The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (23 page)

The narcissistic tabby one and
the small black and white one who looks like a living cartoon aren’t interested in pissing on the curtains, but they do love to bounce all over the bed when their paws are muddy. Also, the narcissistic tabby one really likes to meow his own name and the word ‘HELLO!’ at 3 a.m. You don’t want that in the same room as you. Believe me.

2. There is a slight problem with the bedroom door. Even though it’s heavy, it doesn’t quite click shut properly, which means that the mouthy black one, who is as strong and sinewy as a monitor lizard, can push it open. My method for stopping this from happening used to be to place a very old, large, coverless cushion behind the door, but I don’t do that any more, because the old intellectual black one did something unspeakable to it. Also, don’t even think about using that sausage-dog-shaped 1970s draught excluder. It’s useless. I don’t know why I bought it really. I suppose when you’re hung over and you’re out shopping with friends, stuff like that can seem like a good idea, but you often regret it. Try using one of the massive heavy cushions off the sofa instead.

Also, if you’re passing the big secondhand shop on Magdalen Street in Norwich, maybe you could drop the sausage-dog draught excluder in there for me? Ask for Eric. He’s the one with the limp who looks like he used to be in The Hollies.

3. If the mouthy black one is feeling particularly
determined, he can still push the door open, even if one of the massive heavy cushions from the sofa is behind it, especially on nights when he’s waded through the fen up the road and wants somewhere soft to wipe his paws. As he does so, he’ll normally make a very loud sweary noise, a bit like a disgruntled teenager, but also slightly like an angry pterodactyl. Don’t worry, though: this only happens twice a week on average, and it’s manageable. You just have to keep one eye constantly open and be ready to leap out of bed and intercept him before he spreads peaty jet-black muck all over the duvet and my original 1970s Superman pillowcase.

4. Sometimes, when the mouthy black one breaks in and you’re trying to intercept him, the small black and white one who looks like a living cartoon will nip in after him and scurry under the bed. Try not to concern yourself too much with her. She’s very hard to catch and the worst she’ll do is attack your feet in the night or burrow into your stomach as if it contains a treat that, with enough probing, she thinks she will be able to find and eat. Most probably she’ll just head into the bathroom next door and fall asleep on the folded towels. Make sure that before using it you remember to wash the towel she’s slept on, though – and perhaps the one underneath it, just for insurance. When you
carry the towel to the washing machine, she will probably follow you, with a slightly unnerving, eager look on her face.

5. The old intellectual black one does sometimes have night terrors. I probably should have mentioned that earlier. Please don’t be alarmed by these. They normally involve him walking around the kitchen making a weird wobbly-lipped noise which sounds like he has seen the ghost of a deceased lover or is questioning the very nature of existence. I probably make that sound worse than it is. The narcissistic tabby one, for example, is far, far louder when he walks around meowing his own name or ticking cat jobs off a small invisible cat clipboard. The old intellectual black one won’t trouble you for long – maybe forty-five minutes at the most. Pop in there and give him a cuddle if possible. He’s used to that, and he might feel even more alone and scared without it.

6. Of course, while you’re on a separate floor of the house, comforting the intellectual black one, there’s also the possibility that the mouthy black one will take advantage of your absence and break into the bedroom, followed by the small black and white one who looks like a living cartoon, and the narcissistic tabby one, who does, I should probably say, have
a small problem with bringing slugs in on his back at the present time. If so, you can’t be blamed, and maybe it will be best to abandon the bedroom altogether. You don’t want to be waking up later with bits of soil or slugs between your toes, and, in the words of a couple of my friends who have stayed over recently, ‘That sofa bed is almost as comfortable as some real beds!’ Don’t worry. It’s no big deal. Have a fantastic stay and we’ll see you in just over three weeks!

P.S. If you visit the farm museum up the road, make sure you get some fudge from the shop. It’s excellent.

Taking into account that the seventies
was such a loud decade, in terms of music and politics and fashion, there’s something surprisingly
quiet
about the generation born during it. People born in the seventies – or ‘Generation X’, as we’re sometimes called, when it’s convenient – have neither the massive strength in numbers nor the cultural explosion of the baby boomers to define them. Nor do we have the ‘in your face’ element of Generation Y. Yet what comes after Generation X – what every Generation X-er has to deal with, and will almost certainly have something to say about, if you speak to them at any length – is arguably the most significant generation gap of the last century: that between people who grew up with the Internet, and people who didn’t.

Because I was born in 1975, it means I am one of the last group of people able
to remember the time when men and women would go on nights out without any thought of taking photos of one another, when an answerphone was largely considered a luxury that only posh people had, when arranging to meet someone meant trusting that they’d be there at the time you’d agreed upon and waiting a while then going back home if they weren’t, when pornography was something mainly found high on a newsagent’s shelf or torn up and strewn, inexplicably, across the countryside not far from my house. It also means I can remember a time when being a cat lover was very different.

Cats have been all over the Internet for many years. This makes total sense, as they seem to spend half their lives trying to stand and sit on the keyboards of our laptops. For a cat lover, though, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. There’s the wonder of having access to innumerable funny cat videos and being able to share your love of cats with other ailurophiles around the world. At its best, it can be very creative – like a more sophisticated version of ancient Egypt, with LOLcats and viral potentiality instead of hieroglyphs. (And who knows? All history is distortion. Maybe the Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats but just liked to share stupid pictures of them, and stuff got exaggerated over time?)

Yet, at the same time, the sheer overkill of cat-related memes – and, for all the great cat-related content, there is no doubt that a huge amount of it is mawkish, repetitive, platitudinous rubbish – has turned ‘cat’ into a dirty word for many Internet users: something lowbrow that gets in the way of the
real issues of social networking, such as telling people what you had for breakfast, upping the ad revenue of the
Daily Mail
by posting outraged links to its articles, or arguing with a complete stranger about whether or not you tweet too much. Cats, no doubt, would be disgusted at being branded as lowbrow. They’d also surely be very disheartened about the sad knock-on effect of cat meme overkill, which is the fact that – especially if you’re female – a love of cats, and a domestic set-up where several of them are present, has to many people become synonymous with the state of having no life, and few romantic prospects.