A couple of months ago, I took my second trip, this time to register the death of my grandmother. We followed the usual form. We were smiled at nicely, invited to sit down, referred to the same bereavement-friendly computer screen. It was a woman registrar this time, rather old-fashioned, with red fingernails, a frilly blouse and a tight suit. Nothing else was different; I sat in the same chair. I even found myself commenting gruesomely, ‘This is just like last time,’ as if I had wanted to see this room again ever in my life.
But here we were again, indisputably, and the heart-breakingly bare details of my grandmother’s life (father’s occupation: ‘coal-heaver’) were duly tapped into the computer. My mum, who was desperately upset, occasionally proffered extra details to swell the story, which made the registrar pause patiently with her fingers hovering above the keyboard, waiting to get on. Meanwhile I held mum’s hand and stared glumly at the screen, making sure all the spellings were correct.
‘Now, I’ll just print out the death certificate,’ said the registrar, tapping a few keys. And it was then that it happened. Somewhere between the instruction and the execution fell the shadow, and she suddenly got up, pushed back her chair, forgot we were there, and rapped hard on some frosted partition-glass. ‘Brenda!’ she shouted, in a great lather. ‘It’s happened again!’ The smile had gone; there was something wrong. Mum and I looked at one another, perhaps to reassure ourselves that we had not actually disappeared.
The summoned Brenda burst into the room, in a blur of electric blue business suit, and rushed to the machine. ‘What did it say?’ she panted. ‘I don’t know,’ panicked the registrar, wringing the manicured digits. ‘Well, did it say ‘‘Disk full’’?’ demanded the fearsome Brenda. ‘No, I think it was something else.’ ‘What did the man tell us to do?’ barked Brenda, drumming her heels on the floor. We looked on, mum and I, wondering whether we should quietly leave, but guessing that it is probably a mistake to stop registering a death when you are halfway through.
What struck me most forcibly about this scene afterwards was that it could have come straight from an Alan Bennett play. Even the name Brenda had the right touch. How could this registrar not realize that by suddenly shouting ‘Brenda, it’s happened again’ in the middle of a delicate transaction with grieving relatives, she was creating a scene that any drama critic would recognize from a dozen or more modern comedies? It was so strange. Perhaps she doesn’t watch television. Perhaps she has no self-consciousness. Perhaps dealing with death takes away your sense of dramatic irony.
The last is certainly true. One of the dubious fringe benefits of your first significant bereavement is learning that the black-suited comic undertaker of popular imagination is not only the real thing, but that it isn’t funny and you have to go along with it. You can’t say, ‘Can I have someone who wasn’t in Joe Orton’s Loot, please?’, and you don’t feel like laughing. Our two sets of undertakers have been ugly, seedy characters with dandruff, Brylcreem, ill-cut suits and nicotine stains who perspired in dark glasses as though rarely exposed to the light of day. And we sat there while they absurdly offered us a range of fancy caskets, knowing there was nothing we could do.
Stupefied by grief, you surrender. The arrangements for my father’s funeral entailed an hour-long consultation with a jumped-up professional doom-merchant who actually wanted us to share the tribulations of the funerary business, even if it meant keeping us in teasing suspense. Can we have the funeral on Tuesday or Wednesday, we asked (wanting a simple yes). At which point he started waxing sarcastic about the unnecessary inconvenience caused by bank holidays, conjured up all sorts of distressing thoughts of coffins log-jammed on the memorial lawn, before finally announcing that he had already booked the crematorium for Wednesday at half past two. Sighs of relief and admiration all round. Our hero.
I understand now about Hamlet losing all his mirth. I used to think this meant he didn’t laugh at jokes because he was upset. But I realize now that death is surrounded by dreadful comedy, which you are obliged to participate in, in the role of unlaughing stooge. Nigel Williams was told at the hospital that ‘your father’s not very well. Actually he’s very poorly indeed. In fact, he’s dead.’ Well, it’s all like that. Neighbours come round to tell you they are sorry, and end up compulsively relating (over several cups of tea) all the tragic bereavements in their own family, going back ten years. Dismayed, you can’t believe they are doing it. Is this an Alan Ayckbourn play, or what?
The Trials of Celibacy Explored with Surprising Frankness
The trouble with surprise spells of warm weather is that they make your thoughts run – rather inconveniently, in my case – in the general direction of sex. Damn and blast. What atavistic creatures we are, to be tweaked by the season in such an obvious way. You would have thought you could rise above it, in an age that can invent the multi-purpose bin-liner. Instead of which, all it takes is a small gust of warmish breeze ruffling the hair on the back of your neck, and the next minute you are startling pensioners at the Post Office by singing ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme a Man After Midnight’ while queuing for your tax disc.
Perhaps this is why the single person feels an enormous urge to spring-clean; it is Nature’s way of turning surplus sap into a white tornado. ‘Sub-Lim-Ate,’ orders a croaky Dalek voice in one’s head, and it seems wise to pay attention. Right, yes, get cracking. Eradicate the Sex Monster by sheer effort of elbow grease, and meanwhile pray for snow. As an additional precaution, remove any erotic element from your environment, such as Georgia O’Keeffe pictures (the ones that remind you of orgasms), and the Andre Agassi calendar you were so proud of. Deliberately avoid watching A Bouquet of Barbed Wire when it is repeated on TV Heaven, and put all your Gérard Depardieu videos in the shed.
But there is an old saying in my family: push sex out of the front door and it will come back through the plughole. ‘Phew,’ I said to the cats last weekend, when all this Superego activity was accomplished. ‘Thank goodness I’ve dealt with that little problem.’ But my sense of security was as ill-founded as Sigourney Weaver’s in Alien. I leaned back in the bath and switched on The Archers, and jumped out of my skin. The Sex Monster was back! And it was running wild in Ambridge! I was aghast. Since when had The Archers been scripted by the ghost of Tennessee Williams? I silenced the radio in a bucket of water, but not before thinking that Jennifer Aldridge’s ‘trips to Felpersham’ sounded nice. Damn and blast again.
So I was in a slightly jumpy mood when I went out for a drive on Sunday. On the run from both the Sex Monster and the Jif Imperative I ran straight into my nightmare combination of both – viz, the blokes with squeegees who haunt the traffic lights at Vauxhall Cross. Damn and blast for a third time. They come looming up at you unbidden, these johnnies; and then they clean your windows whether you like it or not. I had forgotten about them, because they disappear in the winter. But on the first warm day they rise up again miraculously, fully armed with buckets of water and beany hats. They are, I fancy, generated out of the swirling grit of Vauxhall by the mystical action of the sun, like crocodiles from the mud of the Nile.
Allow me to explain why I hate them so much. What happens is that having innocently drawn up at the traffic lights, you are approached by a man (or a kid) with a wet sponge, who is intent on washing your windscreen for a small fee. You mime a polite ‘No thanks’ but he is not deterred. You wave and swivel your palms in the internationally recognized signal for ‘Leave it out, mate, and hop it’, but he slaps the sponge on the glass, so that it dribbles dirty water across your line of vision. ‘Bugger off,’ you shout, but by this time he is wiping off the water, and you notice (at short range, through the glass) that he is the sort of person who breathes through his mouth, and wears the word ‘Hate’ tattooed on his knuckles.
Perhaps there are motorists who do not feel intimidated as I do; perhaps they say, ‘Oh goody’ and start rooting in their pockets for change. But perhaps they are not single women, frazzled by the challenge of suppressing their spring
time libido, and crazed by the sea-change to The Archers. But it is a point of principle, in any case: if I say ‘No’ to these blokes, I truly believe they should leave me alone. To my mind, washing someone’s windscreen against their will is quite as menacing as accosting them at a bus stop and insisting on manicuring their nails.
In the meantime, what is to be done about vanquishing the Sex Monster? Well, this week’s plummeting atmospheric pressure has dealt with the immediate problem, thank goodness. I put the Andre Agassi calendar back on the wall yesterday, and I honestly feel OK. ‘Chew string’ was one helpful suggestion; also, ‘Roll yourself in a length of carpet and recite The Waste Land’ (apparently it works for some people). Back from my ghastly encounter with the Invasion of the Bucket Men, then, I decided to give the carpet-option a try, and it certainly helped. Despite gagging on the dust-balls, I found it amazing how Eliot keeps the Id firmly under wraps, while his unmistakable bass-line rhythm makes the whole experience so jolly:
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones
There’s not a soul out there
No one to hear my prayer
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight.
Of course, a book about the IQ of cats begs a lot of questions to begin with. (‘I am reading a book on cat IQ,’ I mentioned to a friend. ‘Short, is it?’ she said.) But when you are a doting owner, keen to establish proof of your cat’s outstanding native wit, you tend to lose sight of what those questions might be. So we sat down a week ago, the cats and I, and mutually ticked a lot of boxes in Melissa Miller’s new Definitive IQ Tests for Cats (Signet, £3.99). The exercise produced quite fascinating results. I mean, according to our relative aggregates, one of the cats is cleverer than I am. Which is weird, really, because despite his mighty cat brain, guess who kept the scores?
‘Look, kitty,’ I said proudly, waving the book near his nose. ‘You achieved 39 in visual skills!’ But, alas, these visual skills did not extend to reading the printed page, or even getting the book into decent focus. Instead, he shrank back in evident distaste, as though the book were a custard pie. I tried another tack. ‘Hey! Fur-face!’ I yelled in his ear. ‘You got 52 on audio abilities!’ But strangely he seemed oblivious to my cry. ‘And in social behaviour you got an amazing total of …’ However, my voice trailed off at this point because he had got up and walked out of the room.
If the cat is really cleverer than me, I just want to know one thing: why isn’t he writing this article while I lie on top of the shed? But I suppose the answer is obvious when you put it like that. Cats are clever enough to get the better end of the symbiotic deal. ‘Tell you what,’ they say. ‘You write the piece, and I’ll sit on it. You earn the money, and I’ll eat the Friskies.’ In these circumstances, there is not much point attempting tests in verbal reasoning. (‘Now let’s try it one more time. STING is to THING, as STICK is to TH- - -.’) A lot of nonsense is spoken about the cat’s exceptional brain-to-body weight ratio. But when they introduced the concept of the electronic cat-flap, you may have noticed that they dispensed with the key-pad, because they knew that cats would need the number written down.
Miller emphasizes that her book of IQ tests should not be taken seriously, but I fear this is to misunderstand the character of her potential reader, which is bound to be fanatical and competitive. By means of multiple-choice questions, she tests your cat’s intelligence in various situations – does it respond to its name, look with interest out of the window, hide things around the home, enjoy television? The trouble with such multiple-choice tests, however, is that there is a tendency in the respondent (me) to second-guess the top-scoring answer and automatically tick the appropriate box. Anyone who has doodled with a questionnaire in a women’s magazine will recognize the syndrome.
You are waiting all day and all evening for your new boyfriend to call. When he finally phones at midnight, do you:
A: Break down in tears, explaining between sobs that you have become completely dependent on him?
B: Wax sarcastic, and then yell that you never want to see him again, despite the fact that you like him very much?
C: Act in a mature fashion, explaining that you demand respect for your feelings, and suggesting that he give you his phone number so that you can phone him next time?
D: Not answer the phone, because you have just committed suicide.
Now, only a very thick person will not discern that C is the big-bucks answer here. Even if you spend your emotional life in a constant moil of sarcasm, yelling, bawling and throat sharpening, you will nevertheless be fully aware that the answer C will translate as the best personality type when you later consult the answers at the back. So, similarly, if you are filling in a questionnaire on your cat’s IQ, and are asked the following question, you cannot ignore the temptation to respond dishonestly.
If your cat could read, which of the following newspapers would it probably buy?
A: Financial Times
B: Daily Mail
C: The Independent
D: The Sun
The fact that Cat No 1 is an obvious candidate for Bunty, while Cat No 2 would sit happily for hours with an out-of-date What Car?, is unlikely to deter you from ticking Financial Times with utter confidence, because you know it is the ‘right’ answer.
One thing I learnt from the book was that Sir Isaac Newton invented the cat-flap. It puts all his other distinctions in the shade. The prophet Muhammad, not wanting to disturb a sleeping cat, cut off part of his garment when he got up (bless his heart). Evidently the cat’s special place in human affections (as well as its innate superiority as a species) is well attested historically, but I don’t mind mentioning that I often pause wearily during essays on ‘the cat in history’ to ponder the famous New Yorker cartoon in which a man says: ‘The fact that you cats were considered sacred in ancient Egypt cuts no ice with me.’
However, this book also contains modern stories of cats doing clever things – such as stealing bread from the kitchen and using it as bait for birds – which suggest the undeniable presence of functioning little grey cells concealed beneath the furry ears and eyebrows. Miller recounts one story of a cat which, having observed its owner’s bleary-eyed wakeup routine of ‘stick the kettle on, feed the cat’, attempted to get things moving one morning by retrieving a used teabag from the bin and placing it on the owner’s pillow. This shows amazing intelligence on the part of the cat, if only because it could remember key scenes from The Godfather.
Mostly, the way you define cat intelligence is by identifying things they won’t do. Why is there no feline equivalent of Champion the Wonder Horse or Rin-Tin-Tin, Flipper or Lassie? Because a cat will not race into a burning building to rescue a baby, that’s why. It is their own peculiar way of proving they are smart. In the heyday of the Hollywood studios, it was uncanny how those hopeful cat-hero scripts somehow always found their way to the bottom of the pile. ‘Tiddles! Only you can save us! Squeeze through this tiny opening, and switch off the infernal machine! Go like the wind, and there’ll be sprats for tea!’ Some joke, obviously. ‘Did somebody say infernal machine?’ the cat says. ‘Blimey, I’m off then.’
This book mentions that there were no cat skeletons found at Pompeii or Herculaneum, and jumps to the conclusion that therefore no cats lived there. But obviously they screeched out of town at the first whiff of sulphur. ‘Tiddles!’ they said in Pompeii. ‘Only you can save us!’ But a flash of cat bum was all that was visible, as the volcano rumbled and split. Centuries later, when the site was excavated, many petrified human bodies were doubtless found in the attitude of surprised cat owners calling to their pets in vain, frozen in time with boxes of Kitbits in their hands. Scrawled on a terracotta brick were some dying words in Latin which, roughly translated, meant, ‘I don’t believe it, the bloody cat has scarpered.’
As I explained earlier, Miller’s tests for cats (the first half of the
book) are fairly easy to second-guess. Once you have imagined that your cat’s brain is entirely devoted to wangling the best deal for itself (and that it reads the FT), you are on your way to a hefty score. The second half is more tricky, however, because it is the test for owners, and the hidden agenda is more difficult to gauge. Take the following:
Do you buy your cat something special for its birthday, Christmas or other special occasions?
A: My cat is treated like any other member of the family.
B: No. Cats cannot appreciate the significance of such gifts.
C: Although I may remember my cat’s birthday, I don’t buy it anything to celebrate it.
D: I’m not sure when my cat’s birthday is, but I always include it in my own special celebrations, giving it extra food or buying it a special treat.
Well, I went for D, because it sounded the best – you know, affectionate without being fanatical. Also, I thought you could eliminate the others. Anyone answering B would obviously not be doing the questionnaire, being too busy running a cold, loveless reform school in a Victorian novel; while the person answering C is self-evidently too mean to buy the book. This only leaves A and D as decent cat-loving responses, and A sounded suspiciously like a trap for loonies. But A scored best, in fact. Because it turns out, in the end, that it is your level of fanaticism that is being tested.
Some of the questions concern how easily one’s cat takes affront, and whether an owner will avoid saying anything negative (such as ‘pea-brained’) about a cat in its presence. Samuel Johnson, you may remember, had a cat called Hodge that he was fond of; and Miller quotes a wonderful passage from Boswell to illustrate the great man’s sensitivity to the cat’s feelings.