Sinclair on life: There's no place like a home to share with a purring presence

These is one of Peter Sinclair's final two columns, sent via e-mail to the Herald just before he died early last Wednesday.


A HOOGA ... hooga ... hooga! Cat alert!

You're either a cat person or you're not, and if you're not, fair warning that this week's isn't the column for you.

Much as I enjoy my periods of "respite care" at St Joe's, there's no place like home, if only for the purring presence of Toy, my ocicat.

Huh?

An ocicat, as its name suggests, looks something like a cross between an ocelot and a cat. Toy has the spots of a wild animal, the squeak of a soft toy - hence his name - and a purr like the distant thunder of a Westie V8.

Where I live seems to be a sort of feline nexus - a constant cavalcade of cats strolls, frisks, lurks, lopes and ambles through the garden outside my window with the sort of Herne Bay aplomb which allows them to offer you a courteous greeting, wander inside, check out your accommodation and food supply and politely take their leave.

They are no more furtive or slinky than their owners, the last of the old central Auckland politesse which remains sandwiched between the faded gentility of Grey Lynn and the sea.

Their elegant presence gives my tiny back garden at the Wallace something of the same feel as the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris (if you ignore the absence of a palace): something sophisticated, urbane.

I mean, they don't come any more distingue than Shelley and Holly, two Birmans who inhabit adjacent apartments. Impeccably laundered and bouffant, they may be seen taking the air on more clement winter afternoons like a couple of well-to-do French widows swathed in expensive furs.

It needs to be made clear, though, that their stately appearances are made separately. If some unlucky chance should bring them outside together, the air of refinement and grand luxe vanishes instantly and they are transformed into two howling cream and white banshees rolling over and over in the shrubbery.

Indeed, keeping the peace among the floating population would require the diplomatic skills of a Metternich.

There's not one but two Oscars, for example, both tabby and virtually indistinguishable. Oscar I lives at the Wallace, a tender-hearted bruiser with two permanent stalactites of spit who will perch on some available part of you and gaze deep into your eyes while dribbling fondly on your pants.

Oscar 2 from over the fence, who appears timid, in fact spends his time hunting Oscar I and all the others in order to beat them up for the sheer sport of it.

His special enemy is a white and ginger who hates the world except for brief interludes when he decides a little strategic purring and head-butting might produce a better result, such as Toy's left-over Shredded White-meat Chicken with Egg and Vegetables (if you don't own a cat, you may not be aware that gourmet catfood these days is far nicer than anything you can buy for humans).

Food is at a premium whenever Pusscat is about. Pusscat is an enormously fat black and white, a bon viveur who can nonetheless move with a desperado's speed and stealth when it's a matter of squeezing through Toy's cat-door, flying across the lounge like an overweight phantom, gulping everything which may safely be gulped in the time it takes me to get to my feet, and flying out again just as I utter my first indignant roar.

And lastly - because I'm running out of column, not of cats - there's Puriri, Toy's girlfriend from upstairs. If cats could be blond ... well, you get the picture. She is a smoke - charcoal with a soft downy white undercoat.

She bats two round eyes at you, quite empty of thought, as sweet and pretty and vapid as Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

And Toy, bless him, normally the most combative cat in the garden (for ocicats are large and powerfully built), just sits and gazes adoringly while Puriri, with the air of Lorelei Lee sampling caviar at the Ritz, scarfs all his Chunked Tuna with Whitebait and Whole Baby Mussels and then has the nerve to look round at him only in order to yell for seconds.

There's a moral somewhere, but I can't for the life of me decide which one ...