Notes for my Children's Therapist: I live with a self centred jerk-face

Yep. That's him. Dermot the Chinese Kitchen Cat. And he's a self centred jerk-face. Oh he looks cute there all cuddled up on the sofa like he owns the joint. He'll suck you in with his "pet me I'm adorable" routine. But he's a jerk-face. He usually looks more like this:

He may have fooled Paul, but he hasn't fooled me.

Here's why he is a jerk-face cat:

1. He's ungrateful. And a hardcore communist.

We picked up Dermot the Chinese Kitchen Cat in, you guessed it, a Chinese kitchen. We were living in Dongguan, the South of China at the time and one day just before Christmas we were walking past a restaurant and noticed a cage of kittens and cats sitting outside of the kitchen. We wondered what was up with that and found out that they were on the menu. Being the easily horrified foreign devils that we were at the time (we are no longer easily horrified. Still foreign devils, though) we asked about the cats and a woman opened the cage, picked up a tiny orange kitten (covered in fleas) by his face and tossed it to Paul. Well, Paul wasn't letting go. We paid something for him (I seem to recall Paul thrusting money at her and backing away) and he's made us regret it ever since.

I've shown him pictures like the one above. I've explained to him that look, considering that you were nearly stir-fried with bamboo shoots and broccoli you should really stop whining about the brand of cat food we buy you, and I've even threatened to cook him up with a nice black bean sauce myself. He doesn't get it.

And this is an outrageously expensive cat. We may as well have purchased a couple of breeding pure bread show cats for what this one is worth.

After we de-flead the little guy with tweezers there was all the feeding him with tiny bottles, teaching him to use a litter box full of dirt, cleaning tiny dirt paw prints off of everything we owned, the shots, the cuddles... then the flight from the south of China to the North of China (nobody could believe that we were flying a kitten with us. Or even taking it with us when we moved). I don't think he has ever quite forgiven us for that last flight.

And then we got a dog. Just to torment him. (technically, the dog came first, but that's another horror story for another day). And to make things even worse, we had a woman come in a couple of times a week that insisted on bathing him. The woman was like a ninja. I'm surprised he never drowned.

Then we moved to England, and took the ungrateful bastard with us. More expensive shots. Microchipping, quarantine in China, an expensive flight to the UK. AND THEN 6 MONTHS OF HORRIFICALLY EXPENSIVE QUARANTINE, and this cat has NO appreciation. At all. We visited him every 2 weeks! We saw what it was like there! It was like a kitty hotel! He had friends to chat to through the plexi glass, stuff to climb on, stuff to hang out on, a door way top to leap down onto the unsuspecting heads of the staff with (we received a few complaints) - he even made friends down the street (the facility received a few noise complaints). His was a palace compared to the dog's solitary confinement hell-hole. But is he at all grateful?

Of course not. Entitled twit.

2. He doesn't earn his keep

So, it's my understanding that cats are meant to keep out mice, no? Seems like a pretty simple job to me, I don't ask much of Dermot, just that he keeps the vermin out and cuddles me once in awhile without giving me a "love bite" that leaves a scar.

But no. When we saw a mouse recently (we have since moved), Dermot was nowhere to be found and we were left to deal with it ourselves. This involved a heated argument, a broom, an empty diaper box and some hiking boots. We're not very good at this stuff. Paul was ready to kill it, I wanted him to capture it and let it loose in the back garden. He though I was insane, I thought he was a monster. We agreed to stun it, capture it, check that it was okay and then release it in the neighbour's back garden. This did not work out quite as well as we had planned.

My point though, is that if Dermot had been doing his job satisfactorily that the mouse wouldn't have even come into the house in the first place. Cat fail.

We figured that once we moved Dermot would have a fresh start. There is a gigantic field directly behind the house, surely his mousing skills will get some much needed continuing professional development. We haven't seen any mice yet, but Dermot has another vile foe to contend with here.

Spiderzilla.

We've got spiders. Big ones. Hairy ones. Not ^that one^, thank god, but just as ugly I'm sure, if I got close enough to look. (I won't). The kids picked one up and were playing with it, brought it to the kitchen and got to watch mommy and daddy running around the kitchen screeching "Holy *&^%! Holy *&%! while Paul scrambled to find something big enough to kill it with and I cowered in a corner wet-wiping the crap out of the children.

AND WHERE WAS DERMOT?

Nowhere to be found. That's where.

3. He cries like their long lost triplet

Whenever the kids cry, my cat cries. Just to let us know that the kids are crying. He likes to feel included. Making sure we're in the loop. Now, with screaming twins, I'm not going to lie. The screaming cat that screams along with the screaming twins has been strangled more than once. Not a deterrent, clearly.

He bitches at us constantly. He yowls at us in the morning to say hi. He yowls at us during the day just to chat. He yowls at us to let us know the kids need something. Or they're crying. Or somebody has pooped themselves. He yowls to go out. He yowls to come in. He yowls at the television.

But the worst bit? He yowls at night when he comes in through the window, directly into our bedroom or the kids' bedroom and then YOWLS. Don't believe it's bad? We got it on tape:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ9Y8gA-_SQ&feature=youtu.be

Jerkface.

4. He has an unnatural "thing" for my husband

A lot like this guy, but in reverse. Possibly like this:

Dermot has a very clear obsession with my husband, to the point that the cat tells Paul when it is time to go to bed. And Paul often does as he is told by Dermot, because the subsequent yowling just isn't worth it.

This cat rules our home and our lives. He feels he is "too cool" for litter boxes and prefers to go outside. All the time. Whenever he wants. So our house is freezing because a window is always open for Dermot. But sometimes he's not satisfied with coming in or going out through "his" window by the door. No. Sometimes no window other than the kitchen window will do. At 3am. Bastard.

And when he comes home after a night of prowling the neighbourhood like a gangster? He lets us know. He yowls as he comes in as if to say "Heyyyyyy! I'm home! Did you miss me?" and then proceeds to tell us all about the neighbourhood gossip once he has established that we (all of us) are awake and attentive enough for his liking.

As is standard with cats, when we want to hang out with him he wants nothing to do with us. At all. But when he is ready to chat and have our attention, well..

We love our cat, of course we do. We would have fried him up with rice and broccoli a looooooong time ago if we didn't. But he is an insufferable jerk-face.

And I think he's dangerous too.