Ellie – An Abandoned Sweetheart

This article made me smile!

“A study says cat owners are better educated than dog owners. I think we should be cautious in the way we interpret these seismic findings. Even if cat owners are better educated, they can’t be more intelligent, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the profoundly unintelligent decision to get a cat. I should know. I’m a cat owner.”

It’s 14 months since my girlfriend and I had our house commandeered by the furry little despot who, as I type, is gnawing my laptop’s power cable. My girlfriend and I have degrees. Yet here’s the question. If we’re so clever, why did we let our armchairs, sleep patterns and bank accounts be laid waste by a creature that, unlike a son or daughter, can’t be reared to wait on us hand and foot during our dotage?

Surely if I were in command of my faculties I wouldn’t have reacted so tolerantly to being woken, at one o’clock this morning, by the sound of the cat extracting my girlfriend’s dirty laundry, item by item, from the mysteriously upturned basket on the bedroom floor. Surely if I possessed an adequate brain I’d think of a plan to thwart our darling pet’s nightly insistence on redeploying the washing-up sponge to a spot beneath the dining room table. Surely if I had an IQ greater than that of a pot plant I wouldn’t feed and shelter an animal whose contribution to our home has been to fell the Christmas tree two years running, roll seemingly every pen we own under the sofa and adorn our white duvet cover with grey paw prints.

I knew what I was letting myself in for. My family had lots of cats, including Korky, the one who smuggled a live baby rabbit into the house and then mislaid it (we found it cowering under a towel in the bathroom). Then there was Kitty, the one I blame to this day for the curious disappearance of my Polystyrene model Spitfires, their sole remains being a single well‑chewed wing.

Yet still I cater to the every whim of my bewhiskered master, bleach the kitchen floor each time he overturns his litter tray, and try not to reflect on the £800 in vet bills he cost us by carelessly letting a car catch him in the small of the back last autumn (he has recovered; our holiday fund hasn’t).

Why do I do it? Because I’m a moron. A moron who will follow any order, provided the tyrant delivering it has a cute little damp nose and the most adorably oafish paws.

This was first published in the telegraph