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banister every time I sat down to work. At one point I was woken up in the middle of the
night by Vespa, who was perched on my bedside table slurping noisily from my glass of wa-
ter. 'You shouldn't have left it there,' Natalie said and went back to sleep. Their worst crime
by far, however, one that was simply unacceptable, was that they were still jumping up on
to the kitchen surfaces. To give you an insight as to how this was making me feel, imagine
Al Pacino saying 'On to the kitchen surfaces!' the same way he said 'In my home, Rocco!' in
The Godfather Part II
. It made me very angry indeed. Natalie said it was my fault for leaving
food out. It's a bloody kitchen! Where the hell else was I supposed to leave it, the bathroom?
I'd tried water pistols, rolled-up newspaper and simply batting them back down with my
hand the second they landed, but nothing, nothing seemed to work. Are cats even trainable?
Does anyone know? Has anyone ever got a cat to do anything against its will? (And I mean
house-cats not lions and the like, they're pussies.) As far as I'm concerned 'domestic' cats
seem to just slink their way through life putting two fingers up to authority and offering a big
'yah boo sucks' to any sense of order and propriety whatsoever. Dogs can be trained - dogs
want to please their master, the important word being 'master' as dogs are very aware of hier-
archy and their position within it. If cats are aware of hierarchy at all it's simply that every
other creature is beneath them. Cats are French.
I've had success training dogs, the only failure being Volcan. He was quite wild when we
first got him and a local Brittany spaniel 'expert' suggested we try an electronic collar to train
him properly - the idea being that whenever the dog is disobedient you press a button on your
remote control pad and the collar gives the dog a short, sharp shock. It's as Draconian as it
sounds and we weren't very keen from the start, preferring instead to offer treats for obedi-
ence rather than pain for the opposite. Also, every time we pressed the button, the television
would turn off and the car boot would open. We tried it on a walk once and felt very uncom-
fortable about the whole thing, and after a good long chat when we got back we decided that
we wouldn't pursue it. Unfortunately what we hadn't realised was that a then two-year-old
Maurice had wandered off with the remote while we were in earnest debate and was subject-
ing the poor beast, quite unknowingly, to an absolute barrage of electric shocks to the extent
that by the time we found the beleaguered creature cowering in the hay barn he looked less
like a proud Brittany spaniel and more like Britney Spears after a rough night out. Our rela-
tionship never really recovered from that, though he would always do what Maurice told him
to do.
We had started putting the cats outside more and more, much to Samuel's quite understand-
able horror, but they just couldn't stand being cooped up all day and I couldn't stand being
cooped up with them all day; and they also seemed to have a decidedly laissez-faire atti-
tude to what I thought would be their main occupation, namely rat destruction. Don't get me
wrong, it was a big rat and it scared the life out of me when I found it nibbling on my winter
quince stock, but I reckon that if the cats had got together and worked as a team they could
