Once again I’m indebted to Sunday for this. When she was annoyed or agitated she shouldn’t thrash her tail around in the manner that Smudge is demonstrating here. Instead all she’d do was raise her tail once and let it hit the ground again with a resounding THWACK!
As this series of strips progresses, Jones’ bandage will gradually morph into a plaster cast…
My first cat, a beautiful tortoiseshell-and-white girl called Sunday, was injured when she was a kitten. We don’t know what happened, whether she was involved in a car accident or kicked by a drunk from the pub down the road, but I remember coming home from school one day, and having Sunday run up the hill to greet me as normal. But something was wrong with her back legs – she couldn’t keep upright and kept flopping over as she ran.
We took her to the vets and discovered that something awful had happened to her hind quarters. She was no longer able to pee unaided, and her tail was paralysed. She should have been put to sleep that evening, but the vet thought she appeared to be unconcerned about it, and she was such a lovely cat that she was given a second chance. She was given painkillers and we were taught how to squeeze her bladder to make her pee mechanically.
After a few days, a miracle happened. She learned to pee by herself again, and she could walk and run without falling over. After a month you wouldn’t know that anything was wrong with her apart from her tail which remained paralysed apart from the muscles at the base of the tail, which meant she could raise it to half mast in greeting. Also, she couldn’t feel a thing that happened to it.
Fast forward 14 years. Sunday’s an old lady now (and she would live a good few years longer yet) but she’s still as lively as she was when she was younger. We’ve moved out to a house in High Brooms, and she’s having great fun patrolling the fish pond and the gardens around us. One evening she came in through the French windows, chirruped a greeting and jumped up onto the back of the sofa for a pet and a nuzzle. As I stroked her I realised her tail was wet. No, not wet… covered in blood. And Sunday is completely unconcerned and purring her head off.
She ended up with the kind of heavy bandage that Jones is currently sporting. Sadly, her tail went septic and half of it had to be amputated, but once again she made a full recovery, and was just as happy with half a useless tail as she was with an entire one.
It’s interesting how much information can be given just by changing the colour of a background. Here we are at the vets and it has its walls painted in that institutional medical green colour. Add in a few stainless steel bits of furniture and a table enamelled in an equally unflattering beige and voila, you have one vet’s office.
Cholmondeley was the best at causing chaos at the vets if he was left alone. He once jumped up onto the vet’s desk and managed to crash the surgery’s entire computer network with a few well aimed paw taps.
Pardon me for decending to matters below the waist, but this is really important to cats. I have never seen an expression quite so affronted on a cat (and quite as funny either) as whenever the vet took the real Smudge’s temperature.
Of course, I don’t know why cats would gossip like that anyway. Surely they’ve all had to put up with thermometers up their bums!
Time to start playing catch-up on the blog again! Here the storyline takes a left turn into something completely different. Anyone who has had to take a reluctant cat to the vets will understand this…
…and we segue naturally into a completely different storyline over the next few weeks. Or should that be Swegway?
Oh no… Jones has a new form of transportation. It’s not a board, and it doesn’t hover – therefore it’s called a hoverboard.
Even though hoverboards have only popped up recently, they’re illegal in the UK thanks to a 180-year old law. The 1835 Highways Act states that people cannot use the footway to “lead or drive any horse, ass, sheep, mule, swine, or cattle or carriage of any description” which, sadly, includes hoverboards. I think they come under the heading of ‘carriage’, as they’re very unlikely to be considered to be livestock, except for VAT purposes.
This animation was drawn on the iPad in ProCreate, saved as layers, sent to my desktop Mac, imported in to Photoshop, coloured and turned into an animated .gif.
Dear old Chumley – he loves being a cat, but not if catting causes harm to other creatures.