Living for Disco

I eventually want children, and my body is beginning to tell me that I’d better get a move on, as I’m getting on a bit, and I do want to be able to play with my kids without the aid of a zimmer frame*.

However, Gordon has said (with increasing firmness, the more time we spend with friends who have more than one child of toddler age) that we should probably check that we’d make good parents first, by getting a kitten and practising on it.

So, we have a kitten. We haven’t named it yet as no names really seem to stick, apart from Kitten. It’s been four days, and I’m wondering whether we would make good parents. For example, is it wise to let your six week old (as yet unnamed) child hurtle up and down the stairs, stick its head through the bannisters, fall backwards off the sofa onto the wooden floor, and play delightedly with a small pile of gravel in which it has just buried its own excrement? I even lost her the other day, only to find she’d got stuck in the cupboard under the sink while investigating our bleach collection.

I admit I’m trying to give her the care and sustenance she needs. She likes to try and suck on my eyeball, which I’m trying to dissuade her from doing, as it is a) uncomfortable and b) unhygenic. I mean, she’s usually just licked her bum clean. Conjunctivitis anyone?
I also let her sleep in our bed, which I understand can be comforting for young children. However, waking up at 5.30 am with a cat on your head isn’t the best way to ease yourself into your day. Particularly when she generally attacks anything that moves, which includes your bleary, blinking eyelid.

She is very, very cute, which is why people get kittens in the first place, I imagine. She’s also completely insane. She stalks us eveywhere we go. Our toes have puncture wounds that would be the envy of a bevy of lorikeets. Nothing is safe.

We bumped into the neighbours from whom we got her yesterday, and he asked us how it was going.

“Bonkers isn’t she?” he said, with a certain degree of schadenfreude. I thought all kittens were bonkers, but he assures us that of the litter of six, this one was particularly nuts. I expect to come home to find her swinging from the light fittings one day very soon, and like most mothers, I like to think that this is merely a reflection of her extraordinary brilliance.

On a weirdly serious note though, it struck me that cats live for 14 or 15 years. I hadn’t really thought about this before. She’s probably going to be our cat for a very long time. For the first time, I’ve actually had to consider the very real nature of our commitment to each other, which has been somewhat overshadowed by the excitement of moving in with Gordon and planning our wedding. It’s bizarre that it’s taken something as tiny as a kitten to bring this home.

Naturally it hasn’t changed anything - just clarified a few things to my satisfaction. However, it’s also made me consider our relationship through a further layer of understanding. It does make me wonder whether anyone really knows what they are getting into when they say ‘I do’, or when they get a kitten together.

Above all, spending time together with the kitten has made me realise that we’re really going to have to do the dusting a bit more often. If anyone sees the amount of fluff on Kitten’s whiskers, we’ll soon be getting a visit from the RSPCA, and I’m not ready to start the recrimination stage of our partnership just yet.

*Although they can do wonders with science these days, so I might just store my eggs and wait til I’m 60.

We are in Singapore. I love Singapore - it’s hot, it’s steamy, it’s full of delicious food (of which we have eaten much) and there are many cool things to do. On our last day, we decided to schedule in a visit to Jurong Bird Park, as it is, as I recall, excellent.

I like birds anyway - I became known for my ability to identify birds while in Namibia. ‘What’s that?’, people would cry as we passed some bizarre avian specimen. ‘It’s an ostrich!’ I would reply confidently, astonishing everyone with my ornithological knowledge.

The main thing I wanted to do was visit the Lory Loft, as I had heard that you could feed the birds and get close to them. ‘How lovely!’ I thought, picturing myself covered with delightful little feathered creatures that would eat demurely from my hand, whilst batting their eyelashes for the camera.

I am now older and wiser. Lorikeets are noisy as fuck, have very sharp claws, defend their food viciously and have thick grey tongues that are, quite frankly, unsettlingly reptilian. But enough of the wordy descriptions. Here, let me show you…

I left the Lory Loft with somewhat depleted hearing, and a number of deep puncture wounds in my arm.

Also I think they had fleas.

Hello! I’m back from my holiday, during which I did not have much opportunity to blog the many marvellous things that happened to me, which included being pecked by lorikeets, seeing possums and wallabies, drinking dirty martinis under the ocean-side palms and watching my little sister get married on a beach. There will be holiday updates soon, and oh my, will they be a hoot. I hope.

In the meantime, the first thing that we had to do when we got back was to visit the registrar to state our intent to marry each other. I had no idea you had to do this kind of thing - get permission from the council to get married? What the fuck have the council got to do with it? Aren’t they responsible for refuse collection and digging up the roads in an inconvenient fashion?

Of course, I realise that there has to be a record of births, deaths and marriages, and that this has to be done by the parish. However, I’d not given much thought to the fact that you have to go and hand over a cheque for £60 and answer questions about your intended in order to prove that you haven’t imported them from a developing nation for tax breaks.

I actually started to get a bit worried when Gordon, having been asked the relatively straightforward question of his age at the current time, had some trouble answering. Would the registrar think that he had failed to memorise his cover properly? I hoped he didn’t sound too Lithuanian.

‘You’re 41′, I hissed, hoping to support him (in a future-wifely fashion) through this mental meltdown.

‘Don’t help him! You’re not allowed to help him!’ said the registrar.

The same thing happened when it came to the answering of questions about his bride, amongst which were details of my age, occupation and length of time lived in Bournemouth. There is only so much information you can convey with your eyebrows, and ‘34′, ‘Trust Fundraising Manager’ and ‘7 months’ tends to be a little specific. We did get there in the end, although I think my gurning may have alarmed the registrar.

So, we have no officially declared our intention to get hitched, and with any luck, no lunatics (you know who you are) will write in to the council objecting on entirely spurious grounds in the next 15 days.

It feels like I’m practically married already.