The Bonsai Cat

One of my most successful lessons with eleven-year-olds used to be about the difference between cats and dogs.

"I'm an alien from the planet Zorb," I would say, "and they both look the same to me. Two eyes, four legs, a tail. Cats and dogs are just the same."

The class would go completely hyper with enthusiastic attempts to find adjectives to describe the differences.

Of course, one of the chief differences is that dogs are very straightforward: they just want to please you. Cats, however, are more complicated - if less brainy - and have a spooky, other-worldly quality: they look at nothing, are terrified by it, and rush round the house as if on fire.

I - yes, I, Daphne the Unbeliever - had a close encounter with cats' spookiness the day I first met our cat Froggie.

It was on the stairs at my friend David's house. I was going up, to see my friend Carry who lived upstairs, and Froggie was coming down.

I looked down at her. She looked up at me.

"I want to come and live with you," she said, quite clearly, in my head.

"And I want you to come and live with me," I replied, also clearly, in my head.

I mentioned this mad interior conversation to nobody.

Two weeks later Carry rang me, because she was going on holiday. Would I look after her cat for a week? It had been a stray, and was called Froggie, because they had found her next to a frog.

Froggie came for a week, in the year of the Millennium, and she's still here, and answers the door when I'm out and come home, and knows the sound of my car, and follows me from room to room, and can tell the price of any tin of cat food, and is altogether the Best Cat in the World, just like yours.

She's tiny and is known as the Bonsai Cat. One thing she never tries to do is to sit on my lap, because she knows I never stay in one place long enough to make it worthwhile. She'll certainly sit on other people whom she likes though, and she's an excellent judge of character: if she likes someone, I know they'll be a Good Thing.

Here's a photo: (thank you Silverback)


To conclude, I'm not generally fond of Cute Cat Cartoons, but here's one that I like: it will surely have the ring of truth to all cat-owners.