Sunday 8 January 2012

The secret life of cats

A belated happy new year. I would like to pretend that I've been hungover from drinking far too much at New Year, but in truth we've been the plague house. Hubbie was poorly most of the Christmas break and then I got poorly just in time for him to go back to work.

All the time indoors has given me a new insight into what my cat does all day. Not everything, of course, only the things I can actually see him doing. So that's mostly sleeping under the radiator, sleeping on the spare bed, staring out of the window into the garden, running around the garden, miaowing at me for food, eating food and back to the start again. I kind of assumed that was his life, but the neighbours often comment that they've seen him and it does beg the question what does he do when we can't see him ?

When you're not around your cat has a whole other life that you know nothing about. We've always known that they have different names in other people's houses - I like to guess that Neo is called Snowball, Snowflake or Snowy in his alternate life. What we don't know is if they have friends, other favourite places to sleep, a family that feeds them.

When we first met Neo he had been staying at Battersea for a few weeks and we knew he was around six and a half years old. He was friendly and clearly loved attention and hubbie knew immediately that he wanted Neo to come and live with us. We were advised that he had some health issues that would need to be checked regularly and that we would be advised to have a reliable vet to care for him.

Strangely, while he's always complained about the travel to get to the vet, once at the surgery Neo is always very content once he's there. On one occasion when he was having a check up with the senior vet she commented that years ago they had a kitten called Neo whose owners had moved far away.  I've wondered ever since if he's the same white cat called Neo and if he remembers living in this area years ago.

Hubbie is still considering a 'cat cam' but I suspect we'll have hours of footage of a very still feline and some of an empty space. I'm amazed no one has ever considered employing cats to work as spies, they have stealth, they rule the house and they still manage to get us to love them.

Until a time when my cat decides to share his other life with me I can only imagine. It's this kind of 'time on your hands' stuff that leads to multi million pound book deals you know - well I can dream can't I ?

1 comment:

  1. We got one of those catcams for Ollie. We discovered that he liked to go out and sit staring at a brick wall four hours.

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