me in a manner matched by no other cat, but their stare has got brighter, and his fur – at least in the period when he’s not due another jab for his flea allergy – correspondingly plusher. He’s sometimes mistaken for Shipley – no doubt much to his chagrin – by those who don’t know him well, but his features are far more exotic: strangely foxlike, but also unignorably evocative of the word ‘snufflepig’.
At fifteen, The Bear has still never, to the best of my knowledge, killed another living creature, but he’s become more playful than ever. When he bats and chews one of his many extra-strength catnip cigars, he takes periodic, nervous looks over his shoulder, as if aware that what he is doing is fundamentally beneath him, and keen that other, intellectually inferior cats do not catch him indulging in such lowbrow pursuits. He still mostly keeps himself to himself, and knows all the best hiding places, but is newly prone to isolated moments of exhibitionism. Not long after I purchased the cats a new toy on which to sharpen their claws, the overexcitably named Kitty Boutique Disco Pole, I found him perched, with perfect balance, o
n top of the central podium: his own version of the Fourth Plinth, a place above all the riff-raff where he could cogitate over the meaning of life. When guests are over at the house, he will emerge more frequently than he once might have, and walk determinedly, with his signature wobble, towards the most intense or melancholic of them, his eyes never leaving theirs.
Old age has also brought a love interest for The Bear, in the form of Biscuit, the aging, plump ginger lady cat that lives next door. I’m assured by my neighbours, Deborah and David, that their Last of the Summer Wine romance does not extend much further than over-the-fence chats, longing looks through Deborah and David’s kitchen window (The Bear’s) and flirtatiously grumpy rebukes (Biscuit’s), but after a couple of years, the flame shows no sign of blowing out.
This is all in sharp contrast to Janet, who, in his youth, was always a hulking good-time cat, but, by 2008, had become more prone to crotchety eccentricities, and was visibly fading as a physical specimen. Right from the moment that the young Shipley had first set eyes on him, the two of them had always made time for at least one wrestle per day. This was strictly play fighting, in which Janet’s supremacy was challenged but never quite questioned, a far different contact sport to Ralph’s tussles with Pablo. Occasionally, heads bounced against furniture and chunks of fur flew, but nobody ended up growling and hissing in a corner. But now when Shipley instigated an encounter, I noticed Janet slinking away, flustered, and retreating behind a chair or table, where he could be found panting nervously. Simultaneously, his appetite became greater, and his habit of tripping me up on the stairs or batting me through the bars of the balustrade more frequent. He had long been perfecting a special ‘fart hiss’ during times of trouble. In the past this had caused confusion as to its point of origin, but as it became more vehement and heartfelt, there was no doubt which orifice it was emerging from.
