Le Chat Noir

I wrote previously about Alex and Ringo's mutual ignorance pact.  Well, the pact has been well and truly broken.  Alex is now very, very, VERY interested in Ringo.

This interest seems to have been sparked by a trip to Fife, where he was allowed to stroke my mum's cats.  Since then Ringo, and cats in general, have become the greatest things in the known universe.  If there's a cat in the room Alex's eyes will be glued to it.  If the cat comes near him, oh!  The sheer joy!

It can be pretty funny to watch.  You can see the interest and excitement in Alex's face.  His thought process seems to go something like:  Cat!  Cat!  Cat!  Fabric!  Cat!  Cat!  Patterns!  Cat!  Cat!  Dad.  Meh.  Cat!

About the only thing better than looking at a cat is getting to touch a cat.  Ringo is particularly fuzzy, so is particularly interesting to touch.  His long, silky fur is also, rather unfortunately, particularly easy to grab in a chubby fist and rip from his body.  Unmoderated cat touching can result in a baby with hairy palms and a grumpy looking mog with bald spots.  The best solution is to hold Alex's hand whilst stroking the cat, allowing Alex to get a feel of his fur, but preventing him from getting a handful of it.  This leads to big grins of pleasure as he strokes the cat.

Ringo is amazingly tolerant of all this.  The poor beast has been demoted from his rightful spot as head of cute brigade, generally neglected in favour of a pink, gurgling thing and now he's getting tufts ripped out of his coat!  Despite this he's never even threatened to lift a paw to Alex.  In fact, he'll sometimes come over and speak to Alex of his own volition.  Thank goodness they get on.