Making the Cat Laugh (14 page)

In the meantime, what is to be done about vanquishing the Sex Monster? Well, this week’s plummeting atmospheric pressure has dealt with the immediate problem, thank goodness. I put the Andre Agassi calendar back on the wall yesterday, and I honestly feel OK. ‘Chew string’ was one helpful suggestion; also, ‘Roll yourself in a length of carpet and recite
The Waste Land’
(apparently it works for some people). Back from my ghastly encounter with the Invasion of the Bucket Men, then, I decided to give the carpet-option a try, and it certainly helped. Despite gagging on the dust-balls, I found it amazing how Eliot keeps the Id firmly under wraps, while his unmistakable bass-line rhythm makes the whole experience so jolly:

Of course, a book about the IQ of cats begs a lot of questions to begin with. (‘I am reading a book on cat IQ,’ I mentioned to a friend. ‘Short, is it?’ she said.) But when you are a doting owner, keen to establish proof of your cat’s outstanding native wit, you tend to lose sight of what those questions might be. So we sat down a week ago, the cats and I, and mutually ticked a lot of boxes in Melissa Miller’s new
Definitive IQ Tests for Cats
(Signet, £3.99). The exercise produced quite fascinating results. I mean, according to our relative aggregates, one of the cats is cleverer than I am. Which is weird, really, because despite his mighty cat brain, guess who kept the scores?

‘Look, kitty,’ I said proudly, waving the book near his nose. ‘You achieved 39 in visual skills!’ But, alas, these visual skills did not extend to reading the printed page, or even getting the book into decent focus. Instead, he shrank back in evident distaste, as though the book were a custard pie. I tried another tack. ‘Hey! Fur-face!’ I yelled in his ear. ‘You got 52 on audio abilities!’ But strangely he seemed oblivious to my cry. ‘And in social behaviour you got an amazing total of …’ However, my voice trailed off at this point because he had got up and walked out of the room.

If the cat is really cleverer than me, I just want to know one thing: why isn’t he writing this article while I lie on top of the shed? But I suppose the answer is obvious when you put it like that. Cats are clever enough to get the better end of the symbiotic deal. ‘Tell you what,’ they say. ‘You write the piece, and I’ll sit on it. You earn the money, and I’ll eat the Friskies.’ In these circumstances, there is not much point attempting tests in verbal reasoning. (‘Now let’s try it one more time. STING is to THING, as STICK is to TH- - -.’) A lot of nonsense is spoken about the cat’s exceptional brain-to-body weight ratio. But
when they introduced the concept of the electronic cat-flap, you may have noticed that they dispensed with the key-pad, because they knew that cats would need the number written down.

Miller emphasizes that her book of IQ tests should not be taken seriously, but I fear this is to misunderstand the character of her potential reader, which is bound to be fanatical and competitive. By means of multiple-choice questions, she tests your cat’s intelligence in various situations – does it respond to its name, look with interest out of the window, hide things around the home, enjoy television? The trouble with such multiple-choice tests, however, is that there is a tendency in the respondent (me) to second-guess the top-scoring answer and automatically tick the appropriate box. Anyone who has doodled with a questionnaire in a women’s magazine will recognize the syndrome.

Now, only a very thick person will not discern that C is the big-bucks answer here. Even if you spend your emotional life in a constant moil of sarcasm, yelling, bawling and throat sharpening, you will nevertheless be fully aware that the answer C will translate as the best personality type when
you later consult the answers at the back. So, similarly, if you are filling in a questionnaire on your cat’s IQ, and are asked the following question, you cannot ignore the temptation to respond dishonestly.

The fact that Cat No 1 is an obvious candidate for
Bunty
, while Cat No 2 would sit happily for hours with an out-of-date
What Car?
, is unlikely to deter you from ticking
Financial Times
with utter confidence, because you know it is the ‘right’ answer.

One thing I learnt from the book was that Sir Isaac Newton invented the cat-flap. It puts all his other distinctions in the shade. The prophet Muhammad, not wanting to disturb a sleeping cat, cut off part of his garment when he got up (bless his heart). Evidently the cat’s special place in human affections (as well as its innate superiority as a species) is well attested historically, but I don’t mind mentioning that I often pause wearily during essays on ‘the cat in history’ to ponder the famous
New Yorker
cartoon in which a man says: ‘The fact that you cats were considered sacred in ancient Egypt cuts no ice with me.’

However, this book also contains modern stories of cats doing clever things – such as stealing bread from the kitchen and using it as bait for birds – which suggest the undeniable presence of functioning little grey cells concealed beneath the furry ears and eyebrows. Miller recounts one story of a cat which, having observed its owner’s bleary-eyed wakeup
routine of ‘stick the kettle on, feed the cat’, attempted to get things moving one morning by retrieving a used teabag from the bin and placing it on the owner’s pillow. This shows amazing intelligence on the part of the cat, if only because it could remember key scenes from
The Godfather.

Mostly, the way you define cat intelligence is by identifying things they won’t do. Why is there no feline equivalent of Champion the Wonder Horse or Rin-Tin-Tin, Flipper or Lassie? Because a cat will not race into a burning building to rescue a baby, that’s why. It is their own peculiar way of proving they are smart. In the heyday of the Hollywood studios, it was uncanny how those hopeful cat-hero scripts somehow always found their way to the bottom of the pile. ‘Tiddles! Only you can save us! Squeeze through this tiny opening, and switch off the infernal machine! Go like the wind, and there’ll be sprats for tea!’ Some joke, obviously. ‘Did somebody say infernal machine?’ the cat says. ‘Blimey, I’m off then.’

This book mentions that there were no cat skeletons found at Pompeii or Herculaneum, and jumps to the conclusion that therefore no cats lived there. But obviously they screeched out of town at the first whiff of sulphur. ‘Tiddles!’ they said in Pompeii. ‘Only you can save us!’ But a flash of cat bum was all that was visible, as the volcano rumbled and split. Centuries later, when the site was excavated, many petrified human bodies were doubtless found in the attitude of surprised cat owners calling to their pets in vain, frozen in time with boxes of Kitbits in their hands. Scrawled on a terracotta brick were some dying words in Latin which, roughly translated, meant, ‘I don’t believe it, the bloody cat has scarpered.’

As I explained earlier, Miller’s tests for cats (the first half of the book) are fairly easy to second-guess. Once you have imagined that your cat’s brain is entirely devoted to wangling the best deal for itself (and that it reads the FT), you are on your
way to a hefty score. The second half is more tricky, however, because it is the test for owners, and the hidden agenda is more difficult to gauge. Take the following:

Well, I went for D, because it sounded the best – you know, affectionate without being fanatical. Also, I thought you could eliminate the others. Anyone answering B would obviously not be doing the questionnaire, being too busy running a cold, loveless reform school in a Victorian novel; while the person answering C is self-evidently too mean to buy the book. This only leaves A and D as decent cat-loving responses, and A sounded suspiciously like a trap for loonies. But A scored best, in fact. Because it turns out, in the end, that it is your level of fanaticism that is being tested.

Some of the questions concern how easily one’s cat takes affront, and whether an owner will avoid saying anything negative (such as ‘pea-brained’) about a cat in its presence. Samuel Johnson, you may remember, had a cat called Hodge that he was fond of; and Miller quotes a wonderful passage from Boswell to illustrate the great man’s sensitivity to the cat’s feelings.

I think I prefer fine cats to clever cats. Which is my way of apologizing to my cats, should they ever read this. But imagine if your cat really were cleverer than you, and kept breezing in to say, ‘Did you mean to leave that tap running in the bathroom?’ and ‘You really must read this TLS; it told me quite a few things about Tennyson that I didn’t know.’ Much better that they consider reading a mug’s game and tap-regulation none of their business. All of this IQ testing makes you realize, with a sigh of relief, that brains are not everything.

To some people, Wimbledon is a tennis tournament. To me, it is a sort of binge. Confronted with a mere two weeks of fantastic tennis on the TV, I approach it with the same gimme-gimme intensity as the competition winner allowed three minutes to fill a shopping trolley with free food, or the fat boy attempting a speed record for the consumption of cream buns.

‘More!’ I demand, each evening at 8.15 when BBC2 stops transmitting, and the light begins to fade. The cats exchange glances, as if to say ‘She’s off,’ but I take no notice. I want more, don’t you see, more. More matches, more coverage, more – I don’t know,
more male knees.
And above all, I want the very beautiful Pat Cash to remain prominent in the men’s singles tournament, despite the unfortunate fact that he was knocked out last Thursday.

Bingeing, of course, is something you do on your own. It is therefore one of the great pitfalls of single life. When there is nobody to say, ‘I think that’s enough Wimbledon for one day,’ you don’t know where to stop. Leaving aside those knees for a moment, let’s imagine you had an addiction to – I don’t know, to fruit jelly, but did not live alone. Well, you would simply be obliged to curb those unnatural wobbly cravings, wouldn’t you? It would be no good leaving a nonchalant bowl
of Rowntree’s black cherry on the coffee table, because the pretence (‘We were out of olives, so I thought why not’) would fool nobody.

But being single means that not only can you buy jelly in telltale catering quantities; you can make it by the gallon-load in the bath, and fill your entire living-room with great amber columns of it (if you want to), so that it resembles a confectioner’s Monument Valley. Similarly, you can watch two channels of Wimbledon simultaneously, and then the evening highlights, and then your video of the highlights, without anyone objecting that it’s getting out of hand. Believe me, it can happen. Last autumn I conceived a crush on an American leading actor and, in the absence of any restraining sensibility, had reached the jelly-columns-in-the-living-room stage before you could say ‘Jeff’.

It was alarming. One minute I was quite normal, the next I was popping out to see Jeff’s latest film every time I could contrive a free slot at 1.10pm, 5.05pm or 8.30pm. I considered finding out from
Mastermind
whether ‘the films of Jeff’ would be an acceptable specialist subject. And sometimes I pretended that I needed to cross Leicester Square on the way from Baker Street to Euston, so that I could accidentally find myself quite near the big Jeff pictures outside the Odeon. I was on a binge.