Tibbles ahoy!
Like farting scooterboys and discreet alcoholism, one of the features of suburban life is the feline felon poster. One sees these sad little adverts pinned on trees, announcing that a cat is missing, giving details and a picture. Once I saw a poster for a missing tortoise and was so struck by the sense of adventure the thing must have had that when I got home I was stirred to make a quick survey of the garden.
A couple of months ago the stakes were raised with a mailshot advertising a missing cat, with a picture. Cats never take good pictures. They always have that sly look that makes it hard to guess what they are thinking, although it’s a sure bet it’s either ‘I am about to lick my anus’, ‘I bet you can’t guess which of your shoes I’ve pooped in’, ‘I have nothing but contempt for you’, or simply ‘I am actually a demon from hell in cat form. And I’ve pooped in your shoe.’
Underneath was a mobile ‘phone number to ring if you spotted Mr Tibbles. I thought little of it; the cat had probably either been kidnapped by vivisectionists or was currently adorning the front bumper of a car like a very surprised Garfield doll. I put the poster down with the absent thought that I would send some crank text messages to the mobile while I was drunk and thought no more of it.
Normally, wild visitors to the Macnabbs estate are few. There are nocturnal foxes and during the day there are the plumpest pigeons to be found outside the pages of children’s books. So when I saw a cat skulking around, I remembered the poster. The problem with cats is that they all look alike and the damn thing was always gone before I could make a positive ID or pump up the pressure on the super-soaker.
The other day, there was a break in the clouds and the rain stopped for a short while. This called for a sacrifice of the choicest cuts of meat to the weather gods and so I fired up the barbeque.
One of the many great things about barbequing is that the barbeque grill is one of the few cooking surfaces that is not so much cleaned as occasionally scraped off. This is because the first thing you cook when you fire up a barbeque is the bacteria that have managed to get a foothold there since the last time you cooked. This means that my barbeque, when heated, smells of the ghosts of feasts past. Mainly chicken and fish.
Which is probably what attracted Mr Tibbles. Returning to the barbeque to see if it was ready to cook on yet (gauged by the amount of smoke coming off it – boy scouts camp fire level for fish, Vatican scale for chicken and ‘oh my Christ evacuate the town the chemical works is alight!’ for meat) I saw Mr Tibbles himself taking a close interest. Fearing that I was about to see the phrase ‘scalded cat’ brought to life in front of me, I shooed him off and made the call. ‘Have you got your cat back’?
It turns out that Mr Tibbles has been leading a double life. His owner explained that he was dividing his time between her and another family a dozen or so houses along and that my back garden was part of his cat parcourt route between houses. The owner spoke as one betrayed. I gathered from our short conversation that Mr Tibbles had had quite a lot of money spent on him at the vets and was on a strict macrobiotic diet at home. This is probably what drove him to a life of being tickled and living off tasty kitchen scraps down the road. It appeared that the two families now operated a sort of cat-share but I got the impression the owner was confident that her approach to cat rearing was going to win the permanent affection of Mr Tibbles.
Unlikely, from the way he was sniffing my chicken scented smoke, I’d say that cat has not ruled out the possibility of three dinners a day.
A couple of months ago the stakes were raised with a mailshot advertising a missing cat, with a picture. Cats never take good pictures. They always have that sly look that makes it hard to guess what they are thinking, although it’s a sure bet it’s either ‘I am about to lick my anus’, ‘I bet you can’t guess which of your shoes I’ve pooped in’, ‘I have nothing but contempt for you’, or simply ‘I am actually a demon from hell in cat form. And I’ve pooped in your shoe.’
Underneath was a mobile ‘phone number to ring if you spotted Mr Tibbles. I thought little of it; the cat had probably either been kidnapped by vivisectionists or was currently adorning the front bumper of a car like a very surprised Garfield doll. I put the poster down with the absent thought that I would send some crank text messages to the mobile while I was drunk and thought no more of it.
Normally, wild visitors to the Macnabbs estate are few. There are nocturnal foxes and during the day there are the plumpest pigeons to be found outside the pages of children’s books. So when I saw a cat skulking around, I remembered the poster. The problem with cats is that they all look alike and the damn thing was always gone before I could make a positive ID or pump up the pressure on the super-soaker.
The other day, there was a break in the clouds and the rain stopped for a short while. This called for a sacrifice of the choicest cuts of meat to the weather gods and so I fired up the barbeque.
One of the many great things about barbequing is that the barbeque grill is one of the few cooking surfaces that is not so much cleaned as occasionally scraped off. This is because the first thing you cook when you fire up a barbeque is the bacteria that have managed to get a foothold there since the last time you cooked. This means that my barbeque, when heated, smells of the ghosts of feasts past. Mainly chicken and fish.
Which is probably what attracted Mr Tibbles. Returning to the barbeque to see if it was ready to cook on yet (gauged by the amount of smoke coming off it – boy scouts camp fire level for fish, Vatican scale for chicken and ‘oh my Christ evacuate the town the chemical works is alight!’ for meat) I saw Mr Tibbles himself taking a close interest. Fearing that I was about to see the phrase ‘scalded cat’ brought to life in front of me, I shooed him off and made the call. ‘Have you got your cat back’?
It turns out that Mr Tibbles has been leading a double life. His owner explained that he was dividing his time between her and another family a dozen or so houses along and that my back garden was part of his cat parcourt route between houses. The owner spoke as one betrayed. I gathered from our short conversation that Mr Tibbles had had quite a lot of money spent on him at the vets and was on a strict macrobiotic diet at home. This is probably what drove him to a life of being tickled and living off tasty kitchen scraps down the road. It appeared that the two families now operated a sort of cat-share but I got the impression the owner was confident that her approach to cat rearing was going to win the permanent affection of Mr Tibbles.
Unlikely, from the way he was sniffing my chicken scented smoke, I’d say that cat has not ruled out the possibility of three dinners a day.
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