The Kitty Letter Chronicles: Mewsic to my ears

I don’t think I’ll ever understand you humans. What IS this obsession you have with constant noise? If it’s your seemingly endless chatter (don’t you EVER shut up?) or the noise pollution pouring out of the box with the pictures in the corner, it’s that collection of screeches, scratches, plonking and bangs you lot seem to so attached to.

Music, you call it.

Being a respectable, well brought-up cat, I won’t tell you what I call it.

For my sins – though to be honest I really can’t recall doing anything THAT bad – I live in what Big Red and DanglyMan call a ‘musical household’.  And that means that I spend much of my time hiding under the duvet or sofa covers with my paws stuffed into my delicate ears, trying to drown the din out.

If it was just the picture box, or the noise-maker that sits under it, I’d probably just blink, bury myself deeper beneath the cushions and seek refuge in a little cat chanting and meditation (pprrrrrrrrr).

But no. Fate has landed me the cruel blow of giving me a family intent on making their own particular brand of audio torture. Every day, NoisyKid scratches at the strings on his noise boxes or going plinky-plonk on the table with black and white top. He even brings in old humans to show him how to scratch or go plinkety-plonk EVEN more (though I must like the Plinky-Plonky teacher does have a particularly comfortable lap).

And whenever I hear the “the band” and “rehearsal” mentioned in conversation, I know I should make myself scarce. Experience has taught me that this heralds the descent of at least four other EVEN noisier kids, who will do maul me, pull my tail, laugh at my gymnastics and add insult to injury by screeching, scratching and plonking ALL TOGETHER in a bid to explode my delicate ear drums.  

Now I know that you lot are at a disadvantage. Your ears are little more than useless flaps of skin stuck (bizarrely) on the sides of your heads. I’ve done the research and I know that you can only ear up to an upper register of about 20,000 cycles per second (at best), compared to the 50,000 my kind pick up on. Frankly, your ears are about as fit for purpose as a child’s paddling pool is for climbing Mount Everest. So, I do appreciate that it’s gonna take the audio equivalent of a being patted on the head by a silk scarf wrapped round a lead brick to get through to your inner vortex, but purrrr-lease, spare a thought for us less aurally-disadvantaged can’t you?

Whenever NoisyKid makes the buzzy box on the floor explode with decibels, DanglyMan starts picking at the wooden thing with the strings or Big Red starts squawking as she faffs about in the room with the hot cupboard (when she SHOULD be feeding me), it hurts! It hurts like a dormouse hurts when an elephant gives it a foot massage. Or like a (particularly stupid) sparrow who’s make its nest in a rocket silo hurts when the countdown ends and the engines fire up.

No-one can accuse me of not trying to humour you lot, or join in your perverse idea of ‘fun’. I try to get into the groove, and sneakily deliver a lesson in harmonic acceptability. But my cool cat offerings of scat and improv jazz, as I dance daintily on the plonky-plonk thing are only met with howls of outrage and a whack to the hindquarters (if they can catch me).

But never let it be said that Joker Felinious Cat is a quitter. I shall persevere. And who knows, one of these days, you monkeys might just get the message.

To start with, here are a few songs or artists which ARE acceptable:

·         Rossini’s Cat Duet;

·         anything by Mews (though you lot do insist of spelling it wrong – Muse indeed!);

·         Everybody wants to be a cat (well, duh, tell us something we don’t know);

·         The Cat (mais, naturellement) from Saen Sans’ Carnival of the Animals;

·         Love Cats by the Cure;

·         Stray Cat Blues or anything by the Stray Cats;

·         Purrfect Day;

actually, the list is endless. Check it out for yourselves, you lazy sods.  

But, for the love of catkind, please never, EVER play Pink Floyd’s Dogs of War, anything by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band or (shudder)….   Who let the dogs out?