Old Boy
“I’m 86, you know!”
My sixteen and a half year old cat Harley-Boy and I have been together longer than me and Meeester. I love that wee black and white guy, but lately he has been letting us know that he’s not got long left.
Here’s how:
1. By pissing in an open suitcase under our bed this morning like a small racehorse despite many good years of fertilising the neighbours’ gardens with the bounty of his bladder and bowels.
2.By smelling of Death.
3. By wanting to be on us all the time which is unpleasant to anyone with a fully functioning sense of smell.
4. By being really bloody annoying so that when he finally goes we’ll say phrases like “It’s a blessing” or “Thank God for a merciful release”. All old people do this, they become intolerable to be around, so that it’s easier for you to say goodbye.
5.By being constantly hungry because the receptor that tells his brain his tummy is full has short circuited. Like Henry the Eighth, Mr Creosote and George IV, he’s going to eat himself to death.
6. By refusing to spend any of his pension on new clothes because there’s no point, he’ll be dead soon. Hang on, I’m maybe confusing him with my late Gran.
7. By having short bursts of frantic activity like a kitten just to fox us and give us false hope. One minute you’re lamenting how slow and lame he’s become, the next you’re watching him sprint the length of the house to the sound of a tin being opened like a stinky Jesse Owens.
8. By shouting at us all the time. He’s not quite clenching his fist in a defiant gesture, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw him doing it. He’s that angry.
9.By dribbling on everything like a furry John Merrick.
10. By shouting out everyone else’s answers during Trivial Pursuit. Sorry, no. That was my Granda.
11. By constantly laying down the law to his younger feline friends. I swear I heard him miaow something along the lines of“ In my day it was all tins. Sachets? Sachets??We didn’t even KNOW what a sachet was! A sachet was something you did along a windowsill!”
12. By being blind but noticing every move you make, specially with those magical tin opening opposable thumbs and index fingers. It’s like Grandmothers who claim to be deaf but can clearly hear you badmouth them behind their backs.
Harley-Boy, the cat of the Flying Martinis, is knock knock knocking on heaven’s door but I’m concerned, do they have a cat flap?
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Leading Men
Insert caption about Ben Fogel attracting dogs here
Apparently in London there is a company which has been set up to allow the good dogless citizens of the UK capital access to a dog by the hour. This dog rental system, Flexpetz, is apparently doing rather well and is set to be rolled out nationwide in the near future.
The idea of setting up a business hiring a range of dogs out to petless city dwellers in need of some doggy affection for an hour or two is one I’d like to see the Business Plan for, if not the reaction on the bank manager’s face when the proposal was put forward. How can this bizarre idea be a success?
Yet,the more I think about it, I can kind of see the reasoning behind it.
Surely this idea must be borne out of the various research that leads blokes to think that they might meet women in parks if they have an adorable dog attached to them. Perhaps they have tried hanging around in parks without a dog and have been upset at the results, as being dogless in a London park will result in one of the following:
- Tory MPs, Kevin Spacey or George Michael inviting you to their country cottages.
- Women slapping your face as you misguidedly act like Benny Hill.
- Men with matted hair, Scottish accents and choice breath wanting to be your “besshhht mate”.
Get yourself a cute dog and you can’t fail but to make congress with other dog owners. Get a puppy and you can just stand still as the ladies flock to you in vast numbers. It’s simple. All you need are some poop bags, a winsome smile and business cards printed with your mobile number on and you are set.
Other reasons for renting a dog for an hour is to remind yourself what a pain in the arse dogs are. It strikes me that people may rent their spouse or their child a dog for an hour if they show any signs of wanting one full time, on a permanent basis. I am, of course, offering my own dog up for this purpose. One hour with Sonny, the Black Menace, is the equivalent of the old draconian method fathers used to use to put their sons off smoking. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, it involves sitting your boy down and making him smoke a packet of twenty in one go. Sonny is the equivalent of a pack of Capstan Full Strength in that regard. You’ll be settling for a goldfish in no time.
In a similar vein, broody girlfriends and wives unsure of their partner’s parenting potential may rent a dog for the hour to test their man’s skills in looking after an animate object. And since you can’t rent kids by the hour as that’s a bit flippin’ dodgy, and generally frowned upon, dogs are the next best thing. If the man comes back with the dog alive…. Scratch that…if the man comes back with the dog at all after an hour, you’ve got a good basis for starting a family. If the dog has been left outside a pub and it takes your man until bedtime to remember about it, you either need to go without babies or get a new prospective father.
Meanwhile, in these troubled times, where gangs of hoodies roam the streets, certain types of dogs may be available to help you make the walk home safely and without incident. If the dog rental system hasn’t cottoned onto this, then they are surely missing a trick. Walking down Dalston high street with a snarling Rottweiler called Genghis, may mean that you need not fear for your life.
However, some inner city ghettos may prove tough even for the snarliest of hired-gun canines. Might I suggest the development of the Wild Boar Unit or a Tiger Division; a division for which my gorgeous husband surely is the poster boy.
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Idiot gets Arm ripped off by Orang-utan
I’m an animal person. But I have a ridiculous attitude towards them.
I get very sentimental about them and even odious ones pull at my heart strings.
Tonight whilst driving home from the radio station I saw a seagull hopping about on the central reservation with a bloodied hanging off broken wing. Seagulls are the scourge of Aberdeen. They are not called “Kebab fuelled shitehawks” for nothing. They are the size of small dogs and every week or so the local paper has a debate about what is to be done about them. The mess, the noise, the dive bombing of small children holding ice-creams; their carnage knows no bounds. Ask any Aberdonian what the answer to the problem should be and people will talk cyanide, to shotguns, to nuclear weapons.
Yet tonight, I slowed down my car and looked at the poor mite with the broken wing and my heart burst. What a horrible couple of days is lying ahead for the broken, little, crap-eating blighter. I found myself welling up over the kind of beast whose only contribution to the world is the ability to clear a Saturday night street of dropped chips and spilled vomit.
I get a bit stupid when it comes to animals. An orang utan once held it hand out to me in London Zoo when I was doing a filming job. Quite a young thing, judging by its size, the ape fixed his gaze at me and held its hand out to me like a small child would. I wanted to stretch my hand straight back, but could see the newspaper headlines the next day,
“Bloody Idiot gets Arm ripped off by Orang-utan”.
I looked back at the lovely ginger face with its gentle expression and I was seconds away from an arm socket rip out just because I have a Disney attitude to wild animals. I still would like to believe that the ape genuinely just wanted to hold my hand and that it would have been a beautiful moment between our two species. We’d have been like Clint and Clyde in “Every Which Way But Loose”, with me organising a zoo break out just to live my life and share adventures with new friend. Disney attitude or no, I would not make my new friend wear shorts, though.
Last week, I took the kids to see the film “Speedracer” which features a family who have a pet chimp. At tea that night, I argued that having a pet chimp would be amazing. Meeester scoffed at me. But I won him round immediately by outlining the comedy potential of such an addition to our family. Never mind that chimpanzees are actually flippin’ dangerous and often hunt, violently attack, and eat little monkeys in the jungle. David Attenborough will tell you that.
Potential violent attacks aside, I sealed the deal by pretending to be a chimp covering my eyes and shrieking at the sight of Meeester coming out of the shower, or someone falling over, or some other comedy caper. Our comedy chimp would not wear shorts though.
Stupid as my attitude to animals is, I did not stop the car and rescue the seagull. Just in case you are thinking that I’m about to announce a new addition to the (now, literally) Flying Martinis. That would be a ridiculous thing to do. Seagulls can turn on a friendly human. My old ginger cat, MacPherson, once dragged one in through the cat flap. Quite a feat in itself, once the cat got the bird fully inside, he immediately thought better of the situation and scarpered, leaving the seagull to thrash about the kitchen systematically destroying everything that lay in its shit strewn path. Seagulls do not make good house guests.
In other animal news, earlier this week Sonny the Dog caught a mouse and tried to eat it. Just like a cartoon the dog looked at us with a mouse’s tail hanging out of his chops. Sadly our little friend did not survive the attack and Indy and I sat with the saliva soaked rodent for an hour on a towel, until his heart gave out from the shock of the ordeal. We love Stuart Little in our house and I’d love a little talking mouse who drives a car. I guess it just wasn’t to be.
So, for the time being we stick to the run of the mill animals, our menagerie stays at Harley the thousand year old cat, Lulu and Libby, the most beautiful pussycat dolls, and Sonny the comedy dog.
No seagulls, talking mice, chimps or oran-utans. Sadly.
And in case we’re in any doubt, Sonny the comedy dog will does not wear shorts.
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