‘That room,” declared Greg on Sunday morning, “is a biological hazard.” He was referring to the second-best bedroom, which is otherwise known as the Lush Places Refuge for Formerly Wild Cats. Once tamed, wild cats overnight turn into the laziest, most pampered and fussiest tame cats. They take to a bed with three layers of formerly fancy blankets – formerly, because they like nothing more than attacking fancy blankets during rare bursts of activity. They have to be pushed outside before their legs atrophy.
Pixie holds the record for the longest time spent lying underneath layers of once-flash blankets. Four days is her slumber record, broken only by brief loo and food stops.
I think she believes herself to be in some reality TV show where the cat that can stay longest in bed wins a lifetime supply of cat treats. I hope she wins. Do you know how much those things cost?
Sleeping in with Pixie would be the most boring reality TV show ever, with the possible exception of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, in which the most exciting thing that ever happens is one interchangeable sister is a cow to another interchangeable sister.
In Sleeping in with Pixie, an exciting thing did happen last night. There was a poison gas incident just before midnight. None of the cats will admit to being the producer of the nuclear velocity fart. I blame my friend Janet, who lives just around the bend with Blokesy Stokesy. Janet, like me, collects cats. I am currently winning that contest. My six trump her four but there is no guarantee she won’t arrive home with another armful of kittens sometime in the near future.
I blame Janet for the poison gas incident because she recommended I feed the cats, the starving millions as we call them, tinned mackerel, because it’s a damn sight cheaper than the usual supermarket offerings, which are sending us to the poorhouse. Still, better the poorhouse than living in a designated biological hazard, I reckon.
A chap in Britain, Nicky Haslam, who designs rooms for toffs, decrees himself the arbiter of taste versus tacky. He would no doubt shudder, theatrically, at the state of the second-best bedroom here at Lush Places and declare it horribly “common”. You can tame the wild out of wild cats but you can’t cure their common table manners. They spit food all over the floor. Nancy Mitford would have said our cats were decidedly Non-U. U stood for upper class; non-U meant you were middle-class, with pretensions towards being U, and hence common. Spitting your tucker on the floor might be the very definition of common.
Haslam declares many things common. He annually lists these things on a tea towel, which you can buy from his website. This may or may not be common. It does rather reek of being “in trade”, which is dreadfully common, one would have thought. Some bewilderingly daft definitions of common, according to Haslam, are: skiing in France, celebrity chefs, Puglia, ordering lobster (showing off how much money you’ve got is common).
Now he has taken on garden adornments. Stone frogs are common. Sculptures of stags, with their antlers painted silver, are not. Those Lloyd Loom woven outdoor furniture sets beloved of the aspirational classes are beyond common. Shabby old bits of garden furniture are not common.
We must, therefore, be posh. All gardeners have garden furniture. No gardener ever sits on their garden furniture. They are too busy gardening. We have two rickety, lichen-encrusted garden benches and an old cane chair, happily unravelling, which I picked up from a Hospice thrift shop for 20 bucks.
The chickens use one of the benches to roost on. The other bench is only ever used for putting lambs on for cute photo opportunities. The sheep think that the old cane chair is something to eat. Sheep think everything is something to eat. The cats like to sit on the old cane chair on the rare occasions they can be persuaded to go outside. They think they’re posh.
