You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough

by Chris Pascoe

  I downloaded a suitable test and immediately disagreed with the opening statement: ‘We sometimes take our cats for granted.’

  No. We absolutely don’t. You can take a goldfish for granted, or a hamster for granted, but not a cat. How can you possibly take for granted an animal that will rip up your curtains, flay your wallpaper and puke on your bed. You can’t. Cats take us for granted, not the other way round. Cats walk all over us, and not only in a metaphorical sense. They do actually walk on us. If we’re in the way, they just trounce straight over us as if we’re not there. We are totally incidental to them. How taken for granted is that?

  I got over my resentment and printed off a ‘test card’. This card’s purpose was to ascertain whether Brum was creative, or had more conventional intelligence. Creative as in artistic, rather than the ability to create carnage and chaos. The test card comprised two mirror-image ducks, one on the left and one on the right. The task was simple. Hold the card up to Brum, once an hour, and see which duck he sniffed. Persistently sniffing the left duck would denote creativity; persistently sniffing the right, conventional intelligence.

  Brum sniffed between the ducks. A duck on either side, and he sniffed the blank space between them. He seemed not to notice the ducks at all. Five attempts in five hours produced exactly the same result. Brilliant. There wasn’t even an intelligence rating for a cat that missed the ducks completely.

  Test one: Creative intelligence – nil. Conventional intelligence – nil.

  Test two was an odd one. It involved training Brum to jump through a hoop. The premise was simple enough – hold ‘his favourite treat’ on one side of a twelve-inch-high hoop, and let him eat it only if he jumped straight through. Repeat hourly, until the cat jumps through the hoop every time.

  Never has my arm ached so badly. I held that hoop out for ten minutes an hour, but all he did was stare at me, grinning that happy cat grin of his. Once he even lay down and went to sleep. On several occasions, I lifted him up and put him through the hoop to demonstrate what I was looking for, but this only served to annoy him. Finally, after five attempts and five hours, with the hoop now barely off the floor, he stepped halfway through and stopped. He had no intention of continuing. He was quite definitely showing me his full range of capabilities. The hoop was a symbolic cat-flap – and he was stuck in it.

  Test two: Task/reward reasoning skills – nil. Memory – nil.

  Test three’s aim was to discover whether a cat has ‘invertist tendencies’. It sounded the sort of thing he would have, but I decided I’d better find out what ‘invertist’ means before jumping to any conclusions.

  Apparently it refers to the way your cat sees things. If your cat often rolls upside down to observe an object, then chances are he has invertist tendencies. Brum often rolls off chairs while observing objects, but I don’t think that counts. The invertist cat rolls upside down because he can see objects more clearly by observing them the wrong way up.

  The simple way of testing for invertism is to observe the way your cat watches TV. If he takes an interest in what’s on the screen, chances are his vision is normal. If he takes no interest, but then suddenly does when the TV is turned upside down, it means he can relate to the topsy-turvy images and therefore has invertist tendencies. Brum takes no interest in TV at all, so I turned the TV upside down.

  Unbelievably, Brum rolled upside down and watched it. What on earth does that mean? He rolled over with it. That doesn’t denote anything. The TV was upside down, but so was he. He couldn’t see it the right way up, or upside down. But he could see it when both he and the TV were upside down. This was pure nonsense. I checked the ‘intelligence rating’ notes. Nothing. What he’d done was unheard of. He’d gone off the scale again.

  Test three: Invertist tendencies? No . . . just strange tendencies.

  The final test was to assess a cat’s ability to register two-dimensional patterns. The test card contained rows and rows of birds, with one rabbit hidden among them. I could hardly be bothered. There was no way he was going to spot the rabbit. I held the card up, somewhat nonchalantly, and waited for Brum to fail. His reaction was entirely unexpected. He attacked my hand.

  Something in that pattern sent him doolally. He took one look and launched himself at me, grabbing my arm with all four paws and sinking his teeth into my fingers. I decided against showing him the card again.

  So, an assessment of Brum’s intelligence. He failed the first two tests with flying colours, and betrayed worryingly psychotic reactions during tests three and four. Going by the website’s own rating system, my cat is an idiot.

  The Eagle Has Landed

  ‘One flew east and one flew west, and one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.’

  Nursery Rhyme

  As the summer got under way, it became patently clear that there was something wrong with it. It was the sun. It kept staying out. And as long as the sun stayed out, so too did Maya’s paddling pool.

  Maya is irrationally jealous about her paddling pool. I’m not allowed in it, Lorraine’s not allowed in it, and Brum is most definitely absolutely certainly not allowed in it. The slightest nose-twitching tabby curiosity is met with a tantrum of terrifying force. In the light of this you’d think Brum would actively avoid diving head first into the thing, wouldn’t you? But not our Brum.

  Never has a garden item proved so much a centre of wet calamity. Three times in the first few weeks of summer I’ve watched him swimming around, albeit extremely unhappily, totally drenched within its plastic walls. On three further occasions he’s squelched into the living room, dripping all over the carpet and sidling around Maya, so I’d say it’s odds on he’s taken unobserved dips too.

  It’s great, by the way, that he now aims for Maya when he’s wet. He’s spent a lifetime bounding happily from bath-drenching or rain-soaking to squelch down on my lap. So common were our joint drenchings that I eventually became immune to them. I’m not saying I evolved a duck-like feathery coat that repelled water, it’s just that I stopped reacting in any significant way. I stopped yelling in surprise as he landed, stopped jumping up and down and swearing like a trooper as he tried to settle. I finally got so used to it all that I’d just robotically change my trousers without registering annoyance, or even hissing. I think this bothered Brum. I think he felt hurt that he wasn’t getting due recognition for the gag. Maya’s reaction, therefore, came as a breath of fresh air. It’s just as mine used to be before I became boring.

  As his thick wet fur slides along her jeans, she tries to move sideways away from him, shrieking with her hands in the air, but he slinks along with her. She tries to back up, but he then slips sideways, always rubbing his soaked fur against her legs and stomach as she waves her hands frantically and screams louder. The scene becomes reminiscent of a dramatic Spanish dance routine, the pair striding around the room in perfect unison, her hands appearing to be playing the castanets as she wails her tragic story (in this case the tragedy being that her jeans and T-shirt are getting very, very wet and, since giving up the Pampers, she’s already had enough trouble with that particular issue, thank you very much) and Brum looking deadly serious, head held proudly in the air, the Latin dance partner to a tee.

  Anyway, I reckon he’s ended up in that pool at least six or seven times in four weeks. That’s not normal, is it? That’s not even just clumsy. Is there perhaps a tabby lodestone concealed within the pool’s air chambers? Or are mer-cat sirens attempting to lure him to a watery grave with their irresistible moggy wailings? No – we must always remember that the word ‘normal’ doesn’t apply in any ‘normal’ way when dealing with Brum. Six or seven pool dips in a month? Absolutely Brum-normal.

  Brum’s range of splashdown approaches has been varied and impressive, but I think for sheer surprise value his cat-flap approach stands out as something quite special. Brum’s had a typically bad year, cat-flap-wise, and I really don’t think he needed this. His cat-flap problems began, of course, the moment we had one installed. As
time’s gone by, his attempts to employ it as a legitimate door have progressed from an early hundred per cent failure rate to his experimenting with many different, and always doomed, approaches. At one time he even started climbing through backwards, which resulted only in the disturbing spectacle of a tabby rear end appearing from nowhere and wiggling at you for half an hour.

  In the early spring, he developed a brand-new approach, which can only have been born of frustration. In total contrast to his usual nervy, one-paw-at-a-time bunch-up, he suddenly threw caution to the wind and just bowled himself head first at it. This only almost works.

  Speaking in an aerodynamic sense, something is horribly wrong with Brum. He somehow manages to execute a magnificent back-flip as he flies through. It’s spectacular. He’ll hit the cat-flap with all four paws pointing down, but by the time he’s through, they’re all pointing in the air. It’s the most incredible feat of high-speed, twisting gymnastics I’ve ever seen.

  On an outbound trip, the brutal finale involves him sliding painfully along the patio on his back. Inward is more of an upside-down descent into Sammy’s food bowl, which is only less painful if Sammy isn’t eating at the time.

  Because of its obvious flaws, he’d largely abandoned this ‘raging bull’ approach by the end of spring, but suddenly readopted it at the worst possible moment – on a day the cat-flap wasn’t there any more.

  We’d purchased new doors, you see. And also new front and rear cat-flaps, which we hadn’t quite got round to installing when Brum came charging across the patio and threw himself head first at a solid wood door. Raging bull is spot on. He butted it so hard with the top of his head, sadly deficient in the horn department, that his rear legs lifted a foot off the ground. Wow, that must’ve hurt. He staggered backwards across the patio as if he’d just taken a fifteen-round pummelling from Tyson.

  Maybe it could’ve happened to any cat; I don’t know and seriously doubt it, but only Brum would retreat ten feet back and then come thundering back for another go.

  I felt I should’ve been waving a red cloth and shouting ‘Olé’ (real Spanish feel to all this, isn’t there?) rather than just jumping in front of him and sweeping him up out of harm’s way, but a red cloth in front of a closed door wouldn’t have been a ‘fun thing’. Not for him, anyway.

  The rear cat-flap got installed the following week, by which time he’d learnt his hard-knock lesson and got back to carefully blocking it with his body and irritating the queue (Sammy). If Brum had kept to this totally useless method of cat-flapping, he wouldn’t have had to endure his cat-flap-cum-competition-diving event, but as always Brum’s comic timing was impeccable.

  When I fill Maya’s paddling pool, I do it from a tap beside the back door which the hosepipe doesn’t fit. I therefore fill it as much as possible under the tap and then move it to the centre of the patio before adding buckets of warm water from indoors. Unfortunately, filling the pool from the outdoor tap places most of it briefly outside the back door and, of course, just beneath the cat-flap.

  Brum, as only Brum would, decided he was now entirely happy that the door was no longer a solid block of wood, and that today would be a great day to go for another good old-fashioned rhino charge.

  Maya and I were watching the pool fill, her a demented mix of impatience and excitement, me holding her back with all my might, when out of nowhere a determined-looking Brum hurtled out of the cat-flap, did a mid-air flip on to his back, skimmed the surface of the water like a stone, reached the pool wall with his head and sank beneath the waves – also in a very stone-like manner.

  For the briefest of moments, only his four legs protruded from the water as his back hit the bottom.

  Maya and I stood in silence, our jaws dropping in unison.

  Maya broke the silence with a roar of sheer, undiluted rage. She was, without doubt, all ready to hold him under and punch his lights out. I held her back, not only to save my furry friend from a beating, but also because I knew that the next bit could be extremely dangerous. Brum has trouble getting back to his feet on dry land, never mind in twelve inches of cold water. The thrashing, splashing mayhem that ensues is painful enough to watch, but I’ve learnt from bitter experience that the pain’s far worse if you try to lend a helping hand.

  And so, I held back an enraged toddler, who angrily kicked and punched the air as Brum laboriously surfaced, spluttering and gasping for air. Eventually he was back on all fours and looking seriously irritated. I suppose he had every right to be. If I stepped out of my back door and fell straight into a pool of cold water, I suspect I’d probably be a mite peeved.

  His eyes met mine and he instinctively knew I was in some way to blame. Of all the stupid places to put a bloody paddling pool. I swear he bared his teeth at me. He slid over the edge of the pool like a greased eel and wandered off across the patio, leaving a rather comical trail of wet paw-prints. As he reached the top of the garden, he stared down at me. Living as we do on the side of a steep hill, he was now two walls and fifteen feet above me, and for a moment I thought he was going to perform a mountain-lion-style pounce-and-kill manoeuvre, so annoyed did he look. But instead he gave a meek miaow and lay down to glare viciously and dry out in the warm sunshine.

  A couple of minutes later, unbelievably, he was at it again, this time so blinded by out-and-out, all-consuming fear that it wasn’t a case of the pool being a bad thing but rather the better option.

  Something had just landed up there on the garden wall with him, something so unexpected, so terrifyingly out of the ordinary, that Brum actually shrieked in alarm as he came running full pelt down the garden steps, skidding round the corner without slowing, still looking over his shoulder as he hit the pool’s plastic wall, briefly collapsing it and stumbling face first back into the water. My disbelieving laughter stuck in my throat, mainly because I’d just seen the thing he was running from.

  As Brum thrashed around beneath my feet, gulping in huge mouthfuls of pool water and trying desperately not to die, I stared in awe at the eagle sitting at the top of my garden.

  It stared back evilly, regarding me with an unblinking eye. Brum, meanwhile, finally found his feet, but this time didn’t even attempt to leave the pool, instead standing stock still and joining in all the general staring going on. A sudden crescendo of pool bubbles confirmed he was every bit as edgy as me.

  And so, a stand-off ensued, a huge eagle at the top of the garden, a man and a flatulent cat half submerged in a paddling pool at the bottom. The eagle shuffled on its feet. Brum and I tensed. At this point, Maya emerged through the back door from a toilet break. Her brow instantly furrowed as she spotted Brum back in her pool. Oh no! Sudden screams of outrage broke the tight silence, and bubbles rose once more as the startled eagle spread an absolutely enormous pair of wings and flew straight at us.

  Brum ducked bravely beneath the water, and I grabbed Maya by the legs, making ready to swing her like a bat and strike the attacking eagle from the sky (not really – I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her into the considerable barricade of my solid six-pack waist . . . well, actually my ‘wobbly two-pack with fifty per cent extra free’). The eagle swooped low. I fully expected Brum to be plucked from the pool and carried away to a mountain-top nest, but the eagle swept over our heads, close enough to cause a sharp down-draught, before nonchalantly gaining height and soaring away over the rooftops.

  What the . . . ! I was stunned. So stunned I let go of Maya, whose concerns didn’t involve giant birds of prey at all, but rather a pool-bathing cat who now had a whole new set of problems racing towards him. I acted quickly, scooping up Maya and running straight into a wall, before readjusting and making it through the door. I switched on Sky News, scanning the text for reports of zoo escapees. Nothing. How could an eagle have landed in my back garden and nobody be looking for it?

  It had to have been an eagle. I’d never before seen a bird so impressive – that huge wingspan, that vicious-looking head, those beautiful red and black markings.
I knew a retired neighbour to be very interested in birds. He spends hours staring at them through his big binoculars (at least, I hope that’s what he uses them for), so if anybody could tell me why an eagle should be frightening cats into paddling pools in High Wycombe, he’d be the man. Maya and I set off down the road to see him, briefly passing a soaked Brum, who appeared to be muttering darkly to himself as he wandered off somewhere, no doubt to get a few more acts of dangerous stupidity in before teatime.

  I rang Tom’s bell and felt hopefully happy to see him answer the door with binoculars dangling from his neck. I asked whether he’d seen an eagle. Sort of inevitably, he laughed out loud. Tom’s mirth, however, came not from the fact that I thought I’d seen an eagle, but that I hadn’t seen one before. Apparently, the skies around us are full of them, and have been for at least a year. Only they aren’t exactly eagles. I was perhaps getting a little carried away, but they’re certainly impressively big birds of prey and more than a match for the sparrow-fearing Brum. They are actually red kites, released into the Chiltern hills a few years ago and now breeding like the rabbits they occasionally slaughter. What a great idea, I remarked, let’s fill the local skies with whopping great sharp-clawed hawks for a laugh. Why not?

  Tom was slightly taken aback by my attitude. He seemed to love these things, and couldn’t believe my lack of enthusiasm. I then made a few comments about people interfering with nature. I’d really asked for it now. I was treated to this admonitory lecture that, leaving out the heartfelt comments on ignorant neighbours and unwanted observations on the continued lack of a gazebo in my back garden, reads like a red kite fact file:

  Red kites are NICE. And you can stop giving me that doubtful look, young man.

  They won’t attack us but because they’re big (two feet tall with a six-foot wingspan) and a bit vicious looking (they look mean, believe me) they’ve always had a bad press.