There are few things more British than putting the clocks back, enjoying an extra hour in bed and then spending the following week complaining that it’s dark before teatime. This Sunday, the clocks go back an hour. For most of us, this is welcome news. An extra hour under the duvet, perhaps a leisurely breakfast, and the comforting illusion that we’ve somehow been given a little more weekend.
Blenheim, our cat, has not been consulted. This is unfortunate because Blenheim runs our household according to a timetable that makes the Swiss railways look positively casual. Meals are expected at the appointed hour. Not approximately, not when we’ve finished what we’re doing, but at the appointed hour. And the appointed hour is determined by Blenheim.
I should explain that Mark bears the brunt of this arrangement. He is the one normally woken at an ungodly hour by a cat who has decided that breakfast is overdue. Downstairs they go, Mark presumably wondering what became of his right to a lie-in, Blenheim entirely satisfied that the catering department has responded appropriately. I generally remain in bed, offering moral support from beneath the duvet.
Then there is the 9pm Lick-e-Lix. Not five minutes past nine. Not when we’ve finished watching television. Nine o’clock, precisely. Blenheim has somehow acquired the accuracy of an atomic clock when it comes to receiving a tube of something that looks remarkably like wallpaper paste. The fact that neither of us can reliably remember what day the bins go out only adds to the humiliation.
And then there’s the water. Blenheim has an excellent supply of fresh drinking water in the kitchen, thoughtfully positioned well away from his food. One of the first things I learned on becoming Chief Executive of Cats Protection was that cats have an instinctive preference for drinking away from where they eat. In the wild, keeping water separate from their prey helps avoid contamination. Naturally, I took this important piece of feline welfare advice seriously.
What I hadn’t appreciated was that, in Blenheim’s interpretation, separate means an entire flight of stairs and having his drinking water literally on tap.
At various key moments throughout the day, Mark is required to go upstairs, turn on the tap and fill the ensuite bathroom sink. Blenheim then leaps from the lavatory seat onto the basin and drinks with the air of a gentleman enjoying the waters at a particularly exclusive spa. The perfectly good bowl downstairs is apparently for peasants. Quite how we arrived at a situation in which a grown man is summoned to operate a tap for an animal perfectly capable of drinking from a bowl is something neither of us can satisfactorily explain.
Mark and I are, of course, merely the domestic staff. We provide catering, housekeeping, central heating and bathroom attendant services. Our performance is monitored closely, there is no appeals procedure, and the management is notoriously difficult to please. I suspect an employment tribunal would find in our favour, although Blenheim would almost certainly ignore its ruling.
Which brings us to Sunday morning. At what Blenheim considers breakfast time, he will appear beside the bed and begin his usual routine. This starts with a gentle enquiry, progresses to a more insistent conversation and eventually involves making Mark’s continued sleep physically impossible. Mark will explain that the clocks have gone back. Blenheim will look at him. Mark may attempt to explain that British Summer Time has ended and that we are now operating on Greenwich Mean Time. Blenheim will continue looking at him. I shall probably be lying beside them, pretending to be asleep.
The difficulty, of course, is that Blenheim has no interest in Greenwich. He has no interest in time zones. He certainly has no interest in the workings of Parliament, although his approach to negotiation would probably fit in rather well. He knows that his stomach says breakfast, and that one of his two employees is failing to deliver it.
The extraordinary thing about cats is that they can spend seventeen hours a day asleep, apparently without a care in the world, yet possess an internal clock accurate enough to detect a three-minute delay in the arrival of supper. And what happens to the 9pm Lik-e-Lix? Will Blenheim accept that it is now only eight o’clock? Will the bathroom sink be required to operate on Greenwich Mean Time, or will it remain on Blenheim Standard Time? I think we know the answers.
There is, I admit, a certain irony in the Chief Executive of Cats Protection living in a household where the cat has comprehensively outmanoeuvred both adult humans. I spend much of my working life dealing with complicated organisations, challenging budgets and occasionally unreasonable expectations. None of it has prepared me for the domestic politics of a cat who expects room service around the clock.
So, to fellow cat owners, I offer my sympathies. While the rest of Britain enjoys its extra hour in bed, some of us will be awake, listening to negotiations between an increasingly impatient feline and a man in his dressing gown who would quite like another sixty minutes’ sleep. I suspect Blenheim will win, as he usually does, and I shall be enormously grateful to Mark for getting up to feed him.
Although I may wait until a more civilised hour to tell him so.
