Saturday 18 June 2016

our furry friends

Mr Fluffy's new party piece, now that he can leap on to the kitchen table in a single bound, is to jump on to the top of the kitchen bin.  It's quite endearing, though the day must come when he leaps just as one of us is opening the bin and he smashes into the lid.  Less endearing is his ambition to climb the sitting room curtains.  He is quite good at climbing, and can come down as well as going up, but I am never in my life going to buy that much Nina Campbell furnishing fabric again and would like the curtains to last another couple of decades.

The energetic kitten is determined to follow suit, but is less good at climbing than his brother and gets stuck with his entire body weight dangling from one claw, whereupon he wails piteously and has to be rescued.  I have tried distracting him with a toilet roll tube, and a miniature football, and even a little ball with bells on it, but a minute later he is back up the curtain.  The Christmas tree is going to be a laugh this year.

Meanwhile Mr Fluffy jumped on to the hall dresser for the first time this morning, so the pottery, postcards, and nature table collection that normally live there have been cleared away until it feels safe to put them out again.  The pottery is more or less irreplaceable.  The giant cups and saucers were made by an Essex potter who is now sadly dead, the little Moorish inspired vase was brought back from the Holy Land by a friend of my grandmother, a jug was a wedding anniversary present, I bought the dumpy and vaguely Aztec inspired bird on a school exchange visit to Brittany, the strange angular teapot is a souvenir of a holiday visit we made to St Ives, and the matching Whichford jugs a reminder of a joint trip to the Hampton Court Flower Show.  And so on and so on. The cuttlefish I picked up on the beach at Dorset's Golden Cap, while one of the bird nests has strands of thin green twine artfully incorporated among the grass and moss.  I do not want Mr Fluffy smashing any of it, or the kittens chewing it.  The house is starting to look increasingly minimalist, as more breakable objects are secreted day by day in the spare room.

Our Ginger could not decide this morning whether he wanted to be in or out.  What he would really have liked was to be in the house but without the kittens, but as is so often the way in life his desired outcome wasn't an option.  He compromised by sleeping on the chair in the outer hall, so that he could keep an eye through the glass on what was happening within, but the kittens could not get at him.  After lunch he managed quite a long session in the sitting room with them, and after they had finished sniffing at his temptingly waving tail, and he had finished magisterially waving a large paw at them, they all settled down to sleep, Our Ginger on the sofa and two of his tiny fanboys stretched out above him along the back of the sofa.  Perilously close to the curtains for when they woke up.

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