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An introduction of cats
4 November 2002
The one and only Thought of ChairCat Misha: 'It is impossible to be too fat or too furry.' Which I suspect is a thought that she thinks purely to irritate her sister, who is neither. Sophie is an invalid, in the grand old style: a bit like Aunt Ada Doom from Cold Comfort Farm. She eats like a horse and has almost no symptoms, except that she's skeletally thin and her coat is soft and sparse, like fraying silk to the touch; to the eye it's more like that mould that sometimes grows on old bread, grey and ciliate (which technically means 'like eyelashes', which is exactly right...).
Myself, I am certainly not furry and have not been inclined to fat since I was a child; my self-image is still of skin & bone, the body I had when I was seventeen, six foot two and nine and a half stone. Alas, these days it's closer to thirteen and a half, and not much of that is added muscle. I put on my smart winter suit t'other night, and the trousers were distinctly on the tight side. This does not happen to me - but I guess I'd better get used to it, because I like food far too much to diet, and I'm not even sure that I'm allowed to exercise, even if I were inclined to. I've been having rigorous physio for the last six months, to treat serious neural problems in my spine. Karen is very strict about what I may or may not do, and straying from the path of righteousness is usually paid for with pain. Late-night television is full of people who pay to suffer like this for the sheer pleasure of it; one of the things I've learned about myself recently is that I don't have a masochistic bone in my body. Many bones I do have, and Karen has probed and pummelled most of them, but not a one has enjoyed the process.
My webmistress can also be severe, when she thinks I'm wasting good writing-time. She was in doubts about my keeping a weblog, for exactly that reason; I assured her that I'd only play with this late at night, when the creative flow was ebbing. It's, um, 5.45pm, which is prime writing-time, and I'm not even talking about work, let alone doing any... [Exit, guiltily]
© Chaz Brenchley 2002
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.