10 hours ago
I was one of those pathetic males who barely noticed cats. Then I became smitten with my kitten
I'm in love with my cat. He sleeps by my writing desk all day on the cotton lining of my inside-out parka. At the end of the day, I crash into the beanbag and he climbs up on my chest and we nap.
To be clear, this is our family cat, but yes, in an eye-rollingly predictable move, the cat gravitated to the person in the household who was least interested.
My now-disgruntled partner and our son campaigned for a cat for quite some time. My partner, let's call her Cat Follower, is a cat follower (online and down the street). You can't walk a block without her having to stop while she chases or coaxes a kitty from somewhere, eagle-eyed (is it wrong to mix in this bird metaphor?) and begins to smooch and trill and do whiskery tsks-tsks with her tongue. Ooh, you're a feisty one, aren't you, she whispers. They often are. They're rarely morose chumps.
I do realise I fall into a lineage of pathetic males who claim to barely notice cats until one turns in their direction, at which point said male abruptly U-turns from ambivalent to love-drunk smitten (skitten?).
I spent part of my childhood on a farm where none of our pets were allowed inside the house. This meant dogs and cats were closer to the category of cow and chicken. They were treated by adults with a certain disdain; it was meant to be good for them. In hindsight it was often a guise for a lazy cruelty. I became a vegetarian as soon as I became an adult.
Cats were a smoke that mingled with the shade beneath your feet and my little sister cuddled them along with ducklings and chicks and it appeared to be my job to find this fey or silly. According to family folklore, she also cuddled a fluffy gold duckling all day until its head propped forward.
But, yes, my partner and our son campaigned and slowly I began to come to the following conclusion – small cats are small shade, like leaves. Or maybe it was more like: tiny cats are compact and probably have tiny sounds.
Nonetheless, I acquiesced on the one condition. It had to be a small one. A small cat.
The mistake Cat Follower made was to allow me to be the one to pick up our little 'fully grown' kitten from the lost cat hotel. He'd been given the name Nathan and we thought that was quite funny at the time. I placed Nathan's cage carefully in the footspace of the passenger seat of our old car and chatted to him all the way home to keep him calm. Nathan, you're so small, you'll fit right in.
I'd read that it's good to acclimatise new cats to your home, one room at a time, so I blocked off the rest of the house and carefully opened his cat cage in the living room. I figured this was a good approach to living with a cat, too – open one compartment of your heart at a time, but Nathan burst out and immediately climbed right up on to my chest to nuzzle my forehead, making me topple backwards in some magic glittering hoodwink.
It was as if he'd read about newborns and skin-to-skin contact. He really was clever and seemed to really like me and I really liked him. We've been inseparable since.
I recently received a print of UK artist David Shrigley's artworks for my birthday, and it pretty much sums all this up because, well, my love for Nathan grew, as he did.
Shrigley has painted an enormous cat in messy lime-green acrylic, the cat's body spilling round his little front paws, wonky eyes, next to a frank statement in big red text which goes: THIS HUGE CAT HAS BEEN ASSIGNED TO YOU / YOU MUST ACCEPT THIS SITUATION AND FIND JOY IN IT.
Luke Beesley is a poet and singer-songwriter. His latest book is In the Photograph
