Ginger's Diary

Adventures of one ginger cat

I am Ginger. I am eight years old, I am a cat, and this is my website. The hoomans built it because I told them to, using the ancient technique of sitting on the keyboard until something happened.

Here is the part of the story I am told I was too small to remember. When I was two weeks old — a period of my life I spent being approximately the size of a bread roll and roughly as coordinated — my mother had a conversation with a hooman. Cats do not write wills, so she did the next best thing and made it extremely clear that this hooman was now responsible for me. Shortly afterwards there was an accident, and she was gone.

So my family came and found me. Officially, the paperwork says they rescued me. I have read the paperwork. The paperwork is wrong. What actually happened is that I reviewed several applicants, selected this family, and adopted them — and I have been running the household ever since.

It has been a full-time job. I am the emotional support animal for this entire household, which sounds impressive until you learn that hoomans require emotional support at approximately 3am, during exams, before job interviews, and every single time the news is on. I have absorbed a truly heroic quantity of feelings in this house. My rates remain unchanged: breakfast, and then a second breakfast, on the grounds that the first one was clearly a rehearsal.

Then one day they announced that we were moving to London. Not me — they had a new life adventure planned, and I was informed of it the way one is informed about weather. There was a box. There were forms. There was a very long flight during which I made my objections known to everyone on board, in detail, for free.

I will be honest with you about Bangalore versus London, because someone has to be. In Bangalore, the sun arrived every morning like a reliable employee. I had sunbeams with schedules. I knew which tile would be warm at eleven and which windowsill peaked at four. In London, the sun is a rumour. It is gossip. It turns up for eleven minutes in February and the whole city loses its mind. Instead there is rain — a persistent grey drizzle that gets into your whiskers and appears to be included in the rent.

I lodged a formal complaint. It was ignored.

But I am a cat of science, and I have observed something. Every year, London gets a little warmer, a little brighter, and a little more confused about which season it is currently having. Meanwhile Bangalore is getting hotter too, and somehow also wetter. Global warming, it turns out, is quietly working to make every city equally unbearable — a great flattening, in which no cat anywhere gets a decent sunbeam ever again. I do not approve of the method, but I note that it has made my relocation feel considerably less like a downgrade.

In the meantime, I have adapted. I found the radiators. Hoomans have installed long hot metal benches along the walls of every room in this country, which is either the single greatest act of interspecies kindness in history or a very lucky accident. I have chosen not to investigate further in case they take them away.

Below is the photographic evidence: eight years of naps, sunbeams, radiators, one unauthorised box, and a great deal of supervising. Scroll on.

— Ginger