Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
Although it would explain a lot, there is not actually a hereditary link between chris’s father and his cat
You may have noticed through reading a few of my columns that my Dad and my old cat Brum had an almost frightening amount in common.
Through knock-outs, accidental fires and humiliatingly embarrassing moments (I’m good at those too) Dad’s life has mirrored Brum’s uncannily. Although I will say Dad has so far avoided fur-balls and an urge to claim property by urinating over it. I think.
One major similarity is a refusal to accept the existence of glass. Dad first displayed this trait in a crowded pub. He ushered his family to an outdoor table and purchased a tray of drinks from the bar. Striding through the pub like an out-of-control juggernaut, loaded tray in hand, he walked straight into a plate glass window. With a loud bang and the crash of broken glasses he rebounded backwards into a wall and slowly slumped to the floor.
The whole pub saw it happen and everybody looked at us when Mum rushed to help him up.
As a self-absorbed 10-year-old at the time, whether he was OK or not didn’t bother me half as much as the fact that I was in some way associated with my own family. I therefore went and sat at another table.
Dad was fine, and it was actually me who looked the strangest family member when I had to be retrieved from my new table, whose occupants couldn’t quite understand why I was sitting with them.
Years later, Brum was at it too. From the word go, Brum had major issues with glass. He simply couldn’t see it. Brum would walk into windows that had been in place for 10 years. He had the same problem with mirrors and this begs the question – was it the mirror he couldn’t see… or himself ? The very fact that he could walk into a mirror without even breaking stride proves that he was at least perceiving a reflected room. What he couldn’t be seeing was the furry-faced arrangement of pointy ears and whiskers coming in the opposite direction.
The Brum/Dad similarity doesn’t end there. Brum had an almost uniquely un-feline ability to knock himself unconscious. Dad’s good at that too.
He once misheard directions to a toilet and wandered down a long dark corridor in a restaurant. He reached a heavy oak door, turned the handle and pulled. The last thing he remembers about the incident was a sense of almost superhuman power in his right arm. He wrenched that door right off its hinges and down onto his head. He could barely believe his own strength, but as they explained to him in the ambulance, the incident owed less to formidable strength than it did to the fact that the door wasn’t secured in any way and merely leaning against a wall…
There’s far more to all this, so I’ll continue next week if that’s OK. And I’ll also reveal why The Missing Link… is me. Bet you guessed that.
Chris Pascoe is the author of A Cat Called Birmingham and You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough, and of Your Cat magazine’s column Confessions of a Cat Sitter.