Missing - 20 pound-ish, orange cat

Well that's bloody typical. The cat's gone missing and my wife's on the phone to me asking if I can make up some posters that we can put up round the development in case anyone's seen him. At least 20. I mean, there aren't even enough places to put 20.

Bloody typical, I say because my wife let him out, in the first place.

Now over the last x-years, Gigi has been a big old bone of contention, although you'd be hard put to find any bones as he packed on the pounds after being confined to the house, following the unfortunately incident when we let him out; he got into a staring match with the neighbor's dog and she retaliated by getting the chagrined dog to pee on our lawn in board daylight at tea time, nonetheless.

Then we had this ongoing dispute about him being declawed. My wife insisted this was necessary for the sake of the furniture, I insisted it was cruel, we dug trenches in the front room and lobbed verbal missiles for the best part of three months, with occasional re visitations of the argument.

I prevailed but the antique chairs from her grandmother got ripped to shreds.

Over the last few months my wife has been again raising the prospect of Gigs "going to live on a farm," a notion I have been lukewarm about, partly because I'm not sure how easy to it to simply "go and live on a farm." There counterpoint to this seems to be the consolation that we can get a bird that we could teach to swear.

(although I'd teach it to scream 'where's bloody Gigs?')

"Yeah, yeah," my daughter says, happy at the notion of a colorful bird replacing Gigs. I feel I am alone in fighting his corner,

Were it as easy as it sounds to go and live on a farm, I'd be tempted myself. I was more than tempted yesterday when the only way to control Jackson was to get him to sit on the pool table at the restaurant, a notion that gained me a month's quota of unpleasant looks, following some downright hostile ones when he started hurling the balls down onto the table, with an ear splitting crackle.

Unlike Jackson, Gigi has been somewhat neglected over recent years. He's certainly not underfed and I am constantly picked up on my litter box cleaning regime, which can slip without an occasional strategic boot up my backside.

But emotionally the poor big old boy is starved of love and only gets attention when he's shouted out to move off the stairs. And now he's out there in his fuzzy orange coat and it's 98 degrees and for all I know he's being tormented over his weight by raccoons.

In the spirit of making my wife feel better about the whole episode, I sent her a press release from the local police department about a spate of fox attacks, warning cats are particularly vulnerable to rabies and should not be outdoors during the current foxmeggedon.

I try not to mention rabies to our daughter as she gets rather uptight about the disease, in the same way as I did at her age when I saw a TV show about rabies in which a man was foaming at the month.

It left me in a state of fear for a week and was up there with the time my father told us the sun would burn out one day, the temperature of the earth would plummet and we'd all die. Of course, I started to believe that one day was that very week.

If Gigi does come back I wonder if he'll finally be appreciated. It's true he's overweight and has a somewhat annoying habit of biting people who stroke him but I know there are worse felines out there.

And I can't help feeling uneasy that there's been a systemic parenting failure somewhere along the line here.