This Side of the Pond

My cat hasn’t starred in this column as much as our other animals because, for the most part, she and her humans co-exist through a mutual pact to respect one another’s privacy. This is an effective policy until her paws feel chilly and the only solution – in her opinion – is to sit on my feet until I get pins and needles.

Over the last couple of weeks, however, she has been teaching me a valuable lesson about problem solving. My life has been a live action version of the old riddle about getting a bag of grain, a goat and a wolf across a river without losing one of them to someone else’s appetite.

I’ll start at the beginning with the exciting news that I woke up on New Year’s Day for the very first time in my newly renovated bedroom. We’ve spent longer than you’d expect converting part of the building, coming up against all sorts of challenges along the way, but with a final push that almost broke my husband we could declare ourselves ready for bedtime.

I’m proud of the effect our careful planning has wrought: a beautifully coordinated room with all the storage I’ve been pining for. We slept in it on New Year’s Eve before we got around to adding any other furniture for the sheer pleasure of starting the decade as we meant to go on.

I may have made a different decision had I realized it was possible for snores to echo, or that it’s really very bright in the mornings when you don’t have any blinds, but then hindsight is always 20/20. It’s too late now, the old bed is gone, and besides, for the first time in several years, we have a bed big enough for the whole family to pile onto – two humans, two dogs, one cat and space in the corner to spare.

Switching to a new sleeping arrangement always takes time, but I expected that to only apply to the humans. I was fully prepared to wake up for the first few days with cricks in my neck and disorientation, as happens when one is presented with a new mattress.

I expected our elder pup to settle in immediately, and I was correct. With a grunt of acceptance, she plonked herself down beside the husband’s knee, exactly as she has always done.

I thought our younger dog would refuse to sleep in the bed because she gets hot easily, which she finds offensive, and so I dragged the comfiest of the dog beds in there for her instead. Thus far, she has not even looked at it.

That’s not to say she’s figured out her routine. She spent most of the first night with her face six inches from mine, staring unblinking into my soul. I believe she was trying to communicate through telepathy that my husband was sleeping in her spot.

And then we get to the cat, who has never been the kind of sleeping companion you’d choose on purpose. If she’s not scrabbling at your covers in an attempt to get underneath them, she’s walking up and down your body looking for the warmest place to settle.

I wouldn’t describe her as svelte on her best days. She also seems to to know exactly where to place her pokey little feet such as to cause maximum discomfort to her human treadmill.

For the first hour, she stalked the corners of the bedroom, checking under the new bed for monsters and inside the closet for murderers, leaping a foot into the air every time she stepped on a discarded piece of bubble wrap from the box the bed frames came in.

For the second hour, she sampled every possible sleep configuration at least twice, biting the dogs when they growled at her intrusion. At one point, she even tried sleeping on my head.

Finally, she settled in, and we managed to sleep the whole night through. The next morning, though, the troubles began again.

The intention was for the new bedroom to have two entrances: one from the bathroom and the other leading through into the living area. However, because we’d moved in before we finished, the latter door did not yet exist.

It never occurred to me that I would need to shut that bathroom door if I rose before the husband. As I did so, the cat materialized out of nowhere and began scrabbling at it from the other side.

I let her through. After giving me an indignant glance, she sauntered to the other door and began scrabbling at that one instead.

Fair enough, I thought – I wouldn’t want to be trapped in shower steam if I was covered in fur, either. I let her into the living room and assumed everything would be fine.

It was not. For the ten minutes I would usually spend attending to shampoo and body wash, I was instead distracted by escalating cat panic. It began as scrabbling, then loud meowing, and finally the sound of my cat flinging herself bodily against the door.

I let her (and the draft I’d been trying to keep out in the first place) back into the bathroom. The glance she flung at me this time was frankly murderous as she sauntered back to the bedroom door and – yes, you’ve guessed it – began scrabbling at it.

You’d have thought the cat would be able to cope with a mere ten minutes of sticking around in the room she’d been absolutely fine in for the last eight hours and hadn’t even thought about leaving until I got out of bed, but no: it turns out that a cat is always on the wrong side of the door.

This went on for days and days. Sometimes, she’d bring one of the dogs with her, who would have a different opinion as to which room was the best one to be in at that moment. No matter which dog it was, they would invariably end up in a noisy argument if left to scrabble at the same side of the door.

Occasionally, she would manage to wake the husband, who would also be interested in getting from one room to another through the only available portal. I’m certain I spent more time letting people in and out of the bathroom over those confusing first days than I ever did cleaning my teeth.

So that’s how I spent the beginning of this decade, with cats, husbands and dogs replacing the goats, wolves and grain. And if you’re wondering about the solution to the riddle, here’s what I’ve discovered: you can put them anywhere you like as long as you don’t include a river. Or, in my case, if you keep every door in the house open at all costs.