Thursday, 7th February 2008.

(Fe)line Management

Emily's friend Maddy lives in Oxford. Her sister owns a house nearby. Said sister has decided that 22 is too young to settle down and be responsible, so she and her boyfriend have decided to become footloose and fancy-free: they are selling the house and moving into rented accommodation. Separately. They are not, apparently, splitting up.

The net result of all this is that Maddy's sister has to get rid of the seven cats that she currently owns. Each cat in turn has a further seven kittens. They're all currently stored in flour sacks inside her front room, and I'd imagine that the move to Cornwall is going to be a nightmare.

In all seriousness, Maddy asked if we wanted two of them: a mother and daughter, named Doug and Chas. No, you did read that correctly. By all accounts they didn't realise that these two were female when they named them. This reminds me a little of the family who adopted Norah, Emily's missing cat from 2003 (and Woody's sister) who miraculously turned up in another part of Cambridge some time after she'd vanished from Langham Road. Her new family had called her Jerry, until a visit to the vet prompted the discovery of a different sort of genitalia and the adoption of the name 'Jebu', which I have to say is a ghastly way in which to address a cat.

We both agreed that the cats could stay but the names couldn't. The two of us debated potential replacements for some time: Penny and Susie, Agatha and Christie, or even Bill and Ben (which is admittedly silly, but no sillier than Doug and Chas). Emily suggested Martha and Rose - a choice I liked and still do - but then she changed her mind on the grounds that Rose was my grandmother's name, and "It would just be too weird".

"I don't think it would. Not really."
"No, look, we can't name a cat after your dead grandmother. You wouldn't call it Teresa, would you?"
"No. That's only one generation. That really would be weird."
"Listen, what would your grandmother say if she knew?"
"I don't care what she'd say. I'd just say 'We're not naming the cat after you, we're naming the cat after Doctor Who's assistant.'"
"We're still not doing it," said Emily. "Martha really irritates me."
"Fair enough. She wasn't that bad by the time she left, though."
"No, but I have a feeling that Catherine Tate is going to be worse."

Eventually (and after they'd been with us for a weekend) we settled on Tabitha and Moppet, which is largely the influence of Beatrix Potter. Tabitha is a two-year-old tabby with white socks and a permanently alarmed expression, and Moppet is a one-year-old tortoiseshell who seems to have become rather fond of me. Not that she isn't similarly fond of Emily - it's just that my other half seems to have been able to earn the affections of both cats, while Tabitha at the moment appears to be avoiding me. This is ironic given that I'm the one who named her - or perhaps that's the point.

We'd actually reached something of a deadlock in the cat-hunting stakes, having received a refusal from the Cats Protection League and finding nothing suitable at Blue Cross. It was the former that upset me the most: our bungalow is a good few yards back from the (admittedly busy) main road, with a substantial (fenced) driveway and reasonably large front lawn, but the CPL home visitor was convinced that even the most sensible cat would bolt from the back door and be instantly killed by a fast-moving truck, in the manner of Gage from Pet Sematary. Never mind the fact that many of the other less sheltered semis along Wantage Road also own cats who have presumably come with them from other locations - this wasn't good enough for our visitor, who, after I'd protested, nodded in a vain attempt at sympathy and said "Well, I'll ask them..." in a manner that suggested the subtext "I won't even try, because there would be no point". Then she looked at me with a suspicious gleam, as if to say "...and how many baby chicks have you tortured lately?".

It was Emily who pointed out that the CPL fosterers are "mostly weirdos...crazy old people who are knee-deep in cats and who don't want to get rid of any of them. We had an art teacher who was one, and she was mad". The situation is compounded when you consider that we've owned cats before and that there is a six-week waiting list at the League for new cats that need rehousing. I know that they have to consider the needs of the animal and I wouldn't want to send a pet to a new home where it was blatantly going to be ignored or mistreated, but this over-zealous risk assessment is pointless. It's a ludicrously bureaucratic system and if this is the way that they do things it's no wonder that they have so many cats they can't house.

Another problem comes when you factor in children. If you have children, the only cats they allow you to adopt are kittens. Or cats who've lived with children who didn't abuse them. If you're lucky. Any other cat, regardless of age, "would benefit from a quiet home with older children, teenagers or adults". Well, I'm sure that they would, but is that in itself a reason not to at least consider a home with toddlers, rather than just cutting you off mid-sentence with the words "No, these cats can't go to homes with children"?. I felt as if I were being punished on the grounds of being a father, and that someone somewhere had decided my lifestyle choice was fundamentally incompatible with owning any sort of cat, regardless of age or experience. For a brief instant I understood a shade of what would-be adoptive parents must go through when they're rejected, albeit on a greatly reduced scale. At any rate, we'd more or less given up on the rescue centres and were about to go private when this one came up. File under Moves In Mysterious Ways.

Both of Maddy's sister's cats arrived last Friday and have spent much of their time since then crouched under the bed - which has had its drawers temporarily removed in order to make them comfortable. They will be kept inside for the foreseeable future, or at least until we've had them spayed and vaccinated. The bedroom seems comfortable for them; it was a couple of days before they really started to venture out. We have locked the cat flap and mostly just leave them to it; Joshua will go in of an evening to say goodnight, in the manner of a wealthy Victorian child visiting his bedridden aunt before being sent upstairs to brush his teeth.

We had a minor panic on Sunday evening when Tabitha appeared to have vanished. Emily and I searched every room from top to bottom. Twice. I went out into the rain and kneeled under the car with a torch. We trailed round both gardens calling out to her and searching under bushes and hedges and in Josh's playhouse. Eventually we found her hiding behind a storage box on a bedroom shelf, crammed into a space that we thought was too small for a beetle, let alone a cat. Two days later she did it again; this time she was in the wardrobe. Both cats are slim and fairly athletic, with far more grace than the admittedly plump Woody ever had, but their ability to contort themselves into shapes small enough to fit through a hairline crack in a door frankly astounds me. When all this happened we were still coming up with names. Emily thought about Houdini or Eugene Victor Tooms, after an X-Files murderer who had the ability to elongate parts of his body in the manner of Mr Fantastic. I suggested that we call her Nina Myers.

"Why do you want to call her Nina Myers?"
"Well, because she vanishes from the public eye for an eternity, and just when you think you're never going to see her again she appears as if from nowhere."

Both cats have their Busy Time at about four or five. In the morning. This wouldn't be a problem as such except that they're fairly neat when it comes to using the litter tray, which means that on most nights over the last week or so we've been woken by the sound of paws covering up recently discarded faeces. This also makes it hard to fish them out; it's a little like gold panning at a theme park sideshow, or putting your hand in the lucky dip. I am marking off the days until we unlock the cat flap on my Outlook calendar.

The last couple of mornings one of them has decided to jump on the bed; the jury is out as to whether it's cupboard love or whether they're just being friendly. I suspect it's a bit of both: Moppet, for her part, has taken to emerging from beneath the bed after I've stepped out of the shower, and wrapping herself around my legs (which is rather sweet, even if it hampers my ability to dress). It's fun watching them get used to things and test boundaries about where they're allowed to sit or not sit. Yesterday I emerged from the bathroom to hear the sounds of mid-range bass notes coming from the study, where we keep the piano. I deduced that either we had noisy (not to mention stupid) burglars, or that Josh had inexplicably managed to climb out of his cot and shuffle along the corridor, or that Tabitha had got up early for a little practice before breakfast.

Josh has thus far been very good with them - to be honest he hasn't had much chance to be rough but on the occasions we've managed to get close I've been impressed by how gentle he's been, so perhaps he's finally learning. On Monday evening I put Thomas on the floor by the wardrobe and he sat there and stared at them, while they stared back. As for me, I can live with the litter changes and early morning alarm calls and the necessity to make sure that certain doors are closed before you open others. It's like working in a space station airlock but it's worth the hassle when a cute furry face peeks out at you from behind a curtain when you call her. I'd forgotten how much fun owning a cat actually was, and feel like the hole we've had in our lives for the past few months has finally been filled up. Just don't tell the CPL.