HAVING just eaten, I'm sitting in the kitchen watching the grey cat watching my chop bone with apparent disinterest. I know what he's thinking. He's thinking that if I get up and go into another room, will he have time to stroll nonchalantly across the floor, occasionally glancing to either side to see if anyone else is in the vicinity, and then make a lightning swoop on the said chop bone and get out of the kitchen before she comes back. It's a game we play. He carries on watching and displays no sign of disappointment as I scrape the plate into the rubbish bin. Probably he's really thinking some very ungentlemanly thoughts, but doesn't display them because there's always the next chop bone, or leftover piece of steak, and he'll just have to wait. Not that I give the cats chop bones, I hasten to say, because I know the dangers, but just try telling them that. We have a great deal of trouble with the grey cat because he's never learned the rule of the house, which is no cats on the work surfaces or the tables. His ginger brother rarely ventures off the floor in the kitchen, usually only jumping onto the table to give a greeting, but the grey one's main ambition in life is to be three feet off the ground as often as possible. Perhaps it's his game. It goes like this. I sit at the kitchen table, he jumps on the sink. I tell him to get up and he ignores me. I start to rise and he still ignores me. I take a few steps towards him and, having gauged just how far I can go before I reach him to push him off, he waits until the last possible second before jumping down. Repeat nineteen times and drive a human being barmy. If I can't be bothered to take part in this game he will march up and down pretending to look out of the window while all the time getting nearer and nearer to the objects of his desire – which range from an open jar of mayonnaise, an uncovered butter container or something delicious residing in the frying pan. There are an awful lot of people who have cats far better behaved than this. Or so they say. They will tell you that their prized puss wouldn't dream of ever getting on a kitchen surface or stealing food, but I don't believe them. What is usually the truth is that these paragons of feline virtue walk the floor during the day but at night, when their owners are safely tucked up in bed, they'll be making hay while the sun don't shine and doing the fandango over every surface they can get their little paws on. Cats don't steal, of course, they can't possibly know the difference between their own plate on the floor and the plate of newly grilled chops waiting to be served with onion gravy next to the cooker. Why not go for it, they will be thinking? I could never convince my former husband of this. He thought that some cats had criminal tendencies or at the very least weren't getting enough cat food and were forced to steal in order to survive. In vain I did point out that you could give your cat a whole tin of his or her favourite food one minute and the next minute it would be making off into the bushes carrying a nice little salmon steak you had inadvertently taken your eye off for five seconds. Not all cats do it, but the better the hunter the more likely it is that they will take great delight in finding something to hunt which sits nice and still on a plate rather than runs into a hole in the ground or flies off into the distance. I once had a grey and white cat which had perfected this indoor hunting technique. Once I watched in awe as, having placed my husband's breakfast in front of him, there appeared a paw from the empty chair next to him which was pushed under the table. This paw waved around a little, then neatly hooked a piece of bacon off his plate while he wasn't looking and then made off with it. He never noticed. That's an Oscar winning performance. Dogs, of course, don't do this, mainly because they're not quite so agile and can rarely leap onto any kitchen surface. My dear old Beauty, however, did learn that by standing on tip toe she could reach the counter and, on more than one occasion, managed to get hold of something delicious and forbidden, including, once, a whole newly iced Victoria sponge. The pile of crumbs on the floor gave her away but she merely glanced innocently across at one of the cats as though to say 'It wasn't me'. This week, however, it's been payback time with the grey cat. On the kitchen counter were two sausages cooling on a plate before being put in the fridge. The grey cat had already done his counter-jumping exercise a dozen or so times, interrupting the crossword more often than I would like. Then the telephone went and I answered it. When I came back into the room there was one sausage on the plate, and one disjointed sausage on the floor. If I'd had time I could have fitted it together again because I knew that no bits would be missing. I knew, you see, that they were vegetarian sausages and it was worth their loss just to see the expression on the cat's face. One up for Quorn I think!
We had a skip at the office last week, which always provides a lot of amusement and I do like skip watching. The world is divided into two. Those who put things in skips and those who take them out again. Now there's nothing wrong with this. After all, one man's rubbish is another man's sitting room furniture. All sorts of people are incapable of passing a skip without taking a look inside and planning a lightning swoop on it later. The brave ones do it in daylight, the less brave wait until darkness has fallen and there is a chance that their desired objects have disappeared already. It's amusing to watch those who casually walk past, look out of the corner of their eye into the skip and walk on; only to return a few minutes later for another look. Some just brazen it out, root through the contents and take what they want. Others will appear to just be nosy, look around laughing as if to say 'look at all this old rubbish' and then the next moment you see them striding off with whatever has taken their fancy tucked under their arm. Some will ask: 'Do you want that old chair?' This is really skip speak for 'I want that old chair, can I have it?, so you shouldn't sarcastically say that actually you do want that old chair it's just in the skip because you needed somewhere to put it while you wallpapered the front room. Office skips don't usually yield much of use. A few old computers, tons of paper, lots of bent folders. It's suburban city skips which are by far the best. People chuck out huge amounts of stuff which is perfectly usable. I knew someone who managed to get a whole fitted kitchen from a skip, returning twice to load the bits of it and then complaining that one cupboard door was missing. Others can become a bit obsessed, filling their garage with their skip finds, telling their wives that 'that's a good bit of wood there it'll come in handy one day', until she's so desperate that she's planning to hire her own skip when he's out to take away all the rubbish. The only problem is that she knows he'll probably come home early and bring all the stuff in again because he can't help himself. Some people are cheeky. A friend of mine once had someone knock at the door at 6am and ask if the electric cooker in the skip was in full working order, 'or he wouldn't bother to take it.' She was none too pleased, mainly because it wasn't her cooker and hadn't been in the skip when she went to bed. That's the problem with skips. While there are a lot of people very anxious to remove all the things you don't want there are an equal number of people who see your skip as fair game to dump all their own rubbish for free.
Finally, I had to smile this morning. I went into the kitchen to get a cup of tea and noticed a pack of bananas. On the side was written 'fun sized, seven Caribbean bananas' What the hell are fun-sized bananas? Do we play catch with them, do we play hide the banana? And what are other bananas? Deadly serious? Not to be treated in any way as fun? Large dour bananas? I really can't imagine.