Peace, goodwill at Xmas, but not for cats!

A recent story on the wires sent an immediate shiver up my spine. It concerned a poor, unfortunate Taiwanese couple whose previously happy marriage had been brought low, not by another woman, but rather by the devious depredations of Felis catus (a cat to those of us less informed about such matters).

It appears that the hubby was very attached to the cat (emotionally rather than physically from what I can gather), and insisted on moggy sharing the marital mattress, a most unfortunate decision given said moggy's predilection for wetting the bed.

Anyway, the long and the short of it was that moggy decided to give vent to his incontinence once too often and was turfed out of the boudoir by the long-suffering wife, a course of action that elicited the ire of her doting husband, and led by a more or less direct route to the sad surrounds of a Taipei divorce court.

All this comes as no surprise to me, for like the Taiwanese wife in this tragic tale, I too find myself the unfortunate victim of a feline home-breaker, a Trojan cat whom I innocently invited into my home, and who is now doing all in his power to rent my marriage asunder through evil and cunning machinations, the likes of which only a felonious feline is capable of.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you will, but I'm fully convinced that my wife and her confrere the cat are engaged in a damnable and beastly plot to evict me from house and home. It would appear that, in my house at least, the Christmas spirit of goodwill to all men specifically excludes yours truly.

But I am a reasonable man, and I don't really blame my wife for all that has transpired, or even for hitting me over the head yesterday with the rolling-pin (while preparing Christmas dainties) following a feline-induced dispute. Given her low level of intellectual development, how is she to know that she's been manipulated by a cunning, conniving cat?

But let me start way back at the beginning, the day we found Bonzo (for such was he later named) mewing pitifully outside our front door. Abandoned by his mother -- who obviously was more au fait with feline nature than either I or my wife were -- we took him in, succored him and gave him a good home, a home that I not unreasonably hoped he would respect rather than attempting deviously to subvert.

While Bonzo started out on the right track, mewing quietly and purring at appropriate moments -- sometimes even sandblasting my fingernails with his little pink tongue -- he soon started showing his true nature, openly displaying his contempt, nay, loathing, for me, the master of the house, through such nefarious and unforgivable acts as making off with my lamb chops while they were defrosting.

He also embarked on a long and ultimately successful, it would appear, campaign to alienate my wife's affections from your's truly, and divert them to own his wicked self.

According to the wife, who now takes Bonzo's side in just about everything, it was all my fault, of course! If I hadn't sat on him that Saturday night coming home from the pub, an unfortunate accident that appeared to discomfit Bonzo greatly, things would have all been so different.

Twaddle!

For it's as clear as the hairs on my nose to me, and will be to all right-thinking people, that Bonzo has embarked on a deliberate course of action conceived and executed with the sole purpose of bringing my marriage to an untimely end ... the rascal.

And it's not as if I sat on him on purpose, not like when I sat on Percy the Parrot to stop him mindlessly mouthing off the foul language he had learned from me in front of the mother-in- law.

No, indeed. It was an accident pure and simple, in no way inspired, I hasten to add, by the fact that Bonzo has a penchant for curling up in MY chair, pretending to be asleep every time I want to rest my weary bones. And what happens when I try to gently relocate him? That's right, I get a half-an-hour's earful about cruelty to poor dumb animals from my supposedly loving wife. I ask you!

But if truth be told, she is the one who's cruel (she bathes him regularly in warm, soapy water, something that all cats loath). And yet, Bonzo gives every appearance of loving her deeply, while all the time going out of his way to ignore me, displaying what can only be described as an aloof and disaffected attitude towards yours truly. Not for me the loving purrs and slinky caresses of a true feline friend.

I know I shouldn't let myself become upset by all of this, especially now that Christmas is almost upon us. But the fact is, unfortunately, unlike Peter I am not a rock (or a hard place, for that matter), and I admit to regularly requiring abject displays of love and affection, things that Bonzo has been so callously and heartlessly withholding from me, while all the time rubbing stinging salt in my wounds by showering love and purrs on the wife, obviously all part of an insidious and well-planned plot to drive me from the bosom of my family in the mouth of Christmas.

Bonzo's unethical behavior is particularly galling given that, and I'm sure you'll agree with me here, the only purpose of feeding and mollycoddling a cat is ensure regular supplies of love and affection, things that the average cat owner feels fully entitled to, if not by law, then at least by custom and tradition.

Now that Christmas is almost upon us, the good and the great tell us that we should bury the hatchet with our enemies. "In our enemies" would be more appropriate in my book, at least when it comes to cats.

I've sadly come to the conclusion that the only way to maintain the sanctity of my home, if not my actual sanity, is to play Bonzo at his own game, and "arrange" for his downfall. Of course, being a kind and gentle sort, putting glass in his Whiskas or Baygon in his milk is not really my style, not yet anyway. But I'm certainly not going to restrain him the next time I find him trying to gnaw his way through the Xmas tree lights' cable. Perhaps a couple of hundred volts up his tail will show him the error of his ways.

Just remember, Mr. Bonzo, he who laughs last laughs longest -- so be warned, the day of reckoning is nigh, Xmas or no Xmas!

-- James Boyd