Fur and loathing in Liverpool
I’ve been the proud owner of a few pets in my time, some cute and fluffy, some borderline psychotic. There was my tiny cat Sultan and his inexplicable relationship with our enormous Samoyed dog, Emma. They put me in mind of a little flat cap-wearing old northern bloke, smoking woodbines and being terrorised by his enormous, blousy, over made-up wife who he loved to pieces but who drove him insane. When he finally died at the age of 15, she moped for a week and wouldn’t eat. She died two weeks later.

Then there was Giles, a funny looking little rescue kitten with the biggest feet I’ve ever seen on a cat. He came to us with his mum Ellie who had huge, mad yellow eyes and who had been so badly treated in her last house that she hid on top of the kitchen cupboard for the first week and would only come out for food when she thought we weren’t there. Eventually she learned to trust us and would sleep next to me with her paws clasping my hand as she dozed off. Giles too was particularly tactile and would sit on your knee, staring at you, then put his great fat foot smack on your nose until you fussed him. As soon as you stopped, the paw would come back up again and he’d apply a bit more pressure. They were both run over last year, Ellie first, Giles a week later.

But no one comes close to the sheer lunacy of my Burmese cat, Millie. We got her from a rescue centre; the family who’d owned her had moved to Dubai and couldn’t take her. Personally, I think they moved to get away from her. They told me she was about 9. I took her to the vet where I was reliably informed she was at least 13. And she only had 3 teeth, which meant she didn’t so much eat as inhale her food, or, for preference, inhale it, throw it up, then eat it again, much softer and easier to digest that way. She had a thyroid problem which made her a bit scatty and hyperactive, but also caused her awful bladder problems. In order to keep the vet’s bill down I used to check the pH of her urine myself to see if her medication was still working. Greater love hath no woman for her cat than she holds a piece of litmus paper under her while she pisses.

She talked, too, in that weird way Burmese and Siamese cats do. If you said “Hello” to her, she’d respond with a nasal “Hiiiiiyaaaaa”, rather like Janet Street Porter on helium. And she chattered constantly, following you round the house, cataloguing (ha!) her grievances from the day. We used to put her in the washing basket and carry her into the garden while we hung the washing out; she’d sit there contented, talking away to herself.

One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen is the day I had to give her valium, in order to sedate her before a train journey. The vet gave me four tablets with the instruction to give her two before the journey (the other two were for me if I couldn’t cope with her chattering). I managed to shove the tablets down her throat; she skulked off to the kitchen in a strop, only to re-emerge an hour later absolutely off all six of her teats. She fell over and I swear she was laughing. She lay on the floor, waving her paws around, totally unable to fathom how many legs she had or how they worked. She spent the whole journey burbling quietly to herself and occasionally waving a paw at whatever cat-like hallucinations she was having.

She died of old age, fat, happy and soaked in her own piss, which is exactly how I want to go when my time comes...
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Mon 11 Jun 2007, 14:05, Reply)