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What is it with girls and cats?
Feb. 8th, 2012 12:11 pmSome months ago now, I took an afternoon wandering around http://www.19princeletstreet.org.uk/ in the East End. It's an interesting building; used by successive waves of migrants - Huguenots, Jews, Irish and so on - as they've arrived in London over the centuries, who have adapted the building to their needs and then moved on once they'd gone up in the world a bit and felt that all the bloody immigrants nearby were lowering the tone of the neighbourhood. It's been preserved as a little museum about the whole migrant experience thing.
One exhibit they had was a suitcase and a stack of luggage labels where you were invited to consider the question "You have to leave home forever in fifteen minutes. What do you pack?", write down your answer and add it to the pile. The she-David wrote "Teabags and marmite" and I wrote "bullion", which indicates the difference in our thought processes better than pretty much any other example I can give.
I thought the whole "fifteen minutes to pack" question was an interesting one so I posed it on here, and some of the answer I found...erm...interesting. You see, several people - all girls - said they'd take their cats.
Now, I must admit that if I were genuinely presented with a suitcase, 15 minutes, and the imminent collapse of my entire life, cats wouldn't be the first thing which would pop into my head as an essential. For starters, how on earth would you pack them into said suitcase? Cats don't tesselate (I know, I've tried), and even if you managed to fit a few of them in there what are you going to do about feeding them? Fit a tube? You'd certainly struggle to get them back in once you let them out for some whiskas. Assuming you could carry the whiskas. It just boggled my mind.
Anyway, this all sort of reminded me of a girl I was briefly seeing some years ago who lived high up in one of those tower blocks which so besmirch the west Manchester skyline. She shared this flat with two cats who, she assured me with a perfectly straight, unblinking expression which I was later to come to recognise and dread from two hundred yards away, had no desire whatsoever go go outside or leave the flat.
"Miss Shufflebottom doesn't want to leave me", she would say as her cat alternated between piteous yowling and desperate scrabbling at the bottom of the front door. "And Mister Winkle loves me so much even if he got out he'd come back", she'd continue as her other cat prowled along the windowledge in atavistic pursuit of passing pigeons.
I just don't get the whole cat thing, so my question for the day is: What is it with girls and cats?
One exhibit they had was a suitcase and a stack of luggage labels where you were invited to consider the question "You have to leave home forever in fifteen minutes. What do you pack?", write down your answer and add it to the pile. The she-David wrote "Teabags and marmite" and I wrote "bullion", which indicates the difference in our thought processes better than pretty much any other example I can give.
I thought the whole "fifteen minutes to pack" question was an interesting one so I posed it on here, and some of the answer I found...erm...interesting. You see, several people - all girls - said they'd take their cats.
Now, I must admit that if I were genuinely presented with a suitcase, 15 minutes, and the imminent collapse of my entire life, cats wouldn't be the first thing which would pop into my head as an essential. For starters, how on earth would you pack them into said suitcase? Cats don't tesselate (I know, I've tried), and even if you managed to fit a few of them in there what are you going to do about feeding them? Fit a tube? You'd certainly struggle to get them back in once you let them out for some whiskas. Assuming you could carry the whiskas. It just boggled my mind.
Anyway, this all sort of reminded me of a girl I was briefly seeing some years ago who lived high up in one of those tower blocks which so besmirch the west Manchester skyline. She shared this flat with two cats who, she assured me with a perfectly straight, unblinking expression which I was later to come to recognise and dread from two hundred yards away, had no desire whatsoever go go outside or leave the flat.
"Miss Shufflebottom doesn't want to leave me", she would say as her cat alternated between piteous yowling and desperate scrabbling at the bottom of the front door. "And Mister Winkle loves me so much even if he got out he'd come back", she'd continue as her other cat prowled along the windowledge in atavistic pursuit of passing pigeons.
I just don't get the whole cat thing, so my question for the day is: What is it with girls and cats?
