Non è Pussibile!

You wouldn’t have thought it was possible, would you, that within a week of Leo’s horrible abcess healing up, he’d have another one?

I wouldn’t but then I keep under-estimating the nastiness of Big Ginge.

I’m already administering eye drops to the Leonine patient at the moment but this morning he’d grown a fat cheek. What with that and his half closed eye, he gave all the impression of being a bit of a toughie… the kind of battling cat who’s fought more rounds with opponents than he cares to remember and is sporting his battle scars with pride.

But I know he’s a complete wimp who cowers and flinches like a great fur-covered lump of trembling jelly under BG’s devastatingly effective attacks, often in our own garden.

This latest injury is a tooth wound from a bite right under his eye.

As the vet said this evening, giving Leo another shot of antibiotics and nonchalantly squeezing more gross green stuff out of the boy’s face “In a fight, Big Ginge has two big advantages over Leo…. ”

Yup, because I had Leo’s taken off, poor boy.

But the visit to Derry the vet was both successful and a relief – although Leo didn’t think much of it – and I had a pleasant chat with a young man in the waiting room.

He was aged 6 or 7, wearing his red school sweatshirt and very proud of the sweet little ginger tabby in his cat box.

He brought his cat box, containing wide-eyed Nimbus, over to my side of the waiting room and put it down so Nimbus could meet Leo.

“Your cat is ignoring Nimbus!” he complained  “He’s looking at me not the kitten!”

I told him he was more interesting.

“I don’t own the kitten. He’s my brother’s,” the boy explained.  I liked it that he’d named him after a cloud but the boy hadn’t heard of the cloud – only the kitten.

The boy said he had been teaching the kitten tricks – like walking on the ceiling.

“That sounds quite hard,” I said.

“You just put him on the curtain and he goes up,” said the boy, matter-of-factly.

I told him I’d only taught my cat one trick. The sit and beg.

“How did you do that?”

“With cheese.”

The boy liked the fact that Leo is partial to cheese. He was expecting fish to be a good training aid.

The boy thought for a moment and asked “Does he do anything else? Can’t you teach him to stand?”

He does that a lot of the time anyway , I said. It didn’t seem special enough for a trick.

The boy was getting a shade bored so he upped the ante and announced “Oh I’m teaching Nimbus *millions* of tricks!”

Then Nimbus got called into the vet’s surgery to get his second lot of jabs.

“BYE  LEO!” said the boy, picking up his little cat box and bashing it against the side of the magazine table and then hitting the door jamb as he took teeny, wide-eyed and no doubt a bit worried, Nimbus into the surgery.

His dad, who had been reading a magazine and ignoring out chat, looked at me and rolled his eyes.