LAUGH Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
Chris considers the change in cats’ reputation over the ages...
Many of my cat-sitting customers go to great lengths to ensure their feline friends are pampered.
Some ensure their cats are served such daily luxuries as fresh prawns, smoked salmon and grilled chicken. One Persian cat has her own bedroom crammed full of cushions and expensive toys, and being a Persian, she looks incandescent with rage about it.
Surpassing all, though, a tabby boy named Harry has his own toilet seat. This ingenious round, grooved contraption with a central hole sits on top of a normal loo seat. Through careful initiation, which involve litter being sprinkled in the seat’s grooves, Harry learnt to use the toilet in the same way we would. One of the funniest sights I’ve seen in my years of cat-sitting was arriving to find Harry sitting on the toilet, grimacing at me in an embarrassed “Shut the door will you? I’m busy”, kind of way. If he’d been reading a newspaper, the picture would’ve been perfect.
Oh, yes, people certainly love cats, but it hasn’t always been that way. This fact was brought to mind the other day as I drove to visit a trio of cats named Cher, Cilla and Lulu.
From the back of my car, my young niece suddenly asked her mum, “What does contemptible mean?”
“Um, let me see... If somebody is contemptible, it means they’re hated, but probably worse than that, because they’re thought of as really bad and despicable,” replied her mum.
“Oh,” said my niece.
“Like Belgium, then?”
What!? Belgium!? How an earth had she come to hold such a damning opinion of a country we hadn’t even realised she was aware of?
After a little delving, we discovered that it all came from a very early life memor
