SHUT UP ABOUT THE CATS ALREADY

For some reason, it just never occurred to me how a cat-litter tray works.  The premise is simple enough, and I’m not totally unintelligent, and yet...  I guess I just didn’t really think about it.  I had a cat growing up (beautiful, but cold and mean – a feline Hollywood starlet I suppose) so I really should have known about such things, but living in the suburbs with a large garden at our disposal, she (along with all the children in the house) was placed outside from dawn until bedtime, and so no kitty litter was ever required.  

This is how it works.  You fill the litter tray with eye-bleedingly expensive recycled paper nuggets, preferably from a near-empty 20L bag which you had assumed would last until Easter or thereabouts.  You sit back for a few minutes until one of the cats jumps into the tray, kicks away as much of the paper nuggets as it can, and then sprays diarrhoea all over the base of the tray (and the wall and the lip of the tray, the roll of toilet paper near by, and one of the many cat toys [the feline-interest (low) in which is in inverse proportion to its cost (high)].) You are then supposed to “remove excrement from the tray and dispose of it in a way which is safe and hygienic” (or so the blurb on the side of the cat litter bag tells me.  The blurb is not clear on exactly how you remove excrement which is essentially liquid and which has covered everything in a quarter-metre radius.)

So basically you have a cat toilet, and you have to pick the shit out of it every time the shit appears.  Because the shit has big clumps of cat-litter attached to it (and because you might not particularly want to go walking through your house with it dangling off the scooper thingy), you can’t just chuck it down the toilet.  Nor can you just dump it in the bin. So instead you have to gift-wrap it in newspaper, then re-wrap it again in more newspaper, and dispose of it down your rubbish chute.

As well as being DISGUSTING in every single way you can imagine, this is also unbelievably time consuming.  “Do it once a day!” proud cat-owners advise me.  Well I would, but these kittens are both prolific in their faeces  production and stupid about where to place their feet, so that shit (literally) gets trailed around the house  unless dealt with straight away.

What I obviously need are kitty nappies.  Do such exist?   (Any Japanese readers here? Because if they exist anywhere in the world, it’ll be in Japan. )

There are positives of course, namely that my children’s toilet habits in contrast now seem positively delightful, AND I love the poor, work- and stress-free hamster (remember him?) more than ever, AND the cats are basically free child-entertainment.  (And yes, they’re cute – especially this evening when they fell asleep in a heap on top of each other, on top of the internet router thingy.  Swiping at flickering lights is clearly exhausting.)

I haven’t mentioned the you-know-whats (braces, if you haven’t been paying attention), and I won’t, because the other half of my day – the half when I am not picking cat-poo out of a cat toilet – is spent cleaning or removing or replacing (I got those Invisalign braces on top) or trying to find some part of my mouth upon which I can rest my poor ulcerated tongue, and frankly I’m bored with it all. 

Let us leave with this happy thought:  in less than 4 weeks I get to take the Christmas Elf on the Shelf out of hibernation and choose amusing places for him to be  found by the kids every morning.  The kitty-litter tray might have its uses after all.