Icat-sat recently. Was kitten-sitting, actually. This can be problematic if you’re under the inf’ well before lunch. It wasn’t so much the responsible care thingo (you don’t need great heights of neural ingenuity to pour a few Whiskas on the floor), but more so that I kept terminologically tripping up and telling everyone I was ‘kid-napping’ for the evening and had to go prepare a special bed from some old underpants and an empty beer-carton. Cat-nap, kit-sit, kid-nap – what’s in a name, huh?
The kitten in question came into my care before she’d been dubbed, and was delivered with a loose suggestion I could assign a designation. When it comes to kitty nomenclature I’ve recently kept to a dictator theme, ‘cause, well, you know, cats can be kind of demanding-like.
For the last puss me and a miss picked up in the Penh, I floated the puntastically funny names ‘Colonel Garfieldi’, ‘Fidel Catstro’ and ‘Chairman Meow’. It was made quite silently clear that a compromise would be required. We settled on ‘Lenin’ (secretly ‘Cat-imir Lenin’) – which misguided, dyslexic hippy types think is a nod to John of the give-peace-a-chance brigade rather than a reference to the Russian Marxist of massacre fame.
Lenny came into puberty at a very young age. This is known as ‘queening’ in the cat-person community, and quite unfortunately so for those mild-mannered amateur felinologists with old-lady glasses Googling away on the net. After conducting my own research, I firmly believe Len’s precocious early onset puberty to be an epigenetic result of the Khmer Rouge regime and not the cheese-and-Mr-Potato-chips diet I fed her as a child.
As the Catholic Church would do well to learn, sequestering young pussy ain’t smart. Firstly, there’s the cat-shat-on-the-couch issue – which, for those of you playing at home, one would commonsensibly scoop up with a napkin first before going the remains with a hose, right? Then it’s just plain awkward when she starts backing in with arched haunches just as your Cambodian landlady pops ‘round for a cuppa. Those crazy barang, hey? But the endless brain-rape yowling? I’d sincerely prefer a Khmer wedding party permanently camped in my kitchen.
Anyone who’s ever endured the twisted mindfuckery of being holed-up with a cat on heat must surely appreciate that the thought of strangling a couple of kittens might suddenly seem like a sweet cuddle-date with a koala. So, as it was, the decision was simple when several days of severe sleep-deprivation climaxed in an ugly moment of late-night madness involving a pair of oven mitts. Swing open the shutters and leave her to the depraved whims of the village bong toms.
Thus Lenny did beget Idi, Chavez and Fidel. The latter was renamed by her adoptive mama after a non-dictatorial pagan god-pet because ‘Fiddy’ was deemed ‘not feminine enough’ for a she-cat. And that’s the rub: how to brand this new girl-kitty according to my cat n’ autocrat schemata when there’s a distinct global dearth of qualified chick-tators about?
Imelda (Meow-cos?) came to mind. But it’s a shame on the whole of society when we’re forced to widen the net to include the Wives-And-Girlfriends of despots due to a lack of equal opportunities for genocidally minded lasses. ‘Maggie’ was the obvious answer: The Iron Tabby. Obvious until Maggie’s real parents returned from their trip and provisionally named her ‘Frida’ instead. So I cattily continue to campaign and confuse the poor miss by calling her Mags whenever I’m around. She’s since been renamed Yoko in what may be a compromise. Oh-no and Lenin together again. I’m reasonably satisfied with the dictator undertones of the tag, but this fuzzy munschkin will always be Maggie to me.
Strangely, I haven’t been asked to cat-sit since. For those considering it, I’ve previously killed an innocent turtle and turned a white prize-poodle an irreversible shade of brown. But, seriously, I’ve never kidnapped anyone unwilling.