My human and I would like to wish you all a happy Christmas.
This is the season of the year when we look back over the past year, take stock of the present and make resolutions for the year to come.
One thing is certain: the inevitability of change for all cats, who face the difficulties of sharing our lives with humans. Those cats who live lives completely independent of this species have the reassurance of a changeless though challenging life style. The search for a dry place to sleep, for mice and other prey to eat, the joys of caterwauling nights and the love of kittens, will be for them the pattern of nights and days, as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
But for us who live with capricious and dysfunctional bipeds, these enduring values may be lost in the pace of hectic mutability. Ours is the harder road. The species we domesticated cannot leave things as they are. Homo sapiens (surely a misnomer of the highest order) is addicted to a life of hurry, doing not being, worry and acquisition. New homes, new furniture, new pets, new babies, new routines – this is the demanding and worthless lifestyle they try to inflict on us cats.
It is therefore for us to reassert the timeless values to which our species holds fast –the love of familiar faces, the pleasure of well-known and well marked territories, the inestimable reassurance of unvarying family scent, the excitement of hunting if not prey, then dustbins or even a single autumn leaf. While all is chaos around us, a chaos only too often wantonly instigated by our humans, we need to live our lives in our way. A way nonetheless that allows us to love this extraordinary and self destructive species.
I am reminded, as I write these words, of last autumn when I was able to forgive Celia for the time when she locked me in the garden shed for three hours. I also remember that day of days, when I bagged a partridge, and she was deluded enough to take the quivering bird from me and set it free. Or the many Sundays when I have had to forgo breakfast until an unduly late time because of her determination to sleep well past the proper time of waking. I have risen above all this to offer her forgiveness from the goodness of my black heart.
During the last year I have been on state visits to Paul and Steffi next door. Their pleasure in my company has fully repaid me for the effort of getting through their cat flap though I wish they would offer a choice of cat food not just the same biscuits. These are good quality but a change would be nice. I have also visited their daughter Jessica and, with an exquisite condescension, deigned to sleep on her bed. She was duly honoured and expressed herself appropriately by opening a tin of cat food.
Compassion, as the past year has taught me, is perhaps the single most important virtue that we cats need. If we are to make sense of our companion pets, we should reflect on their history and learn the lessons from it that they seem incapable of seeing.
We must also to practice that other important value of our times, that of tolerance. If we can remember that our humans are vulnerable to that emotional disorder of living in the past or the future, if we can pity them for their inability to enjoy the moment, if we can (and I know it is difficult) feel sorrow for their incapacity to know what is really important in life…. If we can do all this then we can offer them the compassionate love that they so badly need.
As we step over the threshold of another year in the company of these poor deluded humans, may I wish all of us cats a happy New Year.
P.S. I am very indignant about this silly hat. Just when I wanted to look dignified. She tricked me into wearing it. Waited till I was having a little nap on the sofa, popped it on when I was asleep and took the picture. This is a SNATCHED photo. The woman will stop at nothing.
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