On cats and kids

I was having lunch with a colleague today who has an 18-month old kid. We got onto the subject of tantrums, and how parents should respond to them and the ways in which parents can be responsible for them becoming acceptable behaviour (my colleague was saying he tends to be quite hyperactive around his daughter, so perhaps she expects a certain baseline energy level out of any situation and needs to amp it up to get attention).

Kate and I of course have absolutely no idea what we'll be like as parents. I'm extremely laissez-faire by nature, and am pretty determined not to be prescriptive or judgmental (aren't all soon-to-be parents?), but of course it seems that when kids get to the testing-boundaries stage a huge amount of that is thrown out of the window because the little sweeties are JUST DRIVING THEIR PARENTS MAD.

The argument my colleague was making was that the seeds for this are planted in the behaviours you teach kids from the year dot. And this made me wonder a bit about Jasper.

Kate raised Jasper from a kitten and he was about two when I came along. And if human owners have the same role in shaping a cat's personality as in a child's, we're going to be in for a ride.

Dear Jasper. He's a loving and affectionate beast, never happier than when nuzzling our hair in the morning or waking up from a nap as we come home. He will act standoffish and he's not averse to the odd nip, but he is a companionable beast who likes nothing more than hanging out with his humans. But let's face it, he's pretty much the feline equivalent of a teenage delinquent.

Calm followed by unexplained flashes of aggression; acting out in front of people to express jealousy; absolute dummy-spitting over his food, using wheedling, violence and persistance to get his way; it's all in there. And I can hear a parental tone in the way we always add: "But he is the most gorgeous cat, and we love him."

Anyway, hopefully I'm overdoing the analogy. One thing that strikes me is that he's particularly tantrum-ey at present because I think he is pretty aware that something is awry in Kate's hormones. I think he's smelling all sorts of things that are unsmellable* to humans that indicate he's about to be supplanted. Another is that he is incapable communicating properly with us. I think one side of a tantrum comes from frustration at the sense that one isn't getting the empathy one needs; for a cat, that feeling must be constant.

*Why isn't there a word for smell to go with visible, audible, tangible? I'm going to try to invent "oleable", so imagine you read "inoleable" there.

Music time: Susan Cadogan

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend who has a beloved dog called Lola. Anyway, she was on Australia's answer to Desert Island Discs a while back and chose The Kinks' "Lola" as the song to play herself out to.

I found this endearing, and was slightly disappointed at the thought that if we wanted to enshrine our cat's name in song, we'd have to turn to this sort of thing.

But it got me thinking about songs I love, and about songs I'd like people to know I love because they mean a lot to me and make me happy and I want to share the love.

Of course, it is so like a boy to be making lists of songs he likes. But WHATEVER.

This is 'Nice and Easy' by Susan Cadogan. It would be on my desert island playlist because Kate loves it so much and it makes me think of her. Also, it's quite a weird song in lots of ways. Susan Cadogan made pretty much one single album in the mid-1970s with some Jamaican dub and reggae producers. In that sense I think she was a bit of a manufactured act, but she did have this amazing, ethereal voice and the Pete Waterman to her Kylie was Lee Perry, who brought out the weirdness of her singing with some too-much-echo ghost-train dub atmospherics.



Two other things about Susan Cadogan. The fun fact is that she's now a librarian at the University of the West Indies in Kingston. How cool would it be if your university librarian had a hit with Lee Perry?

The other thing is that we saw her at the Jazz Cafe in London a few years back. It was an odd experience in a number of ways. I've occasionally thought about writing fictional short stories about people entangled in different ways in the music industry, and this would have been perfect material.

The concert was basically brokered by the Mad Professor, a dub producer who's also become a bit of a svengali of the touring revival reggae scene - he's also the person who digs up Lee Perry every summer to wheel him around the summer festivals. The Mad Professor had produced a new album for her, which was I think more or less her first since the 1970s, and Kate got a signed copy at the end. Essentially, it felt that he'd produced the album as a favour for her, and out of respect for what she'd done. There really didn't seem much commercial imperative - it was a one-date tour in London from Jamaica, with a tiny Jazz Cafe audience, so probably lost money.

Susan Cadogan herself had some great stage presence and the same fantastic voice, but shorn of Lee Perry's stylings the stuff she was singing was really pretty run-of-the-mill reggae and lover's rock. Which, given the fact that she's approaching 60 and hasn't been making music commercially for the best part of three decades, is probably what you'd expect (and for what it's worth, lots of people who *have* been making music for three decades end up playing run-of-the-mill stuff; in fact, that's the result more often than not).

I don't really know the point I'm making with that. I think it's probably that it's best to leave some heroes preserved in the aspic of distance and memory. Susan Cadogan was a good performer and she clearly loved what she was doing, but that song from 1975 is something unique and almost timeless; by comparison, the live performance felt a bit like really, really good karaoke.

The naming of babies is a difficult matter

So obviously Kate and I are trying to work out baby names.

This is easier said than done.

For one thing, you have to work backwards from a surname. Tricky because (a) we've always wanted to keep our own surnames, and (b) 'Fickling Mackenzie' is a hell of a mouthful. And has more 'ck's than a posh pants shop.

But we've got over that and it's starting to work as a surname for me. Coming up with a first name, however, involves more treacherous waters. Principally that we've had the wind put up us by our friends Tom and Sandy, who are due to have baby in about a fortnight, saying you should never tell your friends baby names because they'll always have known someone at school called x who they hated, or they'll remind you that Justinbieber is already taken and it's not really a girl's name.

So to put people off the scent we've come up with a shortlist of fake names. In fact, in the endless task of sorting through likes and dislikes in online baby-name sites, I think I'm arguably being more successful coming up with dumb fake names than I am at coming up with proper real names. Does that make me a bad father? Already?

Anyway, any prospective parents in the same situation are free to use my current shortlist:

Chamwow

Marky Mark

Umberella

Bennifer

Movember