The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (18 page)

Don’t allow your kitten to get too cocky

Once you’ve
started to let
your kitten run around outside, you’ll notice it starting to get a little bit full of itself, thinking it’s really shit hot for decking a twig, effeminately breaking a bee’s wing or gleefully slapping about some of the more colourful, less invasive weeds in your garden. Try not to mock the kitten too blatantly for its efforts. Instead, subtly patronise it.

Try phrases
like ‘That’s good – I’m sure a lot of
other cats your age would feel that it was an achievement too, until they’d amassed more life experience’, or ‘I suppose it’s all about perspective: that twig probably seems quite “Safari” if you’ve previously spent all your life in west London.’ This will mean that the kitten will be easier to control and subjugate once it begins to meow properly, gets proper claws and starts wanting to use your bedroom as a cat service station in the middle of the night.

The Legend of Chimney Dog

Chimney Dog is
a truly terrifying figure, stories of whose dark deeds have been passed down through kitten folklore for hundreds of years. A transsexual, soot-black hound with the back legs of a human blacksmith and the claws of a bitter and lonely former actress, he-she is said to climb down chimneys and steal kittens in the dead of night, when humans are asleep. Even if your kitten’s elders have not told it about Chimney Dog, there will be a deep, primal part of it that already somehow knows he-she is out there, waiting. If you find your kitten staring at your chimney with a fearful look on its face, more than likely it is thinking about Chimney Dog. Maybe best simply to block your chimney or get a wood burner or something?

Put big things around your kitten

By the time you’ve
had your kitten a few weeks, your kitten will really be settling in, fully exploring your house and discovering its favourite plants to eat, places to sleep and objects from which to hang upside down. It will be sneaking up on other cats and generally acting like a miniature version of Popeye Doyle in the early scenes of
The French Connection
. However, it’s very important that you remind it at all times that it is, in fact, just a kitten. A good way of doing this is to place big objects near it or over it: feet and legs are good, as are bigger cats with shadowy portentous auras, inflatables, and oversized vegetables.

Your kitten and the self-employed workplace

As everyone knows, kittens
aren’t legally able to work until they are ten months old. In the meantime, however, they can be paid informally on a freelance basis for house and garden jobs, such as window cleaning, the planting of minor crops, and sweeping – although not the sweeping of chimneys, obviously, because of the whole Chimney Dog thing.

Encouraging your kitten to be self-aware

If your kitten
misbehaves, don’t shout at it. Instead, ask it to take a long hard look at itself: Is it the kitten it thinks it is? Has it been fooling itself, and glossing over the flaws in its personality?

Kittens who scrump

Not all kittens go
scrumping, but there’s every chance that, if your kitten lives in a rural area, it will get caught up in scrumping culture, due to peer pressure. If you find that your kitten has been scrumping, reprimand it, then take it to the house of the growers of the fruit that it scrumped and make it apologise to them. You might also want to revoke its disco privileges for a day or two, but don’t be too harsh on it. Remember: scrumping is a relatively minor crime for adolescent kittens. Your kitten could be doing something much worse in this day and age: sniffing car exhaust pipes, say, or joining forces with the feral kittens to fight geese in the local park.

Send your kitten out to spend a night in a tree

The time-honoured ‘Tree
Night’ is a harsh but necessary stage in a kitten’s initiation. The big misconception about it is that it has to involve a big tree: an oak or giant redwood really isn’t necessary. A moderate ash or fig, or even a slightly decrepit silver birch, will suffice. The kitten might
look fearful as it climbs towards the upper branches but, behind the veneer of pain, you will be able to see in its eyes that it knows you have its best interests at heart. As it reaches the pinnacle and finds a spot to rest for the next nine hours, it will achieve a special kind of meditative
calm and find itself truly living in the moment like never before. The following morning, you will be all the better off as the kitten greets you, shivering, at the top of your ladder and smothers you with kisses and compliments, and you will finally know that the difficult early stages are over, and you and your kitten are ready to properly start your new life together.