 | Nik Rawlinson is the editor of MacUser magazine. He lives in the UK, has three chickens and a cat, grows his own fruit and vegetables, brews his own beer and wine and uses his bike ten times more often than his car. Check out his professional portfolio. |
Oscar loves to help with wrapping presents. Particularly if there are bows and ribbons involved. He particularly likes sitting on the paper when you’re trying to fold it around a present.
Hadn’t occurred to me that he might stand for as much as this cat does, though.
Last night, well gone midnight, when the champagne had been drunk and the new year well rung in, Oscar re-enacted the lead from Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in the lounge.
It must be quite idyllic being a cat. After a whole Sunday spent sleeping under the Japanese tree a couple of weeks ago, he spent this Sunday flopping about in a deck chair.
It’s a life of luxury.
…spent Sunday doing this:
…and this:
Summer at last.
Wow – that fortnight went in a flash. And now I’m back to work. Well, riding back to work, to be precise. I’m on the train, which is usually rammed, and I have three whole carriages to myself. Very strange. It’s even running on time.
So, Christmas and New Year. Christmas was the usual carnival of over-eating and feeling very fat in return. Rich and I were both getting over colds on the day itself, and I popped cough sweets as fast as everyone else did turkey. An excellent day, though: the morning spent sitting around drinking gin and eating olives; the afternoon spent playing games and quizzes. No TV apart from the news and the Queen, looking from the smock she was wearing like she was half way through painting the Sandringham ceilings.
Boxing day, we hot-footed it home to be greeted by a miowy cat and three very excited chickens who had got a taste for being out all night. They’ve been almost uncontrollable ever since and now when we try and close their door at night they block it. Gerry is particularly adept – she put a foot on the runner the other night and actually held it back as I tried to pull it across. The night after, she bit me.
Anyhow, boxing day we were entertaining Bart, Sue and dad. We’d already cooked a lasagne as big as a bed and frozen it two days before, so baked that for lunch. Cheese and port then more games ensued and then we skipped dinner on account of our spacehopper waistlines.
By the start of this week, when everyone had gone home and things had calmed down again we were starting to crave fresh air, so we headed out to Thorndon Park where I haven’t been in a decade, most likely, but was a monthly weekend rendezvous for years as a kid. This time of year, of course, most of the leaves are off the trees, so it’s not nearly as beautiful as it is when the canopy is full and it feels like a big, dense forest.
No matter: we were there for geocaching, and the terracotta carpet we kicked through was as beautiful as anything you could hope for in winter. It was a successful outing – we found three caches, and although there was little in the way of treasure worth having, it made for a fun afternoon, and a welcome break in the cake eating.
We spent new year as we did last year – on a rug in the lounge with a bottle of champagne, a baguette, some camembert hot from the oven and the cat. Not long after midnight he started yowling that we should come to bed. By half past he was striding purposefully in and out of the room looking back over his shoulders. By 01h he was pawing at our jumpers and by 02h he had given up and flopped down on the rug on his side, no longer pulling up the edges in the search for monsters that might lurk beneath. We crept up at 02h30, leaving him where he was.
The cat wants to go to bed. Rich wants to watch Olivia Newton John.
It’s become a bit of a tradition that we should start the new year with a long walk, and so next afternoon – yesterday – we drove out to Highwood to find deer. There’s a circular route out there through the woods that we’ve walked many times before, and always seen one or two of them running through the trees. This time we hit jackpot and counted 46. We stepped out from the treeline and no more than 10 metres away the whole pack (herd / family / group / flock?) bounced across the field, almost silent as their feet sunk into the soft ground, squashing the sprouting crops into the mud.
An excellent start to the year.
And then today it was work. First day back, first day on a new season ticket, and a deserted train to boot. If things carry on like this, it could be a good year indeed.
Well that’s one question answered: who’s the better mouser.
Me.
Laying in bed this morning, cat fed, tea drunk, listening to the howling wind outside, the cat flap goes and in he trots.
Mnggwwwh.
It sounded like he had his mouth full. Mnggwwwh.
He trotted up the stairs and faffed around for a bit at the bottom of the bed, then the mnggwwwh turned into a proper miow. Strange – it didn’t sound like his mouth was full any more.
Because of course it wasn’t. Now he was blatting the floor with a flat heavy paw as he chased a live mouse around the room. The mouse ran around the bed rather than under it (we’d never have found it under there) and along the landing, with the cat in hot pursuit. It turned into the study and ran under the boxes and cables, which the cat proceeded to knot up with his flying paws as he pursued the little rodent.
Miow miow miow miow.
Squeak squeak squeak.
Then it became a bit of a contest between me and the cat: who could pick it up first. I’m proud to say I won, but not before dismantling most of the study, lifting furniture out onto the landing, shifting piles of papers and dragging yards of cable out of the way.
The poor little thing, when I got it, sat shivering in my hands – probably from the shock – and when I took him to the end of the driveway and sat him down on the pavement he just shook for a bit until I gave him a nudge and he ran off towards next door where they have three cats, not one.
As I came back in the cat greeted me at the foot of the stairs and rubbed himself against my leg. I think he quite enjoyed our joint hunting exploits, even if he was the loser.
Simon’s cat is fantastic. It’s a line-drawn cartoon of a mischievous cat that for anyone who has a cat of their own has more than a little truth to it.
Well now someone has filmed the real life equivalent – a time lapse of how your cat uses you as a climbing frame all night long if you let it sleep on your bed (as we do). It just goes to show how right Simon is about his naughty little cat.
The live-action time-lapse:
And the original Simon’s cat:
I had two companions while out watering the plot last night. Here’s one. The loveable lazy cat who likes nothing better than to be made a fuss of while slobbing out on the bed (the towel keeps his hair off the pillows).
The other was this little chap, who sat by me and watched as I filled the cans from the water butt and hunkered down in the longer blades of grass.
And then they met, and just where Oscar killed him, I found the rest of his family, picked off one by one.
Poor old Oscar is properly confused by the cat flat. He goes out into the outhouse and then stands at the little door sniffing the air coming through and meowing to be let out.
Sometimes he presses the top – at the hinge – with his feet, but he can’t work out that all he needs to do is press the bottom with his nose and it would flip open. Instead, I have to bend down and hold it open for him so he can shuffle out.
And then, 20 minutes later, he’s sat on the front step, meowing to be let in. Whether that’s because the flap is equally confusing from the outside, or he considers the tradesman’s entrance too degrading, I don’t know.
Either way it leaves me with a question… how do you train your cat to use a cat flap?
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