Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One (I): The Great Emasculator

It’s Sunday night, and I don’t think I’m going to have time to blog tomorrow. Obviously I would hate to contribute to a sudden surge in work productivity, so I’m blogging on a Sunday evening so you have something to read. No, no; you’re welcome.

When I was eighteen, I moved out of home into a share house, and got a kitten. The kitten, whom I named Disraeli, was a grey tabby with ears so disproportionately large that my friends used to call him Dumbo the Cat. What no-one told me at the time was that ears are like feet in this regard; they are an indicator of the eventual size of the animal. These days Raeli is an enormous sleepy old creature with very little harm in him. In those days, he was something of a terror.

One day, when Raeli was about five months old, and as playful as one would expect from a kitten who was growing up in a sociable share house, my boyfriend and I found ourselves alone in the house for an afternoon. It was February, and hot as hell, and we were young and libidinous. So we found ourselves upstairs in my bedroom, naked and intimately involved.

Neither of us spared a thought for the kitten, alone in the house with no-one to play with. Neither of us thought to close my bedroom door. And the thing about sex is, especially if one is engaging in the position that spreads the gospel, certain parts of the male anatomy tend to swing and dangle. And the thing about young kittens is, especially if they are bored…well, I can tell that my male readership is wincing, so I’ll skip over the details. Claws were bared, contact with delicate parts of the male anatomy was made, yelping ensued. And from then on we closed the bedroom door.

Six months later, I moved in with another female friend, Polly*. Raeli was an adolescent cat by now, and whilst he liked the gentle patting that my housemate and I would bestow upon him, lying there and purring like the pampered soul he was. He also appreciated the rough-and-tumble games that her boyfriend would play.

Until one day when he came out of our shower and walked into the corridor, a scanty towel wrapped around his waist. And the cat came bounding up to him eagerly. And he said hi, cat, let’s rough-and-tumble, and he squatted down to pat the cat.

And the thing about being male, and only wearing a towel, is… And the thing about young cats is…

Yeah. Exactly.

Now, whilst this second incident was playing itself out, I was in my own bedroom with my new boyfriend English**. We heard the cry of shock and pain, and I went to check. No lasting damage was done, and I went back to my room, reporting to English what had happened.

Cue two months later. English and I are getting amorous on my bed. The cat pushes the door open (they didn’t click shut in this house, and thus the cat could effect entry whenever and wherever he chose) and padded inside. I heard him come in, but didn’t see any reason to let his presence stop what we were doing until English sat upright, and with wild eyes yelled

“Argh!”

“What?”

“The cat’s going to eat my knob!”

Raeli. The great emasculator.

*Not her real name, but the one I’m going to use for her from now on. Polly is still a dear friend of mine, but abandoned me to study fungi in California.

**Now one of my closest and dearest friends, who abandoned me to work in London. They all swear it’s not me, it’s them…