Breakfast at Kitteny's

Basically, everyone's breakfast will always look better than your own. Especially when you are a kitten and your own breakfast looks like a selection of cardboard shapes. And you get the same breakfast every single day which, co-incidentally, looks and tastes exactly the same as your lunch and dinner.

And despite Andy's resolve that 'The Kitten Shall Not Climb All Over the Breakfast Table' in the mornings, she still manages to climb aboard once in a while in order to snaffle a bit of milk, or muesli, or butter or Marmite.

Actually, I am being a tad unfair to Pandora. Mostly she takes up a position on one of the chairs and STARES at us over the edge of the table. I think she is waiting for the day when we tuck a bib around her neck, place a plate of kippers before and say 'Welcome to the Breakfast Club. Your patience has been rewarded with an Honorary Membership.'

But until that day she sits and waits and stares and sometimes a bout of cereal rage will get the better of her and she will pounce.With admirable persistence.

Currently, her favourite breakfast is cereal and milk. The type of cereal is irrelevant. It's the heady mix of cereal crumbs soaked in ice cold milk that she's after. Here is the Much Malarkey Manor Guide to Breakfast at Kitteny's for those who wish to survive breakfast with their own kitten.

1) Choose your breakfast food carefully. Under no circumstance go for the tuna option. Accept that the tuna option will almost certainly end in defeat. In a fight over tuna, a cat will always come off better than a human. Ditto sausages, bacon, in fact anything that once had a face.

2) Try to distract your kitten. Pandora has a string-on-a-stick of which she is currently very fond. The distraction technique is best used with breakfasts that require only one hand with which to eat as your other hand will be occupied operating the toy of distraction. So -a banana, an apple, a nectarine. Possibly a hard-boiled egg if prepared the previous night and all ready peeled.

3) This morning I went for the fruit and cereal option, the cereal being Bran Flakes, purchased by Andy for Lord knows what reason but now rapidly approaching their best before date and it appears to be up to me to prevent them going to waste.
In the bowl went the cereal, topped off with enough milk to make it edible but not so much as to turn it to mush inside of two minutes. I sit at table. Pandora sits on opposite chair and stares. Her nose quivers. Her whiskers tremble. Within 30 seconds her brain registers cereal rage and so battle commences...
a) Put spoon of cereal in mouth, fend kitten off with back of hand
b) Put another spoon of cereal in mouth, fend kitten off with forearm.
c) Put down spoon, remove kitten from table to floor
d) Pick up spoon
e) Put down spoon, remove kitten from table to floor
f) Pick up spoon.
g) Gobble down three or four spoonfuls in quick succession. Not an easy feat with any Bran related product
h) Raise cereal bowl and spoon above head out of kitten's reach. Kitten will now have her front paws planted firmly on your bosoms, or chest if you are a manly man, and will be staring you in the face.
i) You will receive subliminal message from kitten brain something along the lines of 'Put the bowl on the table and stand well back.'
j) You will now have 2 options - either give in and allow kitten to finish off the cereal or eat remaining cereal with bowl balanced on head (yours, not the kittens). The kitten would like to point out that she is in no way responsible for the dribbles of milk and cereal slush you are bound to get down your front by eating from a bowl balanced on your head. Kittens have meticulous manners, being very dainty eaters. Any mess incurred is down to you, you mucky human piglet.

4) Of course, you could shut the kitten in the hall way whilst you have breakfast. If you can bear the scratching and the plaintive mewing and the little kitten nose pressed up against the glass saying 'Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease let me in.'

5) Try saying 'No!' in a very stern voice. Kitten will look at you and enquire what the word 'no' actually means. You will explain in words of one syllable. You can top it off with the sentence, 'And when I say no, I mean no,' which the kitten all ready knows to be untrue so is, if I am honest, a complete waste of breath.

One day I am going to make a film of Andy and Pandora at breakfast for it is most entertaining. Well, it makes me laugh which can't be a bad way to start the day. It shall be called 'The Battle of Breakfast Big Horn.' Andy shall play the role of strapping man, firm yet kind and in pursuit of defending his breakfast from the paws of the evil breakfast snatcher and Pandora shall play the part of evil breakfast snatcher a.k.a innocent kitten, small and persistent in her pursuit of sustenance that isn't cat food.

Although Pandora had better watch herself. She is 5 months old now. In another month she'll be going into hospital to be spayed (Being the responsible pet owners that we are, there will be none of this ridiculous letting her have one litter malarkey. More than enough spare animals in the world as it is without adding more). And her surgeon shall be???? Well, let's hope he's had a good breakfast that day.