[THE OLD GROANER] Cat-flap lessons

I suppose it all started a year ago when Die Frau took a week’s holiday to İstanbul with a mutual friend, a gayish sort of chap who has been coming to Turkey for some 15 years and loves the country. He loves our simple valley, its simple people, our simple cottage and our less than simple lifestyle.

However, Pierre, as he likes to be called, is also something of a culture vulture and after discovering the city of İstanbul a couple of years ago has been visiting once a year to further experience the delights of that city. Myself, I cannot do with more than about 10 people within a hundred yards of me, so I dread the thought of being within 15 million unless they are equally distributed across the whole of the Sahara Desert or on one of the polar ice caps. I do not go there.

So Frau met Pierre there a year ago, and one day found herself in the Beyoğlu district looking at second-hand furniture and stuff. She spotted an old heating stove that she immediately wanted. It is probably of Italian or French origin, a handsome piece of hardware decorated with exquisite three-dimensional ceramic tiles. It probably graced the home of a very well-to-do family about 80 years ago. The thing was no bigger than the standard tin stoves seen in every house in our valley and half the cafes but outweighed them fifty fold. We learnt later that it weighs 125 kilograms.

Frau telephoned me and kindly informed me the price of the thing, and two days later I took delivery of it at our local cargo office.

Now, having so many cats and dogs living with us, we always accepted that the doors of our house were never closed. You may not find that too unremarkable in the summer, but it was true year-round. The house was cold in the winter. Our bed was warm, the bedroom was warmish, but the rest of the house was cold. We accepted that fact as did the animals.

So after installing our fine new stove, we saw in front of us the prospect of having a warm house in the winter: a house comparable to a civilized European house. A cozy house year- round!

We started by doing things to the two external doors that would allow the closing of them. In the case of the kitchen door that involved the hacking back of a considerable volume of plant life that had been reaching through the doorway for the fridge and its friend the microwave for the last few years.

Having done the necessary we tried the experiment of closed doors. It worked a treat! The house now might just be capable of being warm through the winter months. I need hardly say that the animals were not as pleased with the prospect as we were and reacted very badly toward those several square meters of ancient timber obstructing their free and fair passage from their feeding and sleeping rooms to the outside and interesting world of Mother Nature.

So it was that faced with a mutiny we decided to install a cat flap. The machine was unknown around here until about five years ago but is now readily available. We bought one. I took the door off its hinges and cut the wrong sized hole in it, fixed that, cut my finger, started again and eventually had a door with a slightly squiffy cat flap at the bottom. I re-hung the door with the minimum of blood, sweat and tears, and voila!

That is when the real blood, sweat and tears began. The cat-flap lessons.

We have a total of about 15 of the little darlings, but only about half of that number are the sort of la-de-dah, mamsy-pamsy people who would spend time in a sissy house. The other bruised and battered ragamuffins spend their time in wood piles and ditches. So, there we were with the prospect of teaching about seven or eight cats the business of a cat flap.

You have done this yourself. The lady of the house, by tradition, is on the inside and the man on the outside of the door. The first volunteer kedi is somewhat reluctantly posted from the inside to the outside, there to be greeted by the nominal head of the household, duly praised, reversed and posted back. This is repeated several times until the little victim is thoroughly dizzy and released so that he or she may flee a few yards away to do one of those dignity restoring washes, peculiar to cats, whilst muttering under its breath about “new fangled contraptions.”

And so we worked our way through about five of the poor victims over the course of half an hour or so. The show resulted in a certain amount of bloodshed and was watched by our two sniggering dogs. The donkey fled, probably but needlessly, fearing that she too was soon be stuffed through the hole.

Our first villager to see the cat flap was the No. 1 wife of Taxi-Memet. As far as I could tell she approved of the village-style squiffy installation, but of course, was horrified that the cats had 24-hour access to the house. Consequently I then told a little lie, demonstrated the lock and had her believe that the horrors would be locked out at night.

The five students who had passed the course soon taught the other two or three the required skills, but today we had to teach the new kitten, brought up in a rubbish bin, the trick. This little girl had presumably heard the rumors and was determined not to be involved in any way. That is why you now see me bleeding profusely onto the keyboard. Before I tackle that job again, I will invest in heavy duty gardening gloves, some body armor and a fencing mask.