The Virtual Stoa

Over here [via].

Readers of this story may see the photograph and reasonably worry about whether I’ve been feeding poison intended for dogs to Enkidu.

I haven’t, and he’s fine.

Recently the Google Earth images of Oxford got much, much better. This, for example, is the part of town where you might run into Enkidu on your travels. That’s the canal going down the left-hand-side, where he’s been spotted on a number of occasions now; and there’s St Barnabas Church along the bottom edge, with Jericho’s Albert Street cutting through the top right-hand-corner.

My friend Chris Bertram stayed overnight with us in Oxford last week, and took this picture of Andromache. She’s wrapped in the towel we use for drying off the cats when they get wet.

Obi-Wan Dromaki, perhaps? (Original pic here.)

The BBC, covering the issues that matter, over here.

(The Virtual Stoa’s favourite polydactyl lives in Marin County, California; but I don’t think Alison Thomas is interested in him, owing to her less than fully cosmopolitan attitude, when it comes to cats.)

By my reckoning Enkidu caught two mice in the first two years of his life, and three mice in the last two weeks. So either he’s getting much, much better at catching mice, or else the mouse population in Jericho has recently gone through the roof. (I wonder which.)

Rather touchingly, he brought in last night’s mouse shortly before midnight, played with the corpse for bit under the table, and then placed it in his food-bowl before starting to devour it.

I missed last nights Dispatches on the bin wars — the one where they collected some of our rubbish for us in a nice yellow wheelie-bin — so if anyone can fill me in on the state of play here in Oxford, that’d be useful.

In possibly related news, I realised last night that there’s at least one mouse on the loose in our house, and that when Andromache has been parked in front of her food bowl for lengthy periods without eating, this isn’t a protest against the muck we feed her so much as her patient vigil in front of the mouse-hole.

From the same source as below:

With all due respect,
Rilke didn’t know his cats.
Their eyes are mirrors.

Enkidu recently disappeared for (we think) three nights in a row, which isn’t typical behaviour, and in the end I found him on the corner of Victor St and Canal St where there’s a little alleyway that goes down to the canal, and I brought him home. (This confirms what other neighbours had told me, that he spends his time hanging out down at the canal, and this may be where he finds his mice.)
Anyway, this is by way of background to the fact that my friend Max Pensky, who has been a visiting philosopher at Oxford this year, is living round the corner from us in Jericho, on the street to which Enkidu is a frequent visitor, and has now turned to haiku.

First, there was this:

Enkidu’s return:
Indignant but glad he’s found
Like any good cat.

Then, yesterday, this:

Peripherally
Glimpsed, black-white quicksilver flash.
“Flink,” the Germans say.

And, this morning, the third instalment:

Dialectic of
Enkidu’s extremities:
Quite sharp, or quite soft.

Enkidu and Andromache, two today (probably).

Here’s a birthday portrait of Enkidu:

And here’s a birthday portrait of Andromache:

UPDATE! [11.30pm] Enkidu has marked his birthday by catching a mouse, bringing it inside, and playing with it on the carpet!

As befits his Sumerian origins (more or less), Enkidu appears to have perfected his proskynesis technique (though I doubt I’ll ever capture this on film).

Enkidu is being very friendly at the moment, which I like to think is reciprocal altruism, looking back to the time when he was the one with the damaged limb and I was (one of the ones) looking after him.

(What you can’t see in this photo is that these two cats are enjoying the music of the late, lamented Waylon Jennings.)

For reasons I don’t fully understand, one of the shower-curtain-rings has found its way into the garden, and has come to the attention of Andromache.

We haven’t had a picture of Enkidu for a while. Here he is, in his favourite Place.

I think I envy cats most for their ability to make themselves comfortable pretty much anywhere. Here’s Andromache, relaxing on some books:

Here’s Andromache, wrestling with a blue thing on a stick:

Readers with long memories will recall that Enkidu became interested in cricket almost immediately, after coming to live with us in the Summer of 2005. Here and here, for example. And now that the Ashes are being contested again, Enkidu’s interest has reawakened.

I’ve been leaving the radio on at night, very quietly, so that I can fall asleep while Justin Langer is scoring runs, wake up while Ricky Ponting is scoring runs, lucky me, and if I drift into consciousness in the middle of the night I can easily register the latest score before drifting back into sleep. And after finding alternative places to sleep for a month or more, Enkidu chose Wednesday night, the first day of the Test Match, to come and settle down at the foot of my bed again: he was there at the start of play and still there at the close, and I don’t think he went anywhere else in between. So that’s a lot of Test Match Special that he got to hear.

He slept on my bed last night, too, though he had pushed off by the time the England batsmen were starting their innings. And here he is, later this morning, watching the highlights being streamed through the BBC website:

It’s getting colder and wetter and darker outside, which means that muddy pawprints are becoming a bit more common around the house.

Enkidu stills seems to spend most of the day outside, doing whatever cat things he does out there, and checks in with me twice a day, at breakfast time, and whenever he gets in late at night, when he usually comes to wake me up to say hello.

Andromache, by contrast, tends to stay indoors and purr, happy now that I’ve restored a steady supply of tuna-flavoured catfood, rather than the chicken-themed muck I was trying to get her to enjoy.

Anyway: here’s Andromache washing Enkidu’s head a few minutes ago. Notice the rather complicated cat-toy-glove-thingummy.

More of the same:

A brief pause:

Headwashing resumes:

Enkidu shows off his clean head:

Apologies for the long absence of cat-pics from these pages. I mislaid the camera for a bit, and when I found it again under a pile of books the weather was improving, and the cats were spending much of their time outside. Anyway: here’s Enkidu, contemplating the most recent addition to the historiography of the Enlightenment.

Don’t worry. I don’t think this is going to become a daily feature. Anyway, here’s Enkidu, Mac User, a few moments ago:

Andromache, earlier this morning:

Enkidu, at full stretch:

Andromache doesn’t always make it easy to type at the computer, seeing that wrists can also be employed as feline chin-rests.

Enkidu, to his shame, is bored by my books:

Actually, Enkidu is very bored by my books:

We used to think that Andromache was a lesbian submissive, but more recently we found out that the enormous neighbour’s cat with whom she used to wrestle playfully in the bushes was a boy. (That’s the cat that’s enormous, by the way, not the neighbour.) Our neighbour has been told by a vet, however, that her cat must lose weight soon OR HE WILL DIE, as his heart’s not in a terribly good way right now, and this has spurred us to put collars on our cats and magnets on the collars, so that they, and only they, can get into the house through our catflap and eat whatever crunchy tuna-flavoured food that they might find there.

Andromache was in a bit of a sulk about wearing her elegant green collar for a few days, but she seems to have adjusted to it, and is back to her usual friendly, perpetually purring self.

Enkidu, on the other hand, has managed to get his collar off three times in three days. On the first couple of occasions he did it in the living room, so I could scoop it back up and put it back on him. Now he’s removed it outside somewhere (and woke me up just before 7 this morning banging at the flap - which he can’t get through any more).

So now I have to get some spare magnets, to replace the one that he’s lost somewhere in the great wide world, but I’m also keen to pick up tips from the Friends of the Cat who read the Virtual Stoa - and I know there are some of you out there - about how to choose and fit a collar onto a cat who has managed to remove a pretty securely-fitted collar three times in quick succession. Any ideas?