IT WAS the cat getting married that finally pushed me over some furry edge. I don't like cats. I've never liked cats. And if my past behaviour is an indicator of my future performance – as "behavioural interviewing", a process which is all the buzz in recruitment these days, seems to think it is – well, I'll never like cats, writes ROSITA BOLAND
Recently, German man Uwe Mitzscherlich (39), paid an actress €300 to marry himself and his cat. No, it wasn’t a late April Fool. Yes, marrying animals in Germany (and as far as I know, everywhere else) is illegal, for reasons that are presumably obvious to all apart from Mr Mitzscherlich, an onomatopoeic postman from Possendorf. Yet, he wed his cat, Cecilia, and told German newspaper Bild all about it, in eyes-over-hands excruciating detail. “Cecilia is such a trusting creature. We cuddle all the time and she has always slept in my bed.” He said he married the 10-year-old cat because she had asthma and apparently is not much longer for this strange world; the one where man marries cat.
Cats make people do weird things. My usually perfectly sane friend, John, who is rigorous about hygiene in all other parts of his life, has a cat he insists on feeding only on top of the kitchen island for preparing food which doubles as breakfast counter. The only one who ever eats breakfast there is the cat, as its feeding bowls stay there permanently. This means no human person in the house can use that gigantic space to prepare food, eat there, or sit up in the evening having a drink at one of the – funky but unused – vintage American diner stools that line the counter.
In my book, this hygiene aberration is almost as bad as marrying a cat. John is a science writer. I have no idea why a man with the rational mind of one who analyses science for a living can think it makes sense to feed a cat in a place specially designated to feed humans. John’s reasoning is that the ants will get the cat’s food if he leaves the bowls on the floor.
I call it the curse of the cat, the one that makes otherwise sensible people want to marry their feline pets, and give over human dining space for the exclusive use of their pets.
I have a beloved, and rather eccentric aunt who has a very old cat. The cat has no name, she is simply “cat”. But that nameless animal has motivated my aunt to behave in odd ways in the past. Such as the time she came to visit one Christmas, but the cat was left at home. Several times, that Christmas Day in the pre-mobile phone era, as I scurried backwards and forwards from kitchen to dining room, I noticed her on the house phone in the hallway. Since, to my knowledge, all whom were nearest and dearest to her were currently gathered under our roof, I naturally wondered who she was calling.
She confessed that she was calling the cat. Or rather – as even my aunt would have been alarmed if the phone had been picked up – she was calling their empty house in which the cat currently was. “So she won’t be lonely, and she’ll know we’re thinking about her,” went the explanation.
What is it that I don’t like about cats? Everything. Where some people see cute, I confess all that I see is a creature not far from a rat – the living creature above all others I abhor beyond description. And of course, all cats know that I loathe them and thus make a point of pretending I am their new best friend, just to infuriate me. Nothing magnestises a cat to a human so effectively as being ignored.
Some years ago, I interviewed a writer in his home. It was a difficult interview to set up, and the subject was a notoriously tricky person to deal with. He had a cat, which was in the same room as us for the duration of the interview. Obviously, all bets are off when you’re working, so when the cat instantly bounded over and missile-launched itself into my lap, I gritted my teeth and resisted an urge to fling the animal at the nearest wall (I mean this as a figure of speech, but you get the gist.) The cat purred away like a lawnmower, joyfully digging its claws into my jeans every two seconds. At one point, he attempted to wrap himself around my neck like a feline boa.
My interviewee was flabbergasted. And, frankly, most impressed. Never in living memory, I was told, had his people-phobic cat ever gone to another human except a family member. When the interviewee excused himself briefly to go to the bathroom, I immediately attempted to put the cat out into the garden through the ground-floor window. That animal clung to me like static, and remained like that for the rest of the interview. It was a thoroughly unpleasant 90 minutes, but the interviewee did tell me things I hadn’t heard him tell any journalist before. Ergo, if the cat trusted me, then clearly so did he.
That was until I got back to the office an hour later, and discovered via e-mail that the interviewee had unexpectedly pulled out of the agreement for the interview between my leaving his house and arriving back in the office. I call it the curse of the cat.