As for you, as a catless catlover you will find that a stray turns up outside your new door within days. We think some sort of agency sends them.
The Real cat and other animals
Remember. From the cat's instinctive point of view, the animal world consists of:
1) things that eat it
2) things it can eat
3) things it can eat but regret immediately;
and
4) other cats.
But we then expect it to be perfectly at ease when faced with:
a) Meals On Treadwheels
b) meals in cages (the Flying McNuggets)
c) mad quivering meals in hutches, which in the worst cases may be forced to join our Real cat, plus two dolls and a teddy bear, for a back-lawn tea, party consisting of water and crumbled biscuits
d) feathery meals which are actually encouraged to come onto the back lawn for breadcrumbs
e) meals in ponds
f) large grubby barking things
g) miscellaneous.
It's a wonder they stay sane. In fact, as all Real cat owners know, cats get around most problems caused by all of the above by pretending that they don't exist. Just like us, really.
The only household pet I have ever known actually faze a Real cat is a tortoise. This may be because a cat has problems coming to terms with the fact that a tortoise is a fellow fauna. It appears to be a small piece of scenery which inexplicably moves about.
These days you don't shove a tortoise in a box to tough it out for the winter, since no one makes tortoises any more and they change hands, people keep telling us, for zillions of pounds. We used to let ours doze the winter away in front of the fire, lurching awake every day or two for a bit of lettuce. A peaceful, untroubled existence, but one which did not appeal to Real cat because a tortoise is impossible to frighten. Tortoises don't know the meaning of the word “fear” or, indeed, any other word. Oh, they nip into their shell at a passing shadow out of common sense, but as far as they are concerned the presence of a cat in front of the fire just means that here's a pile of fur that is nice and warm to burrow under.
They sneak up on it, because for tortoises there's no other way, and the first the cat knows is when the edge of a shell is purposefully levering it off the carpet. The cat goes and sits in the corner and looks worried. And then one of them develops an unnatural appetite for cat food. The Real cat sits looking gnomically at a shell seesawing madly on the edge of its dish, and sighs deeply.
The Real cat and the gardener
Peas, greens, parsnips, rhubarb… these are, the concerns of your average gardener.
Black thread, twigs, wire netting, incendiary mines… these are the concerns of your average gardener who has a Real cat. Or, rather, whose neighbour has a Real cat.
It is possible to cultivate your garden when there are Real cats around, but the price of celers, is eternal vigilance. As one exasperated Real gardener14 remarked, “It's not just what they Do, it's what they do afterwards”, viz, the conscientiously clawed conical heaps, out of which the little yellow shoots of what would have been beans poke pathetically.
The Great Ballistic Clod of Earth has already been touched on. Other possible defences are:
Look, these don't scare anything. Well, all right, maybe moles. Come to think of it, we haven't had any moles since installing them. We've never had any moles, actually.
Real cats step over it.
Since it always rains incessantly imediately, this barrage is laid down, we've never found out if any of them work. Anyway, we always feel vaguely uneasy about this sort of thing. Probably there's some international Accord that no one's bothered to tell us about.
The point is that the cat's desire to get onto your pitiful plot is far greater, believe me, than your desire to keep it off. When Nature calls, it shouts. Which leads us on to:
The gardener's friend. Watch their Expressions when They Find An Impenetrable Barrier of Steel laid Above Your Precious Seeds!!!
You can make little wire bootees for the beans, too, and encase the lower parts of your more valuable apple trees in demure corsets of wire. The snags are 1) a garden that looks like an MoD instalation, 2) a tendency to trip up, and 3) the fact that plants grow through the wire.
This doesn't matter with things like onions, but we left it too late with the potatoes and they had to be dug up as a unit. But if you can't tolerate this, your only recourse is:
But we're not that kind of people.15
The Real cat and children
Ah. They can grow up together.
Well, not really. By the time the average child is no longer doing Winston Churchill impersonations the kitten has grown up and, unless Measures have been Taken, has a family of its own. Kittens and children get on like a house on fire—and just think about what it's actually like in a house on fire…
A Real kitten in a Real household with a junior member can expect to be:
1) pulled
2) pushed
3) imprisoned in Cindy's bedroom with Cindy, Mr T in one of Cindy's dresses16, a one-armed teddy bear, a fearsome Madeofplasticoid with Lazer-zap cannon and a small pink pony
4) fed unsuitable food. In this category can be included peas, ghastly sweet pink goo, and a fortnight's worth of Kittytreats in three minutes
5) inserted into unsuitable clothing (cf. Cindy, Barbie, Action Man, etc).
6) carried around by being held in the middle, so that large amounts of cat flop down on either side. (Strangely enough, most cats put up with this, even when they are great fat neutered toms. It's like all that business with unicorns. Only young maidens can get away with it. The rest of us need stitches.)
It's not that children and young animals get along especially well. It's just that young animals aren't experienced enough to know what's going to happen. Stick to puppies. They're practically childproof.
The cats we missed
As has been mentioned already, Man has throughout history tried to overcome various deficiencies—his inability to outrun a hare, dig up a badger, bite lumps out of a burglar's behind, carry brandy barrels through deep Alpine snow, etc—by breeding a variety of dog to do it for him. The dog, in fact, has been a kind of handy Plasticine, rolled out thin or squeezed up fat to suit the demands of the time.
14. This is not the time and place for extensive definitions. Let's just say that the Real gardener is not the same as the Proper (or Radio) gardener. For example, when the Proper Gardener has finished digging, harrowing, sifting, aerating and raking, he has a tilth, possibly even a friable one; when the Real gardener has conscientiously done all these things he has a large heap of stones, roots, twigs and old seed row markers (Country folk used to believe that certain types of stone were “mother stones”, which gave birth to new stones every year; under our garden is a Plastic Seed Row Marker generator.) A Proper gardener has a lawn consisting of Chewings Fescue, Red Bents and Ryegrass; a Real Gardener has moss imbedded with dolls' legs, plastic alphabet characters and clothes pegs. And large areas down to Cat.