My bruv, Gabion Tzchugge, a snow-pawed Birchilla Birman is an Idiot. A complete village idiot with nothing between his ears. He has a degree, with honours, in stupidity, but my human and I love him very much (except when he’s chasing me round the house trying to thump me or steal my catnip mouse).
Recently, he declared that he was going to be an artist, the Banksey of the cat world!! He started off small, shredding toilet rolls. He would sneak into the bathroom and hook a roll out of the box, pat it into the lounge and silently reduce it to tiny flakes all over the carpet. This was done in the dead of night so you can imagine our human’s gasps of delight upon finding the carpet smothered in tiny bits of loo paper as she got up to race to work. Loo rolls are now firmly locked up in a high cupboard where Gabes can’t access them.
Not to be deterred, for his next assignment, he turned his attention to cardboard boxes and paper carrier bags. He would sit inside them and very carefully and precisely bite, nibble and chew until he had reduced them to a pile of carpet confetti. He would even turn his artistic talents to the mail postie shoved through the front door. Curiously, he managed to avoid the bills. Yet more gasps of delight as the human came back from the place called work to find a pile of shredded paper in the hallway and Gabion sitting next to it with a smug smile of pride playing about his whiskers.
Then, Gabion started work on his piece de resistance. Our human bought a beautiful wicker chair and placed it by the patio windows. Here she can sit with a cup of coffee and read, or sit with a small pot of my fave, True Instinct kibbles. These are truly delish and we have cuddles and hugs as I purr and help her guide the treats into my mouth. She is very well trained!
Her ultimate pleasure was to sit in silence with me purring gently on her knee. We’d enjoy complete peace and quiet whilst she watched the snow gently falling or the rain hammering on the glass window and I’d watch the blackbirds hopping round on the patio and the squirrels racing across the lawns of Tom Cat Towers.
Gabes decided that the chair needed a little enhancement, his personal mark as a great artist needed stamping on it. With great leaps across the room he would clamp himself to the top of the chair, its arms or the seat. Then with his eyes closes, in moments of sheer ecstasy, he started to shred the chair. No matter what time of the day or night, Gabes cannot resist passing the chair without having a good claw at it. Slowly, but surely the chair disintegrated and became unstable.
It is now structurally unsound. If a human tried to sit on it, it will collapse. However, to Gabion, it is very much still work in progress as each day the human picks up small matchstick pieces of wicker from the carpet. Soon it will just be a pile of sticks and he will have to find something else to make his next shredding project.
Our humans’ despair of him, but Gabion thinks he should get an art grant!!
Much love xx
Lord Reginald Desmond Vagabond of Tom Cat Towers
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