Cat Holiday
‘A cat is not a dog’ TS Eliot once wrote, for ‘a dog is on the whole/a simple soul’. Recently I have been wondering if the Nobel prize winner (or ‘Old Possum’ as his friends used to call him) made this observation after attempting to take his beloved cats away for the weekend to stay with his pal Virginia Woolf in neighbouring Lewes.
Did he basket them up and load them on to the steam train out of Charing Cross? And did they love him for it or did they spit and sulk and refuse their milk when they got to the end of the line?
Dogs, as he rightly pointed out, are easier to manipulate. Duffle, my border terrier, is happy enough to chug along in the boot of the car or on the floor of an economy-class carriage. Lulu Guinness, our black-and-white cat, however, is considerably more discerning about what she will and will not do to please her humans. She doesn’t do tricks for biscuits for instance. Nor does she roll over and play dead. Admittedly, she will meow if supper is late, but then who wouldn’t?
Still, I was keen to show her Rock House. She’d never seen the sea, and Virginia Ironside, the doyenne of agony aunts, urges cat owners to take them on holiday. They like it, she says. Having taken her advice, I can report that they may like to go on holiday, but they don’t like to travel – and certainly not in a carrier in the back.
I can’t say she liked the house much either – her nose was firmly in the air for the whole week, not least as she regarded the use of a litter tray as a retrograde step. The alternative, to let her outside in an alien garden, was courting disaster and a raft of ‘Lost’ posters, so she spent her minibreak forlornly staring out of the window like a rather elegant prisoner.
She perked up one day when our on-off stray stared back at her through the glass before vanishing, like Eliot’s Macavity, into thin air. He’s shy and retiring, I assured her. But he isn’t shy and retiring, he’s now sleeping with the lady across the road.
Next week: Old bones
Did he basket them up and load them on to the steam train out of Charing Cross? And did they love him for it or did they spit and sulk and refuse their milk when they got to the end of the line?
Dogs, as he rightly pointed out, are easier to manipulate. Duffle, my border terrier, is happy enough to chug along in the boot of the car or on the floor of an economy-class carriage. Lulu Guinness, our black-and-white cat, however, is considerably more discerning about what she will and will not do to please her humans. She doesn’t do tricks for biscuits for instance. Nor does she roll over and play dead. Admittedly, she will meow if supper is late, but then who wouldn’t?
Still, I was keen to show her Rock House. She’d never seen the sea, and Virginia Ironside, the doyenne of agony aunts, urges cat owners to take them on holiday. They like it, she says. Having taken her advice, I can report that they may like to go on holiday, but they don’t like to travel – and certainly not in a carrier in the back.
I can’t say she liked the house much either – her nose was firmly in the air for the whole week, not least as she regarded the use of a litter tray as a retrograde step. The alternative, to let her outside in an alien garden, was courting disaster and a raft of ‘Lost’ posters, so she spent her minibreak forlornly staring out of the window like a rather elegant prisoner.
She perked up one day when our on-off stray stared back at her through the glass before vanishing, like Eliot’s Macavity, into thin air. He’s shy and retiring, I assured her. But he isn’t shy and retiring, he’s now sleeping with the lady across the road.
Next week: Old bones