THE LOVE CATS

In Tim’s house I live with Sam and Kev. Only one of them is human. Sam. And a bloody interesting human at that. We sit and shoot the breeze over the best homemade cups of coffee I have ever tasted. I’ve got quite a good brain for history and the like but Sam seemingly knows everything, and not in a pompous way, he’s just fascinating. Being interested in local history from under a mop of ginger hair he tells you what buildings used to stand where as you walk to the shops.

I was stoked that he knew Simon Winchester’s works; as expected I recommended The Day the Word Exploded about Krakatoa and in turn he suggested The Surgeon of Crowthorne. He also likes the guy that wrote No Country for Old Men, (another great film of the year if only for one performance but I didn’t like the abrupt ending) saying it would be good to read crossing southern America. I recommended my mentor Harry Thompson’s This Thing of Darkness - one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Anyway, you can see that Sam and I have lots to talk about and it makes a change from talking about film or jokes or booze or girls or myself, though we do cover all these topics too!

The house is riddled with cockroaches. Sam went to pick an olive out of the salad he made and it moved. I left two pieces of toast with Nutella and a glass of full fat milk for three minutes while I went for a pee and when I got back they had gone; replaced by a seething mass of black-brown buggery like a bad horror movie. Sam informs me that Newtown is nice now, but it used to be a slum area and that no matter what they might do, the roaches will always find a way back, so I have come to think of the cockroaches as “hideous dwarves jumping and leeeaaping!” from Hammer’s Quatermass and The Pit from the 60’s.

On the plus side it is fun when they go pop in the microwave.
One day I hadn’t seen Kevin Bacon until late afternoon which is unusual. Kev is the biggest cat you will ever see - part moggie, part cougar.

He wandered in through the back door and meowed. Only it wasn’t his normal, chirpy meow, he was trying to tell me something was wrong. We brought him in before I had to go out and watched closely over him for the next few hours.

While I was out Kev crawled under my bed and wouldn’t come out. Poor Sam thought he was dead but luckily his girlfriend April, like me, had been brought up with cats… I told Sam when he rang that cats often go to crawl under a bush to die, but regretted it immediately. They took him in a taxi to the vets who told us that Kev had a bladder the size of an orange.

If Sam and April hadn’t have taken him to the vet that night, instead the next as we planned, he could very well have died. I didn’t relish the thought of that phone call to his Dad, Tim in Thailand.

A catheter was affixed to Kevin Bacon’s pork sword and a drip in his little right arm. Phosphates and Magnesium had crystallised in his bladder making it impossible to wee. Sam and I have been to see him and I went again tonight, spending between forty five minutes and an hour with him; he was very timid when I arrived, trembling with fear but within a few minutes I had him purring and dribbling and wandering round his cage, brushing up against my face and snuggling in for some Will love.

So after a few days and some fair amount of worry later he is now doing fine and due home tomorrow, I’ll go and collect him and keep him in the house until Tim gets home. If I can get hold of Timmy to pay the $1600 bill that is, else the vet might have to keep Kev until he gets back, accruing more expense every day.

You gave us quite a scare Kevin Bacon, lets hope you can get back to your footloose and fancy free ways soon.

Oh and Tim, if you’re reading this… pick up the bloody phone mate!