by Tom Cox
Don’t waste time in getting your kitten started on literature
Don’t make the mistake of delaying introducing your kitten to books, just because you know a good seven or eight months need to elapse before it is be able to read. Those it gravitates toward might seem inconsequential now but could serve as a useful early indicator of its future career, desires, temperament and worldview.
Kitten Baskets
In eighteenth-century England, Kitten Baskets were seen by rural folk as a surefire way to ward off evil. A Kitten Basket would traditionally contain various bits of loose material from the owner’s old quilts and shirts, some herbs and a kitten, and would be presented to people moving to the village on the day of their arrival. The new residents would eat the herbs, keep the kitten in their front window overnight and return it to its owners in the morning, after which their house would be ‘blessed’ and delivered from future evil such as storm damage, plague, and randy wandering soldiers intent on taking the maidenheads of their daughters. The tradition of the Kitten Basket lives on in many counties, although not in Staffordshire, following the infamous Cannock Chase Kitten Basket Theft of 1864.
Slowly introduce your kitten to outdoor life
Introduce your kitten gradually to the outdoors. Before letting it go out on its own, ease your kitten into the outdoor life it will very soon be able to enjoy by showing it carefully, realistically illustrated pictures of the outside of your house. Try also placing the kitten behind a locked window on a sunny day, standing on the other side of the window, waving to it, and pointing out exciting outdoor things such as trees, hammocks and wood pigeons.
Sleeping places your kitten will genuinely enjoy
It’s a misconception that kittens like to sleep on blankets and jumpers. They actually much prefer to sleep in waste paper bins. Nobody is sure why this is, but some experts think it’s related to the fact that waste paper bins often contain magazines, and kittens like to read before falling asleep. Buy a waste paper bin that’s slightly too big for your kitten, so it can grow into it. If there is no waste paper bin available, a kitten will generally compromise by sleeping on a toilet, or on the neck of a person aged between fifty-five and sixty-five.
Introducing your kitten to a cat who already lives with you
If you have an older cat, place it outside the house, then make it stare at the kitten through a window. This might seem cruel, but will actually make the old cat re-evaluate its life – something it’s probably been putting off doing for far too long anyway – and face the future more realistically, acknowledging the limitations its age now imposes on it. This will ultimately help it to get on with the kitten on a more honest basis.
Kittens and their spirit world guardians
Unlike many ghosts, those of cats are very kind and well-meaning. It’s entirely possible that, not long after you get your kitten, a cat ghost who happens to be haunting your area at the time will latch on to it and begin to whisper to it or hover mournfully over its waste paper bin at night. Don’t be alarmed by this, and try not to shout or throw things at the cat ghost; it is probably very sensitive, especially if it is a new ghost and still self-conscious about its non-corporeal state. More than likely the ghost is just trying to protect the kitten from dangerous things such as cars, dogs and the Daily Mail’s Liz Jones. Soon, a beautiful friendship may even develop between the two of them, full of whispered secrets and perfect, tranquil moments, where they will watch the world go by whilst embracing tenderly.
Testing your kitten for grip
A good early way to test your kitten’s clinging power and agility is to throw your kitten extremely gently at a shed. If it sticks to the shed, that means it’s a good kitten.
Your kitten’s first dalliance with disco
The natural love of kittens for disco has been severely underdocumented over the years. Kittens like disco partly because of the freedom it gives them to express themselves, but also because, unlike Lindy Hop, salsa or other, trendier dance styles, it has very few ‘rules’. A kitten can only dance to disco for up to twenty minutes at a time, so try not to be disturbed if it falls asleep in the middle of a disco move. This just means it is on ‘boogie recharge’.
Try not to make your kitten’s dinners too comfortable
At mealtimes, don’t make things too easy for the kitten. Encourage it to stretch and work for its food. Ask yourself: Do I really want one of those ‘nancy boy’ overprivileged kittens who only eat weird, poncey cat foods with sweetcorn and croutons and crap in them, and are always banging on about how the world owes them a living? Do I really think my kitten wants to be one of those kittens? Remember: you’ll be doing everyone a favour in the end.
Kittens and floristry
Many kittens enjoy floristry. In this area, the typical gender roles of the human world tend to be reversed. Very few female kittens like flower arranging, but for male kittens it is seen as a sign of masculinity and virility.
Set your kitten on the right musical path
Kittens are huge music fans, and are often much more likely to come and get their food to the sound of a popular rock hit than a whistle or the singsong call of their name. It’s important to remember that while kittens often tell themselves they like credible but overrated bands such as The Clash or Radiohead, they are lying to themselves and in denial about their true love of 1970s progressive rock and acid folk. Once you’ve got your kitten settled, begin by playing it Pentangle’s 1970 Cruel Sister LP or The Moody Blues’ criminally underrated A Question Of Balance from the same year, before moving on to the more bluesy, elongated and cosmic Overdog from a year later by The Keef Hartley Band. If the kitten makes a face like the one opposite, that means it approves.
Don’t let your kitten eat a whole cow, a blanket, or a plug from the shower
Make sure your kitten doesn’t eat any of these things. They are bad for it.
Don’t allow your kitten to get too cocky
Once you’ve started to let your kitten run around outside, you’ll notice it starting to get a little bit full of itself, thinking it’s really shit hot for decking a twig, effeminately breaking a bee’s wing or gleefully slapping about some of the more colourful, less invasive weeds in your garden. Try not to mock the kitten too blatantly for its efforts. Instead, subtly patronise it. Try phrases like ‘That’s good – I’m sure a lot of other cats your age would feel that it was an achievement too, until they’d amassed more life experience’, or ‘I suppose it’s all about perspective: that twig probably seems quite “Safari” if you’ve previously spent all your life in west London.’ This will mean that the kitten will be easier to control and subjugate once it begins to meow properly, gets proper claws and starts wanting to use your bedroom as a cat service station in the middle of the night.
The Legend of Chimney Dog
Chimney Dog is a truly terrifying figure, stories of whose dark deeds have been passed down through kitten folklore for hundreds of years. A transsexual, soot-black hound with the back legs of a human blacksmith and the claws of a bitter and lonely former actress, he-she is said to climb down chimneys and steal kittens in the dead of night, when humans are asleep. Even if your kitten’s elders have not told it about Chimney Dog, there will be a deep, primal part of it that already somehow knows he-she is out there, waiting. If you find your kitten staring at your chimney with a fearful look on its face, more than likely it is thinking about Chimney Dog. Maybe best simply to block your chimney or get a wood burner or something?
Put big things around your kitten
By the time you’ve had your kitten a few weeks, your kitten will really be settling in, fully exploring your house and discovering its favourite plants to eat, places to sleep and objects from which to hang upside down. It will be sneaking up on other cats and generally acting like a miniature version of Popeye Doyle in the early scenes of The French Connection. However, it’s very important that you remind it at all times that it is, in fact, just a kitten. A good way of doing thi
s is to place big objects near it or over it: feet and legs are good, as are bigger cats with shadowy portentous auras, inflatables, and oversized vegetables.
Your kitten and the self-employed workplace
As everyone knows, kittens aren’t legally able to work until they are ten months old. In the meantime, however, they can be paid informally on a freelance basis for house and garden jobs, such as window cleaning, the planting of minor crops, and sweeping – although not the sweeping of chimneys, obviously, because of the whole Chimney Dog thing.
Encouraging your kitten to be self-aware
If your kitten misbehaves, don’t shout at it. Instead, ask it to take a long hard look at itself: Is it the kitten it thinks it is? Has it been fooling itself, and glossing over the flaws in its personality?
Kittens who scrump
Not all kittens go scrumping, but there’s every chance that, if your kitten lives in a rural area, it will get caught up in scrumping culture, due to peer pressure. If you find that your kitten has been scrumping, reprimand it, then take it to the house of the growers of the fruit that it scrumped and make it apologise to them. You might also want to revoke its disco privileges for a day or two, but don’t be too harsh on it. Remember: scrumping is a relatively minor crime for adolescent kittens. Your kitten could be doing something much worse in this day and age: sniffing car exhaust pipes, say, or joining forces with the feral kittens to fight geese in the local park.
Send your kitten out to spend a night in a tree
The time-honoured ‘Tree Night’ is a harsh but necessary stage in a kitten’s initiation. The big misconception about it is that it has to involve a big tree: an oak or giant redwood really isn’t necessary. A moderate ash or fig, or even a slightly decrepit silver birch, will suffice. The kitten might look fearful as it climbs towards the upper branches but, behind the veneer of pain, you will be able to see in its eyes that it knows you have its best interests at heart. As it reaches the pinnacle and finds a spot to rest for the next nine hours, it will achieve a special kind of meditative calm and find itself truly living in the moment like never before. The following morning, you will be all the better off as the kitten greets you, shivering, at the top of your ladder and smothers you with kisses and compliments, and you will finally know that the difficult early stages are over, and you and your kitten are ready to properly start your new life together.
Oneupfurship
Something that Gemma and I found out about one another not long after we met was that we both had, in our fairly recent past, a tragic story involving a maverick black and white cat: a cat we’d fallen deeply in love with in the years immediately after we left our family homes then lost, very suddenly. Each of these cats had been the first we’d chosen for ourselves as adults, and each had been cruelly snatched away from us before they were fully grown.
Even now, barely a week went by where I didn’t wonder what kind of cat Brewer, Ralph and Shipley’s brother, would have grown into, had he not been run over in the summer of 2001. Ralph was a huge, hulking mouser, but just before his death, Brewer had already possessed around twenty per cent more body mass than his tabby brother. In terms of prey, he had worked his way up from mice to rabbits to pheasants, and was visibly mulling over the idea of his very first peacock scalp. I imagined of the still-thriving Brewer a parallel life as a comical beast: a cat of such formidable size that his tail entered a room a full thirty seconds after his head, but who was possessed of a preposterously babyish meow, which he deployed to lull the local wildlife – ducks, herons, dogs, a particularly large and proud horse down the road who resembled the 1970s rock star Todd Rundgren – into a false sense of security.
Rod was much more of a softy. He’d been tiny in 2007 when Gemma had adopted him, and was still smaller than ninety-five per cent of male cats seventeen months later, when he was hit by a car outside her flat in Plymouth. He’d never really liked to go out very much, and preferred the company of people to other cats. ‘I know some cats like baths, but he really liked baths,’ Gemma told me. ‘He’d try to jump in every time I was in one. He was a maniac. He loved sleeping in the fruit bowl, and climbing up onto the door frame and leaping off it. He’d do it with his legs splayed in this weird way, nothing like a cat at all. He also trusted everyone, which used to worry me.’
In many ways, the photo we received at the end of May 2012 was much like hundreds of others of absurdly sweet black and white kittens needing adoption that I’d been sent by readers of my first two books about my cats. The difference was the black and white cat history Gemma and I shared, the cooling of her ardour for the apocryphal Chip, and the fresh, gaping space in our lives that Graham had formerly occupied. That, and the fact that Roscoe, with her Batman mask face, white tuxedo, and a tail that appeared to have had its tip dipped in white paint, was an almost cartoon-perfect example of what we’d started to imagine as our next cat: a good solid version of what most people probably immediately think of when their mind focuses on the phrase ‘classic cat’. The kind of kitten that, when it was older, you might see staring back at you from the window of a pretty, wisteria-clad cottage as you strolled down a country lane in summer, in a way that said ‘Yep, I’m a cat. What do you plan on doing about it?’
That was what we called her: Roscoe. We decided on the name with remarkable ease, considering our recent track record. It was a nod to several things: the magical song of the same name by the folksy, American Civil War-obsessed rock band Midlake, which we’d listened to on our way to collect her; our recognition of some early tomboyish hints about her character; and my thinking that I’d had a couple of boy cats with girl names in the past and it was time to even the score. There was also our belief that, if you called a kitten Roscoe, it could hardly be anything else but great. We were, however, quickly disabused of this notion.
It might have happened at a moment of weakness, but over time I have come to remember our adoption of Roscoe as a demonstration of remarkable restraint on my part. When I adopted Shipley, Ralph and Brewer, I walked into a stranger’s house planning to come away with two cats, at the most, and ended up with three. When I adopted Bootsy and Pablo, all I’d initially been in the market for was a beagle. Jazzmine, who’d sent me the message about Roscoe, had not one but three kittens that she wanted to give away, all of which lived with her in her house in west London.
I knew her ultimate hope was that all of them would stay together, and that however strongly Gemma and I had resolved only to take one, we would waver once we saw the three of them sleeping in a tiny bundle, or running up the back of a sofa. As it turned out, it was an even greater test of our powers of resistance than we’d imagined: not only had I forgotten what an onslaught of cute a roomful of three kittens can be, there was something very familiar about Roscoe’s brother and sister. Roscoe was every bit as loopy, spirited and friendly as Jazzmine had promised and, within minutes of her introduction to Gemma and me, was climbing cheerfully along our shoulders. Her equally energetic black and white brother, however, was an almost exact hybrid of Rod and Brewer; while Gemma and I didn’t say so out loud, we both noticed it immediately and told each other so with our eyes.
Her sister, meanwhile, was familiar in an even more unexpected way. I’d never had the bittersweet privilege of knowing The Bear in his angst-ridden kittenhood, but I’d seen the sole photo of his kitten self that Dee had possessed when I met her, and it bore an uncanny resemblance to the four-month-old kitten I was looking at now. All of Roscoe’s family’s eyes were big and button-like, but those of this black cat seemed to carry an extra knowledge and wariness. ‘This one is easily the most intelligent of the bunch,’ Jazzmine confirmed. The Bear had tried his best with other cats all his life, but he couldn’t get away from the fundamental fact that they were intellectually beneath him. Had I finally found the cat – a female cat, no less – with whom he could have the cultural and political debates he’d long hankered for? The image of the two of them sitting on The Bear’s favourite bookshelf, li
ke a pair of all-knowing black owls, was almost irresistible.
Somehow, we stayed strong. Driving back up the M11 towards Norfolk from Jazzmine’s house with Roscoe alone in the basket on the back seat of the car, we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves – smug, even – as if we were a couple of hardcore smokers who’d unexpectedly found a couple of quality menthol cigarettes in a pocket and each said, ‘No, actually, I won’t.’
It wasn’t until we arrived home that everything started to go wrong. Now I think about it, though, the switch probably took place at Birchanger Green services, just outside Bishop’s Stortford. Gemma and I had taken turns to go inside and use the toilet, so one of us was always with Roscoe, but while I’d been in the car I’d become distracted by an email on my phone from an editor. As I attended to it, the catnappers must have very gently eased open the rear door, unclicked the cat basket’s lock, and made the swap.
I have to give them credit: they’d done their research. The she-devil kitten they replaced Roscoe with was an almost perfect match. Same white socks, tuxedo, Batman-mask face and button eyes. Same white-tipped candle tail. This tiny, furious monster slept peacefully as we progressed through Essex and Suffolk, but once at its new home, it began a campaign of terrible destruction, slinking out of its basket to hiss and growl at everything in its wake.