Talking of cats...

Misty can fall asleep just about anywhere. Her sleeping arrangements seem to go in cycles, for a few nights she’ll sleep at the end of the bed, then move to the chair in the bathroom, maybe for a week or so she’ll treacherously sleep at the top of the stairs, occasionally on the rug, once half sitting on a cool-bag in the car boot, and most recently in the holdall that I’ve been bringing my stuff to Wales in each weekend. She gets right into it and pulls the top across so that she is actually fully inside the bag. I wonder why she likes it in there…

‘Mmmm I like this bag. It’s nice and cosy, not like in the old days. In the old days putting a cat in a bag was a nasty trick and you could get hurt or even deaded. The farmers used to sell their piggles in bags and sometimes instead of a piggle they’d put a cat in the bag, nasty men – ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ meant that they’d been found out and the buyer hadn’t bought ‘a piggle in a poke’.

Not much fun for the cat if the buyer of the piggle didn’t find out until he got home though, it wasn’t the poor cat’s fault, but it’d be him that ended up in the river, all drownded in the bag if he was unlucky. My uncle Tomster used to tell some terrible stories about drowning kittens when I was a just a catnip, he used to have us squealing and mewling in frets with his terrible tales.

Those peoples are always talking about us cats - and why not? After all we are the superior of the two races. Even so, some of the sayings aren’t very nice - ‘there are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream’; what a horrible thing to even thinks. I don’t mind ‘when the cat is away, the mice will play’, after all mice will be mice, or ‘all cats are grey in the dark’, whatever that means – and anyway, I’m grey all of the time not just in the dark - but ‘curiosity killed the cat’ and 'more than one way to skin a cat'! Well I hissing ask you, why would anyone wish that on us?

My favourite is ‘a cat may look at a king’. Quite right! After all us cats have royal blood. I’m descended from the mighty Mu of Egypt.

I’m not one to ‘cat around’, ‘play cat and mouse', ‘set the cat amongst the pigeons’, but I don’t like the phrase ‘raining cats and dogs’, I don’t know why they need to mention THEM, ‘raining cats and cats’ would have been better, that would have been ‘the cat’s pajamas’, not that I wear them, and anyway, I prefer ‘the cat’s whiskers’. I’m not one to ‘turn cat in the pan’- you see I’m not a ‘whichever way the cat jumps’ kind of cat, but when they say ‘like herding cats’ I’d like to see them try. I’m a ‘cool cat’, a bit of a ‘fat cat', not literally obviously, but they’d never say ‘look what the cat dragged in’ about me. Nor ‘cat got your tongue?’, ‘not a cat in hell’s chance’, I’m hardly the silent type.

Now, I’m not one to play ‘cat and mouse', I like to be up-front, come straight out with it - and I don’t like to ‘cat call’ - but it makes me as ‘nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs’ when Hisfault looks at me that. He’s not thinking of taking me to market is he? No he’s ‘grinning like a Cheshire cat’ so he’s not in a moodies with me, he doesn’t mind me being in his bag.

Good, I like this bag, it’s ‘the cat’s maiow’ - some might say that there’s ‘not enough room to swing a cat’, but I think it’s purrfect, it makes me happy - I must ‘look like the cat who ate all the cream’. It’s such fun being in here that it’s ‘enough to make a cat laugh’. I think I’ll call it a sleeping bag - maybe I should patent the idea. Oh well time for a ‘cat nap’ – ‘let sleeping cats lie’ as those peoples SHOULD say…’

Just look at her! Is she smiling? I think she is, she looks just ‘like the cat who caught the canary’…