Are you nice? Does it hurt?

They say there are are a lot of different kinds of people in this world.  You’ve got your movers, your shakers, your couch potatoes.  Douches, heroes, thinkers, doers, readers, writers, leavers, cutters, people who like the taste of tinfoil, rappers, mappers, toe-tappers and, of course, the universally reviled hipsters.

But when it comes down to it, there are really only two types of people.

People who adopt stray cats, and people who don’t.

Now, if you know the real me, you’ll know that recently I’ve become one of the former.  Here’s a picture of her.  Her name’s Pipe.

Raggedy, isn't she?

She’s tiny, probably about a year old or so, and has been either mistreated, or been feral for quite a while as she has the attitude of a grumpy wood-chipper with a hair trigger.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

She latched onto my kids, specifically my son, on their way home from school about a month ago.  She was scrawny and pathetic, her coat moved of its own accord due to sheer volume of fleas and she didn’t really have the strength to do proper cat stuff like jumping or meowing loudly.

My daughter, because she’s a realist, told him that they wouldn’t be able keep the cat, because we had a cat and a dog already and also because ‘Mum & Dad are both heartless ogres.’ (and she’s right, I actually spend a lot of my time hiding behind boulders up on the moors with a stone hammer, feasting on the bone marrow of unsuspecting ramblers and the mountain rescue teams sent to find them.  It’s where we met, my wife and I. I looked at the sunlight bouncing off her knotted unibrow across a pile of sucked-dry corpses clothed only in that nice, brightly coloured, fabric that’s waterproof, but totally wicks your sweat away and thought ‘Dyamn Beeyatch! You fine!’)

He put down the kitten and started to cry, which seemingly set the kitten off and she panicked and allowed it to follow them home, across several dual-carriageways, over a level-crossing and through a ford, twice… I should probably note that this wasn’t their normal way home; I think she was trying to dissuade it.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

The kitten took up residence in the north formal shrubbery, between the real tennis courts and the helipad, for a day or so until we could purchase enough chemicals, pills and pastes to ensure that it didn’t pass on any dreaded lurgeys to anyone else.  And after a good couple of hours of combing, the mehsahib had dislodged, quite literally, a bin-liner full of fleas (which is now roving around the garden of its own accord, ready to chase any of us that try to escape by running away down our private beach) The worming cycle was completed, causing one unsuspecting guest to exclaim ‘Why have you fed your new cat spaghet… Oh, never mind!’ and be violently sick in my prize hydrangeas.

But not to worry, because everything’s fine now.  She’s putting weight on, OK – that’s mainly because she won’t let anyone else in the house eat, including us.  She will, and this is no word of a lie, put both her front paws on your dinner-plate and have it away with your jumbo battered-sausage before you can say, ‘You little bleeder! I’ll gut you like a fish!’

She does love ‘cuddles’ though, and will sit there and let you happily stroke her until you touch that quarter-inch square of skin that causes all four of her legs to independently swivel around and latch onto your wrist whilst she bites chunks out of the fleshy party of your thumb. (Location of this small patch of fur changes hourly, some might even say very much more often)

She’s also getting used to Morty, our occularly challenged Staffy… He can now come nearer than three feet to her before she devolves into a velociraptor and tries to tear out his eyes, which would of course, leave him much more challenged than usual.

Our other cat, Pop, can take her or leave her.  I mean, they growl, and hiss, and takes swipes at each other, but that’s pretty much standard cat behaviour isn’t it… There’s not actually been blood.

Well, there’s been blood, obviously, it’s mostly dog-blood though.  And it’s not all bad, because he now has a permanent noughts and crosses board on his muzzle that he’ll happily let you use for a biscuit.

What I’m trying to say is, erm… Well, I’m not hugely sure what I’m trying to say… If you could make something up about stray animals and being able to find enough excess affection for something that might well actually be the death of you by sitting at the top of the stairs silently in the dark, feel free to attribute it to me and imagine that it’s today’s message, OK?

Are you more a Ben or a Socrates?

I was listening to BBC Local Radio on the way into work this morning, as I so often do - It stops me staring dejectedly out of the side window of the car into the bleak rain, like someone in a black and white Jimmy Somerville video that's just discovered his true sexuality and is running away from his closed-minded parents to the teeming Metropolis of Manchester, to live a brand-new life that involves many fabulous cushions, ostrich feathers and quite a lot of bumming.

Anywho, there was a 'Pest Control Executive' on there this morning, warning us all about the danger of a new breed of Super-Rat that was resistant to all of the commonly used poisons.  But he said that we should not worry, we should not all start looking on the Internet for contractors who will charge us our life-savings and then some, to rat-proof our homes because there is a miracle spray that we can use which discourages them.

Have you ever seen a discouraged rat? Me neither, but I assume that it looks a bit like this:

Note the drooping whiskers, the general hang-dog expression and the look of rodenty resignation.  He's either just had a good, hard, discouragement, or he's about to get killed to death with a shovel.  My money's on the latter.

Now, I think I may have missed the bit where it described whether you actually had to spray the stuff on the rat itself, like fly-spray, or whether it was a prophylactic (And no, I don't mean that it magically caused a little rat condom to appear out of thin air - And even it if did, I would suggest that you use tweezers to put it on the rat, at arms length - They're bitey little buggers,  I mean that you sprayed your worldly goods and it made them less attractive to rats.)

At one point, the interviewer asked his guest, 'So, am I right in saying that if you have decking, you've probably got rats?' to which his reply was, and I can only imagine that he did that thing we all do at Halloween, where you use a torch under your chin to uplight your face 'No, actually, if you have a shed, you've probably got rats.' - I mean, he didn't actually go 'MuhahahahahHAHAhahHha!' but you could tell by his voice that he really wanted to.

He did try to console the general populace by saying that rats don't often come in through your catflap though.

Let's just take a minute there... If you'd asked me yesterday whether having a rat coming in my catflap was a real worry, I'd have laughed like... Erm... I don't know... Like Christiano Ronaldo looking at my payslip, with the general absurdity of the question.

Now I'm having trouble thinking about anything else, and I haven't even got a catflap!

Don't get me wrong though, I'm not totally anti-rat.  I mean, they have a bit of a bad name, what with the whole Leptospirosis / Weil's Disease thing. Not to mention the small matter of that whole outbreak of Bubonic Plague in the 17th Century killing somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people in England depending on who you believe (Yes, I know that technically that was down to the fleas on the rats rather than the actual rats, but that's like saying that you actually get shot by a bullet rather than a gun. Saying things like this within earshot of me will normally result in you getting a thorough 'Belming', or a half-hearted 'Chinny Reckon' behind your back if you're bigger than me).

I mean, I remember many happy nights in the 1970's sitting outside my parents house and watching some fairly large rats run across the rooftops from house to house, it was the highlight of our Saturday nights.  There are even people who keep them as pets you know? And they will tell you that they're amazing, clean, intelligent creatures (That's the rats, not the people who keep them, obviously. They're just weirdos.) who can be taught to do complex tasks and do not just urinate everywhere, chew through your electrical wiring and get caught in your hair... Hang on, thinking about it, that might be bats though, not rats - They're pretty much the same animal when you get down to it aren't they?

They're as tough as old boots too, they're radiation resistant to the point where, after the big button gets pressed and we all disappear in a bright, nuclear (or New-cue-lar, for our Colonial readers) flash it'll be pretty much just rats and cockroaches as far as the eye can see.  They are also quite easy to muck about with on a genetic level, scientists have bred whole species of rats that are predisposed to obesity and / or diabetes so that they can be used in researching treatments.

I suppose that, when you think about it, it's a tough old life being a rat - Very few sane people like you, you're hunted to almost extinction, chased, trapped and exterminated wherever you may be, experimented upon, if you manage to live past your first few weeks after being born (which 95% don't, believe it or not.) Your average life span in the wild is about two years. You're even thought of as a delicacy in parts of Africa, China and South-East Asia - But don't tell the tourists OK?

And... there's the ever present danger of Toxoplasmotic Zombification.  We've all heard of Toxoplasmosis right? That thing that pregnant women use as an excuse for getting someone else to empty their cat's litter-tray (And let's face it, it's usually the women who decide to get a cat, right? If the choice of house-pet was left up to the men, we'd all have eagles and crocodiles and badgers running around the house wouldn't we?) - The disease is caused by a little parasite, made of a single cell, called Toxoplasma Gondii (Pron. Gone-dee-eye) which only really grows and reproduces in cats.  However, the way it gets into the cat is pretty odd.  It's a well known fact that rats eat pretty much anything up to and including steel - One of those things is cat poop (ewww, right?) If the poop is infected with the parasite, it rages through the rat, to it's little rodent brain and flips a switch, the one that normally says 'You really, really, don't like cats, avoid places that smell like cats, specifically places that smell like cat urine' so that it now says 'You know what you feel like right about now? some cat urine, find things that smell like cat urine and hang about in their general vicinity.'

So, what do you often find near cat urine? That's right, a cat's backside, which is often connected to a cat's frontside, which, ninety nine times out of a hundred, comes complete with a head, mouth, teeth and the sunny disposition of a wet ninja with hemorrhoids.

The rat's lifespan is then measured in femtoseconds, there's a squeak, a bit of a scuffle and it dies, but not without infecting the cat (which I suppose is a bit of a cold comfort for it, all things considered) and the magical circle of life continues on.

Poor, poor Ratty

But on the other hand, and who, other than some of my teenage girlfriends, knew I had so many hands? A rat did kill one of Mrs Dandy's cats once.  Not through any heroic beastial fight for its life, not by giving it some nasty parasite, not by causing a grand piano to fall on it in a Tom & Jerry stylee.  But by choking it to death.  I opened the back door one morning and saw one of the most pathetic, but at the same time blindingly funny things that I have seen before or since.  There was the cat, quite dead and stiff, lying on its side on the patio, with this huge rat's back end sticking out of her mouth.

She was old and didn't have any teeth you see, so she couldn't chew...

She'd attempted to swallow it whole...

She failed...

We gave her a viking funeral, it's what she would have wanted.

Felis Catus

Which is not, as some of you may think, the spell Harry Potter uses when he needs a little furry companionship (leave it!) But the Latin name for the common housecat.

I was watching the news this morning before leaving for work and caught the end of a story, (well, I say story...) that the Cats Protection League have produced a guide to cat behaviour.  It seems that some people don't know what certain cat behaviours mean.

They include (and I kid you not)

If your cat is purring - It is contented.
If your cat is walking towards you with its tail up - It is greeting you.
If your cat is wiping its cheek on the furniture - It is scent marking its territory.

You would, in my opinion, be very special (In an 'I ride on a special bus with a five-point harness and specially flavoured windows for me to lick'  way) to not know all that already if you'd ever spent more than five minutes with a cat.

There was one thing that I thought 'Oh, that actually makes sense.' However, and it was:

If your cat lies down, stretches onto it's back and presents its belly to you, it's letting you know that it's so comfortable in your presence, that it feels like you are no longer a threat to it.

It does not mean 'Yay two-legs, tickle my belly.' as anyone who has ever tried this will testify... What you get if you do is the whole 'Did you think that I was a cat? Sorry, I usually describe myself as a furry bag full of razorblades' treatment and your arm looks like something out of Hellraiser.

There are some very odd things about cats which aren't so obvious though, especially to a dog person like myself - Although we do have a cat, called Pop, I have slowly trained her to become more dog-like so that I don't get so easily confused.

Here are a couple things to look out for:

Cats are attracted to people who don't like cats - This is perfectly true, cats will indeed be attracted to people who don't like them, do you know why?  If you watch a cat for any length of time, you'll notice that they do a kind of slow blink every once in a while and then turn away... Go and watch one now, You see, it did it... Unless it was asleep, then I'd have to question why you were watching a sleeping cat for twenty minutes.

Anywho, that slow blink is a gesture of approval, it's the equivalent of John Thomson's Fast Show character 'Louis Balfour, the host of Jazz Club' turning to the camera and saying 'Niiiice!'.  So, picture the scene, you're at someone's house, they've got a cat and you don't like cats, you don't even like to look at cats, you'd never think of even sniffing, licking or playing a melodic harmonica solo to a cat. so you close your eyes and look away.

Cat thinks 'Hey! a new friend, and he likes me enough to have learned my language!'  then it jumps on your lap, nestles down in your nether regions and slowly pumps its claws into any area where hair mysteriously started to grow during puberty.  Because you're polite and don't want to offend anyone, you just sit there like a swan... Unmoving on the outside, but screaming like a lunatic on the inside - That is Swans right?  Actually, thinking about it, I might have swans confused with something else - Not sure what, it'll come to me probably.

The headbutt is another cat thing that has a meaning, it's kind of a question.  Your cat is saying 'Are you mine? you used to smell like me, but you don't anymore.'  The initial 'butt' is the question, if you don't push the cat away, squirt it with one of those plant spray bottles or hit it with a telephone directory, then it will assume that you are its property and re-scent you with its cheek glands.

This is the cat marking you as its property, confirming your status as a chattel, something that the cat wholly owns, but allows to move around within certain boundaries, known only to the cat.

Our cat does this to our dog, often.  Here is a picture of our dog, trying to tear my throat out in a loving and caring manner.

He is not as kind to the cat... There is chasing, and a little light, occasional biting.

But when you get down to it (No, not with the cat you skanky pervs) cats are simple animals with simple drives for everything they do.  If you look into it deeply enough it tends to be because they despise you with all of their black little satanic hearts.  You are just there to service their every whim.

There, I said it cats are evil.  I think Terry Pratchett might have said it best: 'If cats looked like frogs, we'd realise what nasty, cruel little bas*ards they are'

And they are, if a child plays with its food, it means that they're making the word 'Bumholes' with their alphabetti spaghetti, wheras if a cat's playing with its food it means that it's biting the leg off a baby bird and then jabbing it with its claws while it flails spastically about until one of its eyes pops out. (And yes, I have given myself extra points for using the word 'spastically' correctly and in context)

You can, and I have seen this happen to Mrs Dandy, feed a cat a plump, juicy prawn... Which it will proceed to eat, wash itself all over and then hunt you down and kick your ass by jumping from the ceiling fan, grabbing onto your ears with it's front paws and slicing your face open like an over-ripe beef tomato with its hind ones.

There is anecdotal evidence that they smother babies in their cots. According to Japanese sailors, they can bewitch you with their tails (I guess this really depends on how long you've been at sea). It was a commonly held belief that black cats are an incarnation of the Devil, which is a little racist, but I applaud the basic sentiment. and in the 9th Century, King Henry the First of Saxony was so seduced by a cat (History does not record whether he'd ever sailed on a Japanese boat) that he made it illegal to kill cats, a crime which carried a fine of sixty bushels of corn.  If that isn't evidence of witchcraft then I don't know what is.

This is our cat, Pop

She look like a perfectly normal, fuzzy little animal, until you realise... That her eyes don't have any pupils...

I leave you with a bit of ugly Feline doggerel.

There once was two cats of Kilkenny,
And each thought there was one cat too many.
So they quarreled and fought
and they scratched and they bit
Until there was only their nail,
and the tips of their tails
Instead of two cats, there weren't any.

And I think that sums it all up perfectly - Cats? Just say no.

That wasn't the year that was.

Well, I suppose - As it's the last day of 2012, I should do some sort of hoitsy-toitsy review of the year... High points, low points, mid points - What trended on Twitter, how many people found the Blog interesting, how much my personal Facebook index flopped around like a halibut in a Zumba class.

But I'm not going to, I have a memory like a sieve and the few things that I can remember actually happening, I can't remember when it happened or to who and with what.

I might make some stuff up I suppose - Hey, that might work - In fact, that's what I'm going to do! A month by month guide to things that didn't happen in the last year.


January.

An early news report from Khazakstan informed us that civilian contractors were transporting a Sperm Whale by air, using one of those huge Russian sky-hook style helicopters and an intricate system of thin straps and pullies - It turns out that the whole thing had been organised by an Italian company and the instructions had been translated from Italian to Khazakstani by the same Icelandic chap from the Dutch East Indies who writes out the instructions for Ikea. Within minutes of taking off, the poor cetacean suffered terminal garroting and fell into six neat pieces. Luckily, local villagers were able to follow some supplementary instructions, and fashion the remains into three free-standing bookcases and a very avant-garde table-lamp.

February.

Shoppers in Sheffield, UK, were startled to find that due to an issue with autocorrect at a local advertising agency, a launch event for the BluRay release of the X-Men origin film 'Wolverine' had become a little more feral than expected. Where the original instruction had been 'Make sure the guy in the Wolverine suit gets to Meadowhall by 09:00' - It appeared on the Talent-Wrangler's iPhone as 'Make sure you release 900 live Wolverines in Meadowhall - Guy'. In the ensuing chaos, four people were bitten to death - two seriously, one by a policeman.

March.

March will be remembered, more than anything, for the temporary repealing of the laws of conservation of momentum by the US Senate. The reason that this was a temporary change was that not much research had been done beforehand and no-one realised that this would make any form of 'Coasting' impossible - This alienated one of the largest US demographics - i.e. The 15-35 year old, itinerant, disallusioned skateboarding company director - And Google threatened to launch a class-action suit due to lost productivity at its HQ, as no-one was able to use the swings and slides.

April.

Apple fanboys were shocked to learn that they had been taken in by a complex ruse perpetrated by Samsung. An email had been sent to anyone with an @overpricedtoy.com or @moremoneythansense.org email address, offering them the chance to take part in the new Beta Test of the printable iPhone 5. The 'dupes' queued for hours at their own home printers, after being told that the device would be launched at 00:00 on April 31st, a completely new day, that would only exist for the Apple glitterati - At 11:59 on the 30th, a print job was generated that printed out a picture of a house-brick with a smiley-face painted on it by a duck. The joke was on Samsung however, as this proved to have slightly greater functionality than the standard iPhone 5.

May.

Plans were unveiled by NASA to recreate the original Starship Enterprise in Earth orbit. The $60 Billion dollar project stalled however, as not enough people could be found who were willing to be boarded into the walls for the entire five-year mission and operate the sliding doors whilst making the 'Shhhht' noise.

June.

June played host to the hottest day ever recorded in the history of the known universe. It occured when an office party prank at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland went horribly wrong. A group of scientists, bored with making drinks that changed colour indicating the arousal level of the drinker, decide to see what would happen if you accelerated a shish-tikka-donner mixed kebab (with extra salad) to lightspeed. The effect was devastating, but thankfully shortlived. As the chilli sauce reached 299,792,459 m/s its quantum state changed to anti-chilli and a small, but quite fragrant sun was instantly created - raising the local temperature for Western Europe to approximately 74.2 bajillion degrees.

July.

On the 8th. Due to an unusual weather pattern, 95% of the world's remaining 17,600 White Rhino performed The Timewarp - from Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror show. The quake produced when they all initially 'Jumped to the left' caused massive flooding in Botswana and large cracks to appear on the peak of Kilimanjaro - It's not known why the remaining 5% didn't join in, but the prevailing research shows that they were probably Mama-Mia fans.

August.

August shall be remembered for the temporary cessation of all sporting activity on the UK mainland - Absolutely nothing competetive happened. TV programming that would normally have been sport related was replaced by re-runs of Come Dine With Me. Even conkers was outlawed. Anyone caught flouting this new ruling was taken to Sebastian Coe's underground hideout and birched ruthlessly until they'd learned their lesson.

September.

Danish inventor Myrtryk Von Hunboltzon premiered his world-beating new invention - The Cat-a-porter, a method of instantly transmitting cats from place to place globally. Initial trials proved effective as cats of all sizes, colours and personalities were transmitted around the world. Unfortunately, it all turned out to be a massive con, as the cat that was being 'transported' was in fact, being minced by hidden equipment and not transported at all. All Von Hunboltzon had actually invented was a device for spontaneously creating cats out of thin air.

October.

The world of Fortean Research gained another martyr in early October as Brigadier Hawksworth McTavish-Silverplib (Retd.) completed his two year stalk-fest of the Beast of Bodmin in spectacular fashion. The Brigadier, known to local Beastarians as 'Mad Dangler McTavish' due to his habit of hunting the beast a Magic-tree car air freshener tied to his genatalia to mask his scent, was believed to have cornered the animal in a disused barn. His mangled remains were discoved in various places scattered around Cornwall. He is survived by an English Springer Spaniel called Leonard.

November.

Almost nothing of any note happened in November, the tides continued in their sploshey up-down motion, birds flew south, cheese matured and the complex system of checkes and balances that we call life continued unabated. Right up until the point where every man, woman and child who lived through the 1980's was discovered to have been some kind of pedophile or assorted rapist, sheep worrier or sodomiser. Apart from Bruce Forsythe, he was outed as a vampire and ritually staked by Tess Daley on the set of 'Strictly Come Dancing'

December.

Hollywood news that peaked in December was centered around the revelation that Kristen Stewart, 'Star' of the Twilight films and Snow White and the Huntsman, did not actually exist. She was outed as a completely digital construct by her ex-partner Cedric Pattinson. When questioned by a representative of the Jo McCarthy Rights for Real Humans group, Pattinson admitted that he thought it strange that Stewart dissapeared every time there was a power outage at their shared apartment in East Compton, LA. However he thought that this may have been due to her childhood spent in California. It was also discovered that it was during one of these power outages that her facial expression subroutine had been deleted.


Well, there you go, a month by month list of things that didn't happen in 2012 - I hope to continue making youse guys shake your heads in mild disbelief in the new year.

Let me leave you with a quote from my good friend Pedro Vader that I think sums this year up.

'If you stick your hand right inside, and I sort of make a sawing motion like this, do you think you can feel it?'

Go-Kat Diet [Edited Meme]

Originally posted on Facebook 24/10/12

So, as the few of you that have met my cat will attest to - She has a pretty loud meow. We ran out of food a couple of days ago and she just wouldn't shut up. Fearing for my sanity (and not being able to lock her in the soundproof cupboard) I took a trip to Asda. (Walmart)

I walked up and down the aisles, but couldn't think of anything else that I actually needed - So all I got was one of the giant bags of Go-Kat, put it in the trolley and walked to the checkout.

It was pretty busy, and there were a couple of people in the queue behind me. After a few minutes I felt a tap on my shoulder, turned around, and the woman behind me said 'Snap! Do you have a cat too?'

I looked at her trolley, noticed that she had the same brand of catfood in there, adjusted my face to 'really serious' and replied 'No, I'm going to try the Go-Kat diet again, even though I ended up in hospital last time!'
'Diet?' She asked
'Yeah, it's a complete food, so you just put a load of the biscuits in each of your pockets and eat some whenever you're hungry'
'Oh! OK, are they poisonous to humans though?' She asked, in a very concerned voice, 'Is that why you ended up in hospital?'
'No,' I replied, 'I had this sudden urge to defecate in my next door neighbour's garden, and he ran me over with his lawn-mower'