settling in

We had got sorted into a regular routine with Damien and Lucifer. They were becoming more relaxed all the time, although Damien was still pretty unsure of everyone he met and he did have a tendency to bite. Most disconcerting was when he would come to you for a fuss, stand on your knee and then attempt to bite you. That said, he has bitten virtually everyone he has met but has never bitten me. So it's all OK really.


It was pretty clear that he didn't think much of Lucifer though, so much so that I actually rang the shelter to check if we had taken the right 2 cats. I mean apart from the differences in their coats and colouring they did look pretty similar, but Damien despised Lucifer. But no, they were the right 2 cats so we just set about making sure that they could each gain access to a bit of defensible space. I don't really blame Damien for disliking Lucifer though - he was a big cat weighing about 1.5 stone when we got him and he would climb onto a high surface, wait for Damien to walk past and just launch himself, belly flop style onto his unsuspecting brother.
He soon gave this up though as Damien became wise to it and Lucifer decided that it used too much precious energy.
Over time his nickname became "the hungry cushion" for very good reason.


Lucifer is an incredibly lazy cat. He has been on a diet since we got him, but his willingness to eat anything, however inedible plus his rather limited energy expenditure meant that it took him a long time to get down to a respectable weight and he is still on the tubby side even now.
The less you feed him the less he moves. Put him on a really restricted diet and he just lies all day on the sofa, not even lifting his head up as you approach. Instead he will just whimper the tiniest of miaows. He of course forgets to act all pathetic when he hears the food cupboard being opened at which point he will move like greased lightning and we discovered that his hearing was excellent - he could detect a can of cat food being opened from 2 streets away. When he used to go out he would stagger as far as next doors garden where he would sleep for hours until he mustered the energy to stagger back home again, overheated from an afternoon in full sunlight.


He is also not very good at being a cat. He is utterly terrified of spiders, insects and mice. When we had mice in our last house he refused to come downstairs for weeks until we had managed to solve the problem. If he sees a spider he fluffs up his tail and legs it to another room.
He also has no balance and has often fallen asleep on his back at the top of the stairs only to roll over and bounce all the way to the bottom where he usually just licks a paw and looks at you as if to say "yes, and? I meant to do that you know."


Damien is far better at being a cat. He can catch anything smaller than him that moves - mice, birds, insects, spiders, kittens...
Fortunately as he no longer goes outside he doesn't have the opportunity to harm the local wildlife, but when he did go out his favourite pastime was to sit by the Valerian bush at dusk, spring himself into it and then try and catch all the huge moths that flew out. He would catch them out of the air and crunch happily away. As soon as all the moths were re-settled he would leap again.


Lucifer would sometimes sit on the windowsill of the office and spy a bird on the wall at the end of the garden. With no concept of perspective or distance he would launch himself from the window, legs flailing in the air until he landed with a bump on the flat roof of the bathroom below. The bird would still be hopping around at the end of the garden and Lucifer would sit there, not quite sure why the bird was not in his tummy.


Just when things had finally got settled Nashi came along...