CAT IN A LAT

... and other feline tales.

Cats plague me. They greet me with vibrating purry meows when I get home, track me excitedly around the house when Im looking for my sandals, spray my motorcycle jacket cheerfully with nauseous civet musks and drop suddenly out of the ceiling onto my dining table when I’m entertaining important guests….

I look around and wonder to myself how I ever got so surrounded by this many smelly mewling mangy excuses for former Egyptian Gods.-the answer is I love my kids and they love playing with string and kittens. I also love kittens, I admit, and from garbage dumps and temple corners they all seem to be asking me to take them home. The problem is these kittens I bring in mutate within six months and for the next decade I’m hounded (no other word for it) by large, obnoxious feline predators calmly decimating the crockery and waving insouciant, in – your –face balls, or “cutlets” ,as the kids call them...

My cats embarrass me and stink up my house but keep me warm if ever I am cold or lonely(admittedly not often).However there’s good reason to believe I may be in future: I have had to reject at least three perfectly good marriage proposals (not easy to find for a middle aged divorced broad in Colombo-) due to the fact that I just knew/ or found out in the nick of time that the otherwise excellently moneyed and suave suitors hate cats and such marriage would probably end in catricide- and/or worse.

Cats hypnotize us. My worst cat is a half Persian Garfield –wannabe with a tail like a Christmas tree, named Patchy because she is black with tabby patches and has a yellow eye patch rather like a pirate in negative. She will not lower herself to the level of common cats who use the sand patch in the front yard. She uses our bathroom instead. I have Nokia videos of her pissing leisurely in the bathroom sink, which I always wanted to send to Atapattama but am not sure if they will clog bandwidth, or actually what their email address is.

Solid waste is quietly deposited in a corner behind my laundry bucket, and followed by a brief absence from the domestic scene. That is until she gets lonely and broody and wants to do the kneading thing.

I call it that from want of any more scientific term but what Im referring to is the slightly psychotic purring /kneading /claw digging Massage scenario that cats subject you to once they get you under them in the evenings. Evolution has mutated a whole totally weird group of sub-humans who actually tolerate being pinned under a heavy cat, and being pawed and kneaded firmly and rhythmically- and I admit to being one of them, perverted as it sounds. I do believe, thought scientists have not researched this, that they include a mildly hypnotic and decidedly sedative chemical in the substantial clouds of fur they release in the process otherwise why would I be under my cat for stretches of up to even 15 minutes? Some one tell me I’m not the only one that does this?