Which brings us to the most important consideration in the naming of cats: never give a cat a name you wouldn't mind shouting out in a strained, worried voice around midnight while banging a tin bowl with a spoon. Stick to something short.
That being said, most common names for Real Cats are quite long and on the lines of Yaargeroffoutofityarbarstard, Mumthere'ssomethingORRIBLEunderthebed, and Wellyoushouldn'tofbinstandingthere. Real Cats don't have names like Vincent Mountjoy Froufrou Poundstretcher IV, at least for long.
The chosen name should also be selected for maximum carrying power across a busy kitchen when, eg, a bag full of prime steak starts moving stealthily towards the edge of the table. You need a word with a cutting edge. Zut! is pretty good. The Egyptians had a catheaded goddess called Bast. Now you know why.
Illnesses
Real cats are subject to the same illnesses that unReal cats get, although by and large Real cats tend towards rude health—not counting, of course, the occasional little intestinal problem which could happen to anyone.
However, there are several specifically Real cat ailments:
Weird, this. We had a cat who suffered badly. The vet couldn't explain it. The cat could climb trees, ladders, anything, it was as agile as you please, but when it tried to run fast it was all okay until its back legs tried to pass. Then it'd get so embarrassed at the sight of its own rear end coming past on the fast lane it would stop and wash its paws in shame. If it forgot itself and really made a dash for it, it was likely to end up facing the wrong way.
Well, okay. Not common. But one of the biggest cat ailments we've ever faced. Ho—we said—let's be ecological, remember the ozone layer, have no truck with flysprays, whatever happened to good old-fashioned flypaper. Finally found some, after shopkeepers made mad faces (“man here wants flypaper, keep smiling, desperately signal assistant to call police, will soon be asking for crinoline hoops and a pound of carbide crystals”). Got it home, hung it up in open window, bluebottles soon stuck fast like small angry currants, hooray, paper swayed in breeze, Real Cat leapt… Real Cat becomes spinning furry propeller. Paper snaps, cat falls out of window, begins massive chase across gardens as it tries to escape from unwound paper trailing behind it, finally brought to earth in distant shrubbery because only one leg now capable of movement.
Panic, panic, where box flypaper came in? This is 1980s, paper bound to be covered with Polydibitrychloroethylene-345, oh god, cat now immobile with terror inside kitchen towel. Fill huge bowl with warm water, drop cat in, swish it around, cat doesn't protest, oh god, perhaps Polydibitrychloroethylene-345 already coursing through tiny veins. Change water, rinse again, brisk towelling down, put cat on path in sun.
Cat looks up, gives mildly dirty look, turns and walks slowly up garden, lifting each paw one at a time and giving it a shake, like C. Chaplin.
After all that it was a bit of a let-down to find the flypaper box at the bottom of the waste bin and find that, far from being the complex chemical trap we'd feared, it was just some jolly ecological plain sticky paper.
We've always put this down to voles.
Never been sure that this is a symptom of illness. It probably comes under the heading of Games: (“Hey, I'm being watched, let's eat some grass, that'll worry them, they'll spend half an hour turning the house upside down looking for the cat book, haha.”)
Can be fatal. But not always. We knew a cat who regarded motorised vehicles as sort of wheeled mice, and leapt out on them. It had so much scar tissue that its fur grew at all angles, like a gooseberry. Even its stitches had stitches. But it still lived to a ripe old age, terrorising other cats with its one good eye and forever jumping out at lorries in its sleep. It was probably looking for one that squeaked.
However healthy the cat, there will come a time when it needs a Pill. Oh, how we nod and look like respectable, concerned cat owners as the vet hands us the little packs (one grey one every five days and then a brown one after ten days, or was it the other way round?) And once we were all innocent and thought, the cat food smells like something off the bottom of a pond anyway. Real cat can't possibly notice if we crumble the damn things up a bit and mix them in…
As we get wiser, of course, we learn that the average Real cat has taste buds that make the most complex computer-driven sensory apparatus look like a man with a cold. It can spot an alien molecule a mile off (we tried halving the suspect food and adding more from the tin, and kept on doing it until it was like that famous French chemical experiment with the weird water and everything, there surely couldn't have been any pill left, but Real cat knew). Next comes the realist phase (“after all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.”) You take the pill in one hand and the cat in the other…
Er…
You take the pill in one hand and in the other you take a large kitchen towel with one angry cat head poking out of the end. With your third hand you prise open the tiny jaws, insert the pill, clamp the jaws shut and, with your fourth hand tickle the throat until a small gulping noise indicates that pill has gone down. You wish. It hasn't gone down. Because it's just gone sideways. Real cats have a secret pouch in their cheeks for this sort of thing. A Real cat can take a pill, eat a meal, and then spit out the slightly damp pill with a noise which, if this was a comic strip, would probably be represented as ptooie.
It is important to avoid the third stage, which basically consists of Man, Beast and Medicine locked in dynamic struggle and ought to be sculpted rather than described (as in Rodin's “Man Giving Pill to Cat”).
The fourth stage is up to you. Usually by now the cat is displaying such a new lease of life that the treatment might be said to have worked. Grinding the pill up with a bit of water and spooning it in sometimes does the trick. A fellow Real cat owner says powdering the wretched object—the pill, not the cat, although by stage four you'll entertain any idea—mixing it with a little butter and smearing it on a paw is a sure-fire method, because the cat's ancient instinct is to lick itself clean. Close questioning suggested that he hadn't actually tried this, just deduced it from theoretical studies (he's an engineer, so that explains it). Our view is that an animal that will starve and asphyxiate before taking its medicine won't have any trouble with a grubby paw.