As I walk with Jesus, Misty copes with winter

As Christmas approaches, what could be better than a walk with Jesus?

The context to that perhaps strange statement is set by the changes there have been recently in the non-human members of our household. 

You only have to look at our cat Misty, when he’s lying in the sun in summer temperatures we would find unbearable, to realise that even a cat as hard to please as he is, finds life in Spain not entirely unsatisfactory. His body language says, “of all the four countries you’ve dragged me to, this one isn’t too awful. It just about meets my exacting standards for a self-respecting cat’s retirement”. 

Misty enjoying the summer

He spends nights outside, too. But as soon as he hears me moving around indoors, he makes it clear – “very vocal, isn’t he?” Danielle says – that it’s time to let him in and feed him. Then, once the sun hits the grass in the back garden, he’s keen to get outside once more. “Never put off till tomorrow the lazing around in the sun you can do today,” he seems to feel.

A good place to spend the day in summer

A better place to spend the day in winter
(Luci to the left, Toffee in the middle)

With the arrival of the cooler weather, though, his behaviour’s had to change. He finds that out-of-doors isn’t such a good place to spend the nights. He still insists on being let out, but is back within minutes demanding to be allowed in again. Which would be fine, even though it involves me having to interrupt whatever fascinating and massively important activity I’m trying to focus on, except that half an hour later he’ll want to head out once more. It’s as though he expects the weather to have turned milder in the meantime.

Possibly the central heating leaves him a little confused.

The worst of it is that, with all his in-out-shake-it-all-about behaviour, sometimes I get confused and can’t remember whether he’s out or in. This happened the other night. I left him outside when I headed to bed. Oh, boy, was he fed up with me in the morning. Not only did he complain loudly to Danielle (it was she who let him in), but he came upstairs just as soon as he’d had some breakfast and mewed furiously at me through the bedroom door.

“Particularly vocal this morning,” Danielle remarked.

Oh, yes. Very vocal. And I know just what he was saying.

“What kind of a moron, are you? It’s December, you incompetent fool. And you left me outside for the whole night. Don’t give me any of that ‘this is Spain’ stuff, it won’t wash. How would you like to spend the whole of a December night in the garden? Even in Spain? What makes you think I’d like it, then? Now just open the door and let me get on the bed to warm up.”

Very vocal, indeed.

You may say that the problem would be resolved if we had cat flaps. Well, we do. But we can’t leave them open, because of the Siamese next door. To him, an unlocked cat flap’s just a standing invitation to come in and go after Misty’s food. Or even just after Misty. They met just down the street the other day, and had a heck of a fight. It made me think of T S Eliot’s fine epic, Growltiger’s Last Stand:

But most to Cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed;
To Cats of foreign name and race no quarter was allowed.
The Persian and the Siamese regarded him with fear –
Because it was a Siamese had mauled his missing ear.

Misty may not have had a Growltiger mauling, but he came out of that last battle bleeding from the ear. It took a lot of comfort, including plenty of comfort food, to get his equanimity back. 

The dogs have taken far more enthusiastically to the cooler times. Where before I sometimes had to carry Toffee into the woods to get her to walk with me, these days they both run ahead of me to go out, and give every sign of enjoyment while we’re out there.

It was just after the contretemps with Misty that I had my encounter with Jesus. 

I took Toffee and Lucy out for their walk, partly as a way of soothing my bruised ego, after Misty’s rebukes to me. A short walk, I felt, just to get a little fresh air, and then back home. But we’d barely been in the woods a few minutes before I heard someone calling me. 

“Cavalier, cavalier,” he was saying. It’s the Spanish word: “Caballero, caballero”. 

I felt like replying, “Yes, I’m Sir David,” except that it would have been a lie, since I’ve not been a beneficiary of the fine British Honours system, with all its excellent qualities, such as self-promotion for the privileged elite or borderline corruption (not always merely borderline).

“Where are the trenches?” he went on.

The trenches? During the Civil War, the Spanish Republic moved its capital to Valencia, just twenty minutes’ drive down the road from where we live. And it built trenches in what are now our local woods, to defend the approach to the city. As it happens, the Republic was defeated before a last stand could be made in those trenches, so they were never used. But their remains are mouldering in the woods, a reminder of the bitter defeat of a democratic regime by a military uprising.

“They’re two or three kilometres from here,” I told him.

“That’s all right. We’re looking for mushrooms and we’re told the best ones are out that way.”

I barely had a chance to wonder why he’d said ‘we’ when his companion – his brother-in-law, it turned out – showed up.

“I’ll show you the way,” I told them.

They wanted to know my name, so I told them. And then the first one I’d met told me, “And I’m Jesus.”

I absorbed that. Names are funny in Spain. There’s plenty of Jesuses. As well as Immaculates and Conceptions (I keep hoping to meet an Immaculate Contraception, but haven’t yet). You even get amusing combinations: María José (Mary Joseph) is a woman’s name, while José María is a man’s. 

“He’s Jesus too,” added the man I now think of as Jesus 1 (I hope that’s not blasphemous), indicating his companion. “I’m afraid we have the same name. Pure coincidence.”

“Ah, yes,” I replied, “to avoid confusion,” but he didn’t react to that.

So I got my walk with Jesus. Or rather, all three of us did, since Luci and Toffee shared the blessed moment with me. And not with just one Jesus, but with two. Who could ask for a better preparation for Christmas? 

I hope they found plenty of mushrooms.

Slippery Jack mushroom
Our woods are full of visitors picking them