So, back in 2022, we decided to get another (i.e. second) cat.
I’ve already talked about Rosie in the pages of this blog… our beloved calico mog who died of cancer in January 2023.
Well in 2022, before Rosie died, we thought she might like a little feline friend… so we got ourselves (and Rosie) a small grey kitten, from one of Annie’s pals whose own cat had just had a litter.
The little grey kitten we adopted – a male – was pretty cute. But he was also alarmingly nuts. He’d tear around the house as if a local foxhunt had mistakenly picked up his scent. And if you’d try and stroke him, he’d seize your hand in a painful embrace of teeth and claws. A prickly welcome in the truest sense.
We put the grey kitten’s lunatic behaviour down to the fact he’d been born in a barn, on Annie’s friend’s family’s farm. In other words, the grey kitten was semi-feral. Like he was half-cat, half-rat (that would explain his grey fur, at least).
When it came to naming the nutty grey kitten, we struggled. Myself, Lizzie, Jake and Annie spent weeks arguing about it. There was no single moggie moniker the four of us, as a family, could agree on. We were like a quartet of bickering band members, chronically and comically unable to come up with a band name we were all happy with. So we just ended up calling the kitten ‘Kitten’ instead. A placeholder name which ended up sticking. Imaginative, huh?
So anyway, enough probably unnecessary backstory, let’s get back to the present…
‘Can you feed Kitten please?’ Lizzie asks me.
Kitten is in the conservatory, waiting on the bookcase just under the hole in the wall… a hole which goes behind the chimney breast and where Kitten spends a lot of his time.
It’s safe to say that Kitten really isn’t a kitten anymore. He’s large and fuzzy and round, with a grey moon-shaped face that makes him look like a malevolent Bagpuss.
I stroke Kitten, pre-feeding. He’s wet from the incessant Midlands drizzle. As I stroke him, he arches his back, shudderingly, and pulls his head away slightly from my hand. He doesn’t appear to be enjoying the stroke-process at all.
As soon as I’ve finished feeding Kitten, he bolts off through the conservatory door into the wilds of the garden, like the semi-feral ex-farm animal he is. We won’t see him for another twenty-four hours.
‘Kitten really isn’t getting it,’ I say to Lizzie, afterwards. ‘He’s not understanding that this is a reciprocal, two-way, working relationship. We provide him with food and shelter. In return, he makes himself available for stroking. AND looks like he’s enjoying it.’
Lizzie nods, not really listening.
I briefly think about the nature of ‘escorting’. Isn’t what I’ve just said about the cat exactly that? We’re paying him in food and accommodation… and in return he must appear to enjoy our affection… and return it? Are we treating Kitten like a mini-feline-gigolo? Is that what cat-ownership actually is?
I then think… I’m talking about a blooming cat. Don’t be ridiculous.
At this point, a sad thought pops into my mind… like a friendly, overweight tabby squeezing its way indoors through a cat flap.
‘Rosie!’ I think, glumly. How I miss that old cat. She actually liked being stroked and picked up (or, if she didn’t, she instinctively understood the reciprocal nature of our working relationship). Since she died, I’ve definitely been feeling very needy and at a hug-deficit. Who is there in the family now, to hug? Not the kids. And hugging Lizzie can be a bit emotionally-loaded. Not like a simple moggie hug.
There’s a ‘cat café’ in our local town. You pay six pounds to go in, drink tea in plush surroundings and stroke their selection of felines… like ‘One Eyed Jacks’ in Twin Peaks, but with moggies instead of women-in-lingerie.
It’s a bit weird-looking, if I’m to be honest.
We really need to get another cat for the house, I decide. A good one.
March 2023
P. D. Clifton 
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