LIFE: We Ain't Getting No Cat

'When you're older,' my girlfirend said to my son last night, 'we'll get you a gerbil.'

'Yes', I said, 'so you can learn the meaning of death in just two years'.

My ears are carefully tuned to listen carefully to anything my girlfriend says regarding pets. By telling my son he could have a gerbil, she was telling me that we ain't getting no cat.

When it comes to pets I have one rule: they have to be self-managing, shit-wise. That means a cat and nothing else. Rodents, fish, birds and lizards all need much too much waste management for my taste, and dogs are four-legged shit factories, shitting everywhere. Eat, shit, sleep, stink and lick balls, that's a dog for you. Cats, on the otherhand, like to keep all toilet matters to themselves, something you can plainly see when observing a cat in a litter tray. Don't they look embarrassed?

I pretended not to hear what she was really saying, taking instead her statement as an invitation to talk about pets in general.

'Or we could get a lovely cat,' I said, my voice bristling with excitement. My enthusiasm for cats gets cranked up by her opposition to them.

'We're not getting a cat - ever,' she said, flatly. That's that then: she's stated the case, laid down the law. She raised one eyebrow. In Roger Moore this looks quizzical: in her it's a full-stop, a salute to her statement. How do you like them apples? I don't care if you don't. It's a happy-go-fuck-yourself face if ever there was one.

She likes, every now and then, to bring up a subject of previous dispute just to make sure that we're both still singing from her hymn sheet. I don't know why cats swam into her concious and out through her mouth that night, but there's probably a rhythym there somewhere. She may be worried that if she doesn't express her opposition to cats at regular intervals, I may get the impression that she know longer cares and come home with a bag of kittens.

'We might...'

'We won't, not ever, we're not getting a cat.'

'Listen,' I said firmly, 'don't start writing the constitution before we're out of the valley.'

'What do you mean?' she asked.

Naturally I know better than to simply tell her what I mean. 90% of the time we both know what's meant by everything we say, but if I tell her what I mean, without finding out what she thinks I mean, it may turn out that she thought I meant something entirely different, so we'd have two things to disagree about. I meant, in this case, don't be such an old bossy-boots, laying down the law. So I said 'what do you mean, what do I mean?'

'What fucking valley?'

So you see, I'd missed the meaning of her 'What do you mean?'

'I mean... the valley of our relationship, the land we're in.'

'And?'

'And we're on a long journey, to the promised land, our life together.'

'So we're still on a journey, we haven't arrived?'

How do you think this'll turn out?

Find out in part two...