Vacuum cleaners, hair blowers..... we need a safe haven.

Dear George, 

I’m a very, very social kitty! Very friendly (even if I don’t look so at times).

The reason I’m so friendly is because we, the cats, are fearless and sometimes

people or dogs or other animals feel really intimidated and are afraid of us; they can see “the lion” in us! I would say we are as courageous as we are curious! So, I’m trying to “meet and greet” different things and different people. 

But there are these two things I don’t know how to make friends with: the vacuum cleaner and that “thing” my mom uses to blow dry her hair!  Yes, I tried to get close to them but they would just blow hot air back to me! I tried to rub my head against them but they make this terrible, scary noise (which gets louder closer I get)! I tried to meow to them but none meowed back to me! Guess they are not speaking “things”! So, since I have to live in the same house with these two, I need your advice - how I can befriend them? 

Even if I summon the Lion in me ….that lion falls flat as no real lion has ever experienced a vacuum cleaner or blow dryer in the jungle!  So, what do I do now?

The roaring kitty 

Angelica

Dear Angelica,
Summon your pride, congratulate yourself on your beauty,  and remind yourself that these unspeakable devices are beneath your notice. We all hate them. When I see the vacuum cleaner come out of the cupboard or hear the hair dryer being switched on, I make myself scarce. Either I leave the house altogether or find my own safe haven.
What is your safe haven? Every cat needs a safe haven. Mine is on top of a wardrobe in the spare bedroom. It's high up, admittedly a bit dusty, but away from human interference. For some of us it's under the bed: others go and sit in a garden shed: or find a hiding place with the clean clothes inside the airing cupboard.
Humans should never ever disturb us while we are there. There are thoughtless humans that pull us out from under the bed, or harass us while we are on the top of the wardrobe. They should be trained to leave us alone for as long as we need to stay there.
Regaining our composure may take a little time.... But when we feel serene again we can stroll back into our humans' life.
Yours 
George.
PS. One of the compensations for becoming deaf in old age is that these devices become less scary.

Roof top climbing - it's the life

Dear George,

We are two Burmese cats, Inky and Ellie. We thought we’d let you know that we have invented a new way into our humans’ bedroom. We could simply go through the door but this is a much more interesting route.

We start from the garden and jump up to a ground floor window sill. We leap from there to another sill at a higher level. Then we spring onto the sloping roof of a lean-to. Walking up that roof we can jump on to the pergola. The next stage is to prance gingerly for 5 yards along one of its transverse beams. At the far end of the pergola there's a hop up to the edge of the conservatory's sloping roof. We climb up that carefully. After progressing along the ridge we jump to the bedroom window sill.

Then all we need to do is to mew loudly until one of the humans finally finds out where the noise is coming from and opens the window to let us in.

What next? Well we jump into the bedroom, down the stairs and then out into the garden to start the whole exciting procedure all over again! What do you think of that?

Inkyman and Ellie

Dear Inkyman and Ellie,

I really admire your leopard-like mountaineering. Marvellous photos of you on the top of the roof looking down on the pedestrian world of human beings.

This is the outward visible sign of our species' inward superiority over humans. Don't see many humans high up on roofs - except those poor souls that have to put up a ladder to get there. If only we had cat olympics we could show the world what we can really do.

Climbing allows us to practise a particularly good game. We climb up trees and then stay on a high branch mewing with apparent distress. The poor old humans come up, stand under the tree, and make distress noises themselves. Out come a ladder and up climbs a shaky human.

Then, just before he/she reaches up to grab us, we jump down with ease.... game, set and match to us felines.

Simple. So simple. They always fall for it.

George

P.S. Due to shocking absence of my secretary Celia, my comments were a day late... I am thinking of firing her. It's just not good enough.

The negligence of my personal staff

We cats expect a certain level of service from our humans. In return for our beauty and company, we expect doors open, regular meals , warm beds (which we are generous enough to share with them), and thoughtful personal service with proper attention health and safety. I am sorry to report that Celia has failed badly. She has been astonishingly negligent in her duties. She has failed to carry out a proper risk assessment of the garden shed. And she utterly forgot its obvious dangers to a healthy active cat (me). It happend early in the morning when she went out in her dressing gown to get the floating device for the garden pond - it stops the pond icing over and allows animals in the water to breathe because gases don't build up below the ice. If she had done a proper risk assessment she would have identified the high risk of my getting shut inside the shed. Obviously when she goes into the shed, I follow her - to check territory, to see if mice are living in the shed, and to make an assessment of whether there is anything else interesting there - spiders, frogs, wood lice and so forth. As is my wont, as could be expected by a better member of staff, I went in there and was nosing around. She shut the door on me without a thought. Worse still she walked off. I was there for three hours until Ronnie saw my angry face at the window and set me free. Worse still, I had not had time to perform my morning toilet in the nearby seed beds. So there was an ugly rush to the vegetable patch, a great deal of frantic digging, and I finally squatted down with enormous relief.
It was very emotionally upsetting. Tramatising even. I expected better of her. She is an unreliable woman and she is lucky that I didn't just leave home. I have not forgiven her.