A Eulogy for Miss Pissy Woo

Sisters: Agatha and Alice

My house is very quiet, apart from lazy buzzing of annoying cluster flies. The dogs don’t make much noise when they sleep unlike Miss Agatha Woo who’d purr all the time.

Did you note that? Dogs and flies in the present tense but Agatha is already in the past.

She’s not there in the morning as I struggle bleary-eyed to let the dogs out, yowling at me to give her some food; the all-pervading stench of ammonia from her night time ablutions fast becoming a faded memory. I feel more confident crossing the kitchen in bare feet within a few days of her demise. And although I never particularly liked treading in the proverbial be it cat poo, cat pee or cat sick I had become used to it and could gracefully wend my way over the kitchen floor to where I kept the bucket and mop seemingly blindfolded. It was a skill I was inordinately proud of; getting from Point A to Point B without anything squashing between my toes and all before I had had my first cup of tea.

My husband is calmer for not having to face such an obstacle course. In fact he can now get his own cup of tea first thing in the morning, which after several years of getting up at sparrows fart o’clock and foregoing said tea before catching the train to London with all the other work-oholics who need to be seen to be the first in and last out, must be kind of nice.

I can put things back on shelves that I never thought to see out again; the things that she’d always try to step over and round but latterly she’d just knock off. Many have been repaired, quite badly but I can’t look at those cracks without thinking of her and her quest NOT to have to touch the floor after it had been washed.

Curtains can go back up; shorter than they were but at least now they will stay clean. The table-cloth can come off the Kitchen table as she’s not there to gauge great scratches across its glossy top as she leaps up to get a better look at me and to, of course, look down upon the dogs.

Friends can now bring their dogs to our house knowing that Agatha Bagwash will not be there to corner them and make them wet themselves in fear – a neat party trick she enjoyed rather too much and one which nearly got her killed when she tried to take on a visiting Weimaraner who although blind had a very acute sense of smell.

He bolted after her and landed with his head stuck through the flap of the cat litter tray while she escaped by vaulting on to the Aga which was just to the side. She vaulted off pretty quick too as the Aga was on and I landed up buttering her paws and apologising to my friends for traumatising their dog.

Soon they will forget that she was ever there for how could they have loved her as I did?

She’ll be a few words on a page that no one will read, some faded old photographs of a cat their mother once had to be thrown away as a load of old junk as they sort me out  to move into the old people’s home before I too become the past…

RIP 

Agatha Bagwash

(latterly Miss Pissy Woo)

1 June 1996 – 15 October 2011

Agatha Bagwash: Summer 2010

Pissy woo - the joys of older cat maintenance

They've nicknamed her Pissy Woo. It is not very respectful to an older cat but really rather accurate. For Pissy Woo will just do it wherever and whenever she feels the need. It is rather awkward to defend her in a houseful of Dog people but as I remind them we will all be old and frail one day and we too may have problems.
My boys look at me in disbelief.
"What you mean we'll pee on the floor?!"
I peered over the top of my glasses at him, one eyebrow raised. "You mean you don't do that in the bathroom already?"
The Boy had the decency to blush. "Only sometimes...."
This is what my life is now; clearing up pee. If it's not on the bathroom floor or  beside the downstairs loo, it's on the kitchen floor. Thank God! I never got rid of the child gates so at least I can curtail the cat in one area; though I no longer have curtains and as for the Persian rug...let's just say it won't be back for some time.
I don't think either of my boys will have cats. Not after Pissy Woo's latest escapade; although I do actually blame it on a visiting puppy. We lost Agatha, or at least thought we had. The puppy had become rather too excited on seeing Miss Agatha Woo and had chased her away. We thought she was outside, a place she rarely goes as she hates the countryside being a town-born cat, but it seemed the only logical place.
I forget sometimes my cat's proclivity for small dark places.
We went out thinking she would come back.
We came back half an hour later and got ready for lunch, not cat.
I opened the dishwasher to get some clean plates and was met with an earsplitting caterwaul and an overriding stench of ammonia. Pissy Woo had done her stuff while shut in the dishwasher, how she got there I have no idea. After yelling at me adn mewling in complaint for five minutes she seemed none the worse for her incarceration, for which I thank god for dementia.
But as for the plates, well I decided we'd better have a picnic and put the dishwasher on again. I can only think that she jumped in there to escape the puppy earlier that morning. Thank heavens I am lazy housekeeper and had not put the clean crockery away, just imagine the scene had I had dirty stuff in there and had been more efficient...! It's tough having a cat with alzheimers or maybe she is just making a point.

Moving experiences...

Things I covet: Jim Lawrence tassel

If someone bought your house, how would you leave it? Would you leave it clean and tidy? Perhaps you would add a note about how to turn things on and off and good wishes? Maybe you might even leave a bottle of bubbly and some flowers. A little something to say you cared and hoping that the next owner of your house enjoys it as much as you did.

Maybe you’d do none of the above and just shut the door on a chapter in your life. Being an Army Brat I was brought up to leave my lodgings spick and span. I have an abiding memory (although it may be erroneous) of watching my mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor in last ditch attempt to leave our Army Quarter ( military term for house) in Germany, spotless. Finished she closed the door and hassled us into the car where we awaited the Housing Officer to pass the property clean enough so we could leave.

I kid you not these guys would come with clipboards and white gloves to check absolutely everything. They would don white gloves to make sure you had cleaned everything properly, the door lintels the light switches, behind the cooker, under the fridge everywhere. I don’t remember what the penalties were for failing but as a child of eight or nine I got the impression they were dire indeed.

As an itinerant Student my landlords loved me such was the ingrained need to leave each lodging spotless, in fact there were times I felt that the property was left by me far better than when I arrived. I know that when I sold my flat the lucky girl who had bought it was dumbstruck at how clean it was left, so much so that she rang to thank me. So you may forgive me a little when I get righteously indignant when I hear of people leaving their homes in rather a poor state.

Friends of mine bought a beautiful house and moved in a few weeks ago. The couple who left, she an interior designer, were great. They took everything, virtually everything even though they were going into rented accommodation in the same village. They removed every light fitting, every fixed mirror, every flower pot (after dumping the surplus soil on the ground where the pots had previously stood); they even took the gas canisters that ran the hob breaking the connections so badly that new ones cannot be fixed. They took all the chopped wood. If they could I am sure they would have drained the oil – there again I am not sure that they did not.

However, they did leave behind filth, everywhere. Evidence of the great anger they obviously felt about leaving their home. They also left behind two pairs of curtains and told my friends so very magnanimously. I was immediately suspicious. If they had taken absolutely everything else that was not physically cemented to the floors of the house, why would thy leave the curtains behind? In fact when the negotiations were going on for the house my friends were offered all the curtains at a price way too steep for my friends to feel comfortable with, despite being told rather forcefully that the curtains were designer and that my friends should be so lucky to be offered said curtains.

We were shown proudly round the new home and I tried to avert my eyes from the dark patches in the carpet and the badly scraped walls, the piles of dust and ingrained dirt on the bannisters. We were shown the curtains.

“They aren’t our state but they aren’t so bad," said my friend, “just a little stained on the bottom.”

I pricked up my ears, stained? I said: "Let’s have a butchers..."

I approached the curtains already knowing what I would find. I gingerly picked one up

They were stained alright and also felt a bit damp too. I sniffed and staggered back a few paces. The bottom of the curtains were drenched in cat pee.

Now if the previous owners had just left the curtains and said nothing at all about them I would have just considered them filthy people with no sense of pride, but because they actually said they had left the curtains for my friends and they said it so magnanimously I can only say one thing what complete and utter prats and what a nasty thing to do, downright deliberately nasty. And remember this is an interior designer we are talking about, one who still has a business to run.

I must admit I did add after sniffing the curtains that it was blooming lucky they hadn’t opted to buy the rest of them!