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Catnip
21 May 2006
Still catching up...
So it's eight in the morning, and I'm sitting there watching a rerun of Keith Floyd cooking in a boat in Bangkok (hey, look, it's Saturday morning: I'm allowed a little gastroporn before work), and suddenly Barry comes in with his coat entirely covered with - well, something. I don't know what. It's grainy and clearly dried, except for being slightly damp, and brief and unworthy thoughts do flit through my bewildered mind ("oh God, don't tell me you've been rolling in the litter-tray," and like that). So I go to investigate, and he comes strutting with to show me - this is after he's rolled around all over the living-room carpet in an ecstasy of long black beauty: his self-content knows no bounds - and there is this stuff all over the kitchen floor. It looks like he's spilled one of the spice-jars, but I can't identify it and it doesn't smell spicy. Herbal, perhaps. A lot of dried herb, it might well be, only I don't keep dried herbs, having a yardful of fresh...
And then I find the packet. As Baz clearly had before me. Light dawns, and a question is answered: oh, so he does like catnip, then. See, I'd bought this bag of it a year ago, meaning it as a present for a new kitten in a friend's life; only to learn that she was to be a clean kitten, undrugged-up, so I wasn't allowed to give it her. My Misha-cat wasn't interested by then, she'd outgrown her druggy phase (when we used to play a game where I grew catnip and would go out into the yard to hide it; she'd come out to find it; then she'd eat it; then she'd go back indoors to be sick. Great game). So it had just been lying around - not quite sure where; on top of the fridge, I think - and I had meant to hunt it out and see if Bazza liked it.
So Bazza did the hunting, and yup. He likes it. Unfortunately, he's used it all at once, but hey.
Right now he's out in the back yard, leaping and massacring cherry-blossoms as they drift in over the wall. I can't actually work out if this is still hyperactive nipped-up Barry, or if it's just regular frantic Barryness: a distinction without a difference, perhaps.
© Chaz Brenchley 2006
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.