Things my cat does that I love and wouldn’t change for the world:

  1. When he sits with me on the couch, he sits with his front half on me, and his bottom half on the couch. Companiable, yet still with his own space.
  2. If he’s sleeping and I start talking to him, he starts curling and uncurling his paws, and then starts purring.
  3. When he’s been outside for a while and I want to bring him back in, I go looking for him, calling out his name, and he comes running from somewhere, squeaking at me, and starts purring when I pick him up.
  4. When I’ve got a new ‘toy’ for him, like a piece of paper screwed up into a ball, and hold it out to him, he sniffs it for a while, then holds the edge of it with his teeth and slowly and steadily tries to pull it out of my hand, as if by doing it slowly I won’t know it’s happening. Do be do be do - nothing to see here.
  5. When I’ve just finished in the shower, he sometimes comes in and starts licking the water off my feet.

Things my cat does that don’t make me stop loving him but if he didn’t do them any more I wouldn’t mind that much:

  1. When he’s lying on the ground and I go to pat him, he sometimes grabs my arm with his paws and holds it in place while he licks it. This would be cute if he didn’t dig his claws in to hold on.
  2. Waking me up at an unreasonable hour of the morning by walking around crying. He doesn’t usually do it if I’ve checked the night before that they have plenty of food, but sometimes he just does it for some other reason that I haven’t worked out and it’s really annoying.
  3. Waking me up at an unreasonable hour of the morning by playing with some object that has either been left on a cupboard and that he has gone and retrieved, or a toilet roll or screwed up paper ball that he had been playing with during the day. Can’t you see we’re trying to sleep, boy?
  4. Fortunately this is not a habit, but he woke me up this morning after I’d had 4 hours sleep with a really weird, rhythmic clicking noise. At first I thought he had some plastic thing that he was chewing on, but then realised that he was actually trying to throw up. Unfortunately it was pitch black, so the short walk to the light switch was one where great caution was exercised. Lucky it was M doing the walk :)
  5. ‘Christens’ the new tray of litter within 3 minutes of it being replaced. Can’t you leave it unspoiled for at least 10 minutes so I can savour the cleanliness?