Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

Chris ponders the wisdom of accepting offers of tea or coffee… or cat milk…

Experiences during cat sitting pre-visits to collect keys and make notes on their cat’s unreasonable demands occasionally put me in mind of an extract from a book by the great Douglas Adams… an ex-Cambridge University student visits the home of an ageing Professor, who asks him if he’d like a coffee. “Yes, please” he replies. “One lump or two?” “Two please.” “And would you like sugar?” Needless to say, he rapidly declined the coffee, which is precisely the stance I should take if offered refreshments on pre-visits.

A few years back, a lovely old lady with a violent ginger cat offered me a cup of tea, and asked if I’d mind if she made herself a cup-a-soup as it was her lunchtime. Never one to veto old ladies a cup-a-soup, I offered no objection. I should have.

Three minutes later she leant over me to carefully place my tea on the table, spilling half a cup of hot soup down my collar. I have to say, my ensuing howls and crazed dancing could’ve won TheXFactor.

On another occasion, more akin to that Cambridge student’s experience, I accepted a coffee only to see my client repeatedly thrusting a screwdriver into her coffee jar, saying, “Nobody drinks this stuff – it’s gone a bit congealed.”

Another time, I watched as a young student couple made tea using the bathroom hot-tap and a used dried-up teabag. It was quite a nice cup of tea actually, though reaching the mushy biscuit at the bottom of the mug was a bit of a shock, considering I hadn’t had a biscuit.

Mind you, I’ve managed to make some pretty awful in-house refreshment choices of my own. One morning, arriving on a catsitting job at a house empty but for a cat named Dodgy Roger, and gasping for a cup of tea, I checked there was milk in the fridge, “borrowed” a teabag and boiled the kettle.

Then came massive disappointment. There’d be no tea for me after all, because the milk was off. Alongside it sat, staring back at me… a bottle of Whiskas cat milk. Could I? Should I? Would cat milk be OK in a cup of tea? No, you gasp, don’t do it! Don’t be silly – of course I wouldn’t put cat milk in tea. Nobody would do that.

A few minutes later, watched by Dodgy Roger, I sat drinking a cat-milk-cuppa. OK, that’s bad enough, but how did I come to the conclusion drinking cat milk would be OK? That’s right… I first of all drank some of it neat. Pouring a tiny amount into the bottom of a cup, I’d taken a tentative sip, half expecting something terrible to happen. I can report, having experimented on myself, that Whiskas cat milk is fairly nice actually, tasting more like over-sweet single cream than actual milk. So sort of fine in a hot drink, with the added bonus that no sugar was required.

A little later, on the same visit, I needed to answer a call of nature, only to find the toilet out of order. I glanced at Dodgy Roger’s litter tray. No, borrowing has to stop somewhere…

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The only milk left was cat milk… would it be alright in tea?