One thing my keepers can’t work out is that I don’t wander off [I’ll always come back]. At Bumble Cottage I could walk at least 1 mile in any direction, and often did. 

My keepers are softies, so she’s on a winner.

 

Harry [and even Ch’Bee] and me will jump over next door’s fence, and Milo is the worst culprit for territory. She has no problem in going around the front of the house, something which I avoid. I’m not sure but perhaps it has something to do with squeezing through the side gate, which is just too small for a big lad like me.

Cat ages can be translated into human ages, so I wonder what a cat mile equates to?

I’m not feeling any withdrawal symptoms from strutting about, snarling and hissing at Max’s successors.

Yet a lifetime of aggression and facing down is hard to let go. I find myself getting mildly narked at meal time, even though I never miss out on food. I must be ‘hard-wired’ for some macho nonsense. I never knew my dad, so I’m not sure where I got it all from.

But isn’t aggro what big toms do?

You lot have criminal, obesity and health genes. So if your parents are fat gaspers who handle stolen goods, isn’t your card marked at school?

A lot of my cat world siblings are ‘pedigree’. What that means to me is that each generation looks like the last. I’ve observed some of your so-called aristocrats are pretty strange looking people, and might benefit from the odd human old tom ‘improving the line’ don’t you think?

In the urinals of history, we had a cat called Charles Clawwin who said that we only survive because we are the fittest. But he was misquoted and before he died said some of his ideas needed to be further investigated. And I know of another cat [Lamb rack] who was around over two cat generations before Clawwin. Lamb rack argued that we evolve in a cooperative way with our environment, rather than rip each other to bits.

Still who does it suit to peddle the notion that everything is determined by genes I wonder?

The ‘energies’ were a bit queer at Bumble, as I’ve told you before. They’re different here, but if you swallow Clawwin’s stuff, then it’s all hogwash.

Genes or energies, cat food or birds, I can tell you which side my cat tag faces.
I know too there’s only so much serious stuff you lot can handle, given your short attention spans, so I’ll finish with a tail about Milo.

When you are going out of your house, we have already twigged. We pick up all sorts of things up-smells, rituals, door and window shutting, mood changes and the like.

Milo is like a radar. She gets it before any of us. So she nips out, squeezes through the side gate [I must get back on that diet] and ‘jumps’ my keepers. So, they can ignore her, and let her roam under cars and be at [slight] risk - or let her in through the side door and she can get her head down in the spare bedroom.

My keepers are softies, so she’s on a winner.

There’s a way I can muscle in on this, but it’s probably genetic. Milo has the side door gene.

See you in June.

Jimmy 

© Jack Stewart MSc


A Morning Kiss

A morning kiss, a discreet touch of his nose landing somewhere on the middle of my face.
Because his long white whiskers tickled, I began every day laughing.

Janet F Faure