A pink kink in her think

As I’m sitting here writing at the kitchen table, my progress is being monitored by one of my cats. She’s sitting purring loudly and staring at me over the laptop screen. She’s on Prawn Patrol. Her hunted eyes follow my fingers’ every move just in case they should produce from behind my ears, Paul Daniels-stylee, a pink morsel.

Prawns are, you see, kitty crack and Cami’s a prawn whore who’s going cold turkey.

When Cami first came to live with us almost 5 years ago she was the smallest cutest bundle of fluff you have ever seen. She had peculiar tastes though having apparently been weaned onto Weetabix and milk rather than catfood. Her first night home she didn’t show any interest in the food we put down, she preferred to nibble on cat litter instead. She did develop more conventional tastes and now when she gets the crunchy munchies she eats ordinary cat food. And prawns.

Things have got out of hand just lately and she’s got a little too used to having them often so she’s been cut down to a few every weekend. This makes her alternately very sulky and very adorably affectionate. I like the affectionate bit and it’s hard not to reward nice behaviour with a little treat, trouble is once she gets what she wants she wants more, more, MORE!!

With hindsight I think Cami and her brother Dougal were too young to leave their mother but I also think we saved their lives by bringing them home when we did - they were infested with fleas and I believe that if they’d been left any longer without intervention that they probably would have died from anaemia. Their third litter mate had died already so I think we got them just in time.

The couple we got them from said to me as we were leaving on that fateful Saturday, “they might have one or two fleas”. One or two? Bloody hell the poor little buggers were absolutely heaving with fleas and would have to pause every couple of seconds mid-playfight to stop and have a good scratch. They were being eaten alive and I couldn’t get them into the vets until Monday.

So I sat with them on my lap and a mug of hot water beside me and combed them with a flea comb. And combed them and combed them. The fleas came off on that flea comb clustered like tiny bunches of grapes and I swiftly plunged the comb into the glass of hot water to kill them. I sat and did that for over an hour changing the water every ten minutes to ensure that it stayed hot enough to kill the fleas. When I got to the vet on the Monday night he could only find a couple of fleas on them.

I wish I’d carried on with the regular combing, they have very dense, long fur (I think they have some Maine Coon or Siberian in their genes, definitely some Husky somewhere in there) and they hate being combed now. They love being outdoors and getting muddy and matted from creeping through the undergrowth. I frequently have to extract twigs from their fur and they usually leave me something prickly after they’ve been snoozing on the bed.

kasjrdobcljasroiacjamslkdljLDLKLDJqowueojvlzn,\ c x,cxnlkgjpaswlhjegjasgdd I have to go now, she thinks I have some prawns stashed in the keyboard.