The cat I had whilst in Oxford, named Thin Cat, died a couple of days ago. I was saddened to hear of it, but not too surprised as she looked pretty tired and old when I took a picture of her last Christmas. She had a right to look tired as she was over twenty years old. A good innings for a cat.
You may be wondering about the name ‘Thin Cat’, yes she really was called that. My family got her at the same time as another Russian Blue kitten and they looked pretty similar, the only difference was that one was slightly smaller and the other was slightly thinner. So they were named Small Cat and Thin Cat. My mother was somewhat embarrassed when she registered these expensive pedigree cats with the vet, she had to give their names and thought the vet would be disdainful of our naming strategy.
Thin Cat was quite social but I was clearly her favourite person; she would usually be found hanging around where I was and loved sitting on me no end. I used to feel I had been particularly favoured by her attentions when she wanted to spend the night asleep on my legs. How could I possibly throw her off me when she loved me so, just for the feeble excuse of me needing sleep?
She did have a close escape earlier in her life. One night she came in through the cat-flap with her face bleeding and covered in cuts. When we looked at her we noticed that she was also missing some teeth: she had clearly been hit by a car. My dear mother was a bit concerned about her and so started looking through the phone book for an all night vet. As she was flicking through the phonebook pages Thin Cat walked over to where I was sitting, jumped up onto my lap, curled up and started purring very loudly. At that point we realised seeing the vet could wait until the next day. The only fall-out from her run-in with the car was that she lost some teeth and this would occasionally make her tongue loll out of one side of her mouth; it looked quite funny.
Small Cat was a much more nervous, neurotic cat, far less friendly than Thin Cat. Indeed, Small Cat was so meek that she was even bullied by my sister’s budgerigar, which would land on her head and bite her ears. Bold budgie! Small Cat hated this but didn’t seem to realise that, as she was a cat, she didn’t have to stand for it and could eat the bird if it was vexing her.
Fast forward to three years ago and the partner and I decide that we want to get a cat. I’ve told the story before, but once we made this decision we acted with speed and efficiency. Within a few minutes we had found a reasonably local breeder of the variety of cat we wanted, the next day we visited her and met the little kitten we would call Kisu. With his big ears and hugely long back legs we thought he was extremely cute and could not resist buying him. Why is he named Kisu? I wanted to follow my historic pet-naming strategy and call him ‘Cat’, but the partner disagreed. He suggested instead that we call him Kisu, which means ‘little cat’ in Finnish (the partner is of Finnish extraction), I approved and his name was settled.
Kisu has grown to be rather large for a ‘little cat’, now weighing almost 6kg, so when he jumps on me whilst I am asleep I generally notice. He is certainly one of the most friendly, well-adjusted and social cats I’ve experienced. He may not always fancy sitting on someone’s lap, but he generally likes to hang around where there are people; he wants to be involved in what is going on in the flat be it eating sushi or appreciating fine ceramics. He may like to hang around with us, but he generally does it in a very relaxed style:
