Zip

This is Zip, my current cat. Right now, she is sitting up between the keyboard and the screen, although she does no longer chase the cursor as she used to do. The main advantage of having a 24" monitor is not that I can have several windows open at the same time, but that I can work past Zip.

Her full name is Zyprexa, because I got her at a moment when I was prepared to get off it - or so I thought - and use a cat as an antidepressant instead.

It didn't work so well, in the first few weeks.

As happens with cats, she chose me. I had gone to the local shelter to find a kitten, and the shelter volunteer placed her over my shoulder. She was small, thin and not too lovely, but she was already very active and very vocal. We put her back into her cage and she went beserk, climbing on the bars and pushing her paws through them, all the while screaming like and infant torn from the mother's arms.

The volunteer told me that she had been alone for all of one day, having come in with five littermates two days before. But she was very, very small, probably too small to be on her own, and whenever somebody wasn't actively petting her, she would wail in fear an loneliness. And she didn't have (nor does she now) a particularly pleasant voice.

I was still seriously depressed and worse still, when you are trying to convince yourself that loneliness isn't so bad after all (I had just broken up a six-years relationship) having a small animal that screams continuosly and not too melodiously "LOOOOOOOOVE! MOMMY! I NEED LOOOOOOOOOVE! NEEEEEED! LOOOOOOVE!" doesn't do much to cheer you up.

Here she is in those needy baby days:

All the same, she grew up pretty quickly to become a hyperactive, happy and clever little cat.

And she finally got over trying to kill the cursor

I took her to the UK with me, although I had to leave her back home for six months between her rabies shot and the issuing of her Pet Passport. She now lives in a house without a garden, poor thing, and can no longer catch lizards for me every morning.

Also, there are no lizards in London, I understand.

What she does, however, is chatter in frustration at the birds outside the window of my study: