Morning Rituals with Cat

She woke in the predawn and lay listening to the rasping breath of the old cat who acted as a barometer of the air temperature outside the warmth of the bed coverings. She knew that shortly she would need to attend to the hot water bottles which warmed them both, feeling hers , tepid now at the end of the bed. And give the cat ,as she had now done for more than 12 years, her morning steroids via a face mask and a puffer. The cat no longer instigated a chase or escaped through her cat door to the run outside, waiting with side eyed patience for her to go away. The cat waited to be picked up, nestling into her shoulder with a long and loud sigh.

They were both too old for the battle of wills which had, and occasionally still, characterised their relationship. She was less patient and the old cat more troubled by her breathing difficulties so they had developed the pre dawn ritual where when she gathered the strength to brave the deep ice of the morning air, the cat was gathered onto her shoulder and carried to the place where the puffer was always given. It had never varied and she was confident now that when the cat went and stayed there voluntarily, it was asking for some assistance with the rasping chest which had characterised its life. Each morning however they had a ritual.

While the water boiled to refill the hot water bags and she waited, judging the tenor of her mood by her patience with this process ...a watched kettle ...., the cat went back to the bedroom and waited at the bed end. Until a place on the bed was rewarmed with a newly filled hot water bottle it did not waste breath on jumping up.

On particularly bad days she had learnt that the old cat needed to be lifted to the warmth. And she had learnt this by wondering why the cat, all needs satisfied, assumed its position at the bed end but did not jump up to the warmth it so obviously loved. The cat made no attempt to jump but hunched in on itself, tailed tightly curled, with stoic patience. She came to understand how proud her cat was , like all cats perhaps, determined not to be seen to fail. And heaving a huge sigh at once again having to for sake the warmth of bedclothes, she got out of bed and lifted the cat to its rug and the underlying warmth. The cat never acknowledged this assistance, although the nonchalant grooming it usually undertook after such a lift, was a sign that it needed to demonstrate a business as usual attitude in the face of some frailty.

On most mornings she collected the morning paper and brought it back to bed to read in the warmth. This ritual filled the hours until dawn which hung heavily dark in the huge windows of her bedroom, bracelets of street lights glittering on the horizon. The cat had developed the habit of jumping off the bed with the arrival of the paper and going always to the same spot where she sat face to the wall until whatever devil she believed lived in the paper went away and she resumed her position on the bed. This too was done with an air that only a cat can carry off. "This is what I do...you might do it differently but this is what I do "

There is enormous comfort in an old cat and a winter`s morning.

• This story owes itself to a book I recently read called "The cat and the City "by Nick Bradley. It is about Tokyo and a calico cat who ties thready tales together. I suspect the stories owe much to aspects of Japanese literature that I do not understand but it captured the wonderful self possession of felines , the fragility of humans and apparently as I have not been there, an essence of Tokyo. It was a lovely book.