The World of Woof

When I was a child, I had a cat.

Or, to be more accurate, the family had a cat of which I was particularly fond. He was an ugly, scruffy, dopey lump of a cat called Sylvester. And, yep, you guessed it, he was piebald.

Sylvester’s mum, Samantha, was a sleek, lithe tortoise-shell with soft fur and sharp teeth. She belonged to no-one except my father. Samantha came and went as she pleased, and on cold winter evenings settled herself comfortably on Dad’s lap (probably because his chair was closest to the lounge-room heater). Samantha was smart.

Sylvester, by contrast, was not only dumb, but looked like he’d gone ten rounds with a rock crushing machine. His fur was patchy and disordered, and his skin was lumpy and flaky – a kind of feline dermatitis, I think. He was constantly getting into fights with neighbourhood cats, a fact evidenced by the red welts that would occasionally appear on his nose, a raking scar of which the most stereotypical Prussian duelist would have been proud.

I called him Woof. I called him Woof because I didn’t have a dog. Well, there was a dog – Danny, a Welsh corgie – but he belonged to my mother. So Woof was Woof because I didn’t have a dog. But if you think that’s stupid (and, remember, I was only a kid), you should have seen this cat.

Woof loved sitting on things. All you needed to do was put a scrap of paper on the floor, and he’d be sitting on said scrap within instants. Woof also loved sitting on my lap – but not when I was wearing trackie daks made out of parachute silk. Try as he might (including inserting his powerful claws into my flesh), Woof just couldn’t keep a grip if I was wearing my silky, shiny TDs; he’d get on my lap, settle down, then slide off. But he kept on trying, no matter how much I was convulsing with laughter.

Woof was also forever getting his tail caught in the heater. We had one of those old things with the three squares that could be ignited all together, or just the outer two, or just the middle square. It also had a guard rail that was supposedly meant to keep things out. But not Woof's tail. Whenever warming himself in front of the heater, he invariably managed to singe his tail. There'd be a sudden smell of singed hair, then a squeal, then Woof would fly out of the room like a blazing comet. You would have thought he'd learn after the first time - but he never did.

Woof wasn’t much of a hunter, either. Samantha regularly deposited birds and mice on our back doorstep. The closest Woof came to the call of the wild occurred one morning when he was sneaking up on a bunch of birds in our front garden. They were feeding at the seed-bowl my father had placed on the lawn, and Woof decided they were too tempting a treat even for him to pass up. Gradually, painfully, he slunk up behind the birds, belly to the ground, ready to pounce…

Suddenly, the birds took off. I suspect the wind shifted and they literally caught wind of Woof. Whatever the reason, they took off in a blizzard of feathers and flapping wings – leaving Woof staring at the now bird-less seed bowl with an expression of comical exasperation. I cracked up – but what really killed me was Woof’s response. With an almost visible shrug of the shoulders, he decided to make the best of a bad situation and moseyed on over to the seed bowl – and started eating the bird seed! It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, a touching combination of incompetence and endless optimism.

But what I remember most about Woof was his affection. Every morning, without fail, as we stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast, Woof would leave his own feed bowl and come and say hello. Just a quick brush up against the legs, then back to his own food; but it was more than Samantha ever did. Woof was a people pussy.

I said in an earlier post that I’m a dog person – and I am. But Woof was almost a dog; he certainly had enough character. Cats are, by most measures, the psychopaths of the animal world, utterly self-absorbed and indifferent to others. Woof was different; no Lone Wolf he, just a big, silly cat who liked being around others. He grew old and died many years ago, but I’ve still got his photo on the fridge. He was a cool dude, and I miss him.

Talk to you soon,

BB

Quote for the Day: Cats are a species that will tolerate humans until the day when someone invents a can opener that can be oprated by paws. (Terry Pratchett)