The Psychic Cat

I am certain that my cat, J, is psychic.

She loves playing with string. No shoelace is safe. The other day I left a pair of my lace-up boots in the kitchen. An hour later, one boot was two rooms away, virtually disembowelled, the lace just about completely separated from the boot.

For years (J’s nearly 11 years old) I have loosely tied a long shoelace to the back of a kitchen chair.

This is a cat toy. She deftly unravels it. I tie it on again in a different configuration, and a few days later, she’s worked it out, and teased it off.

Best game out it the sun is to wriggle a piece of rope along the grass. She chases it, pounces on it, and savagely “kills” it.

Whenever we return from a few days away, I have to have a Stern Talk with J to tell her not to scratch at the bedroom door at some unholy hour of the morning. This is a bad habit which surfaces after we’ve been away. She usually complies. It must be the Tone Of Voice that goes with the Stern Talk that does the trick.

I thought I would have to have a Stern Talk with J about yarn and knitting. All that lovely string …

Strangely enough, she has completely ignored my knitting. No chasing of balls of wool, no snatching at the working yarn, no sitting on work-in-progress, nothing. Apart from nibbling on my elbow as I knit, she disregards the whole thing as only a cat can do. It doesn’t exist, as far as she’s concerned.

This is a relief.

It doesn’t stop cat-hair getting into everything. It is inevitable that cat-hair is going to be an integral part of everything I knit. I’m sure there’s a word for fibre made from cat-hair, like angora is for rabbit, but I don’t know what that word is.

As I say, J must be psychic – if she had misbehaved with the wool, not only would she get the Stern Talk, if necessary I would have shut her out of the house while I knit!