I got Lazarus fully grown from the Cat Haven, and he’s a large cream ginger tom who thinks he’s a child.

He sleeps in my bed, curled in the crook of my arm, just like a baby would, that is when it’s cold.  When it’s not so cold, he sleeps on my pillow, curled around my head.  When it’s hot he still sleeps on my bed, but he always makes sure he gets between me and my fan!

He’s a very lazy cat (you know the type, he’ll sleep 26 hours a day with time in between for cat naps!), and usually doesn’t get out of bed in the morning until he hears the shower going, then after he’s made sure I’ve washed behind my ears, he goes back to bed, under the covers of course, and stays there for hours.  One day he stayed in bed until 6.45pm, then got out of bed, but didn’t have the energy to get off the bed until he had to make a dash for the door with his legs crossed!

As I mentioned, he supervises my shower every morning, and when I sometimes have a bath, he sits on the edge and drinks my bath water.  He likes bubble baths, and occasionally gets in the tub and has a both.  Weird!

Of course, he’s had his fair share of sleeping so hard he’s fallen off the chair, and if I laugh at him, he sulks for days.

One morning while I was having breakfast, he must have had a very dry throat because when he was sitting on the kitchen windowsill and meowed, it came out as a quack.  I spluttered corn flakes everywhere and he got very aggro with me because I laughed at him.

He likes to play “Owl”, the game where two people stare at each other and the first to look away or blink is a lousy owl.  He’s never beaten me yet! 

He’s also made a game of suddenly jerking around to look up towards the corner of the room near the front door.  His ears go up and back, and his eyes go wide, just as if he’s seen a ghost.  It gives my son Vincent and I the creeps sometimes, but we know this place isn’t haunted.

Whenever I go away for a few days, he totally ignores me for a couple of days when I get back to show me how much he hates being neglected.  That is, until the last time I went away.  He was so glad to have me home again that he followed me like a shadow, and refused to take his eyes off me.  This adulation was quite embarrassing (well, how would you cope with a cat who leans his chin on the edge of your bath and fixes his gaze upon you!), but true to his feline nature it soon wore off.

One habit of his that I really hate is that he sits on my knee to watch TV, and he falls asleep and snores, and before I know it I’m snoring too.  I miss more TV programmes that way….

He doesn’t seem to realise that he’s been fixed, and has a tendency to spray to mark his territory, but the limit came when he sprayed the legs of my jeans…WHILE I WAS WEARING THEM!

His table manners could use some improvement as well.  He has a water dish on the kitchen floor, but completely ignores it, as he prefers to drink out of the aquarium or the toilet.  He’s also the only cat in Australia who’ll let me thaw out steak or chicken (or any meat) on the table and totally ignore it.  He won’t eat meat at all except for a bit of liver now and then, and when I got him he would only eat dry cat biscuits. I’ve managed to get him eating tinned fish now, and he’ll eat some fresh fish and prawns, but he won’t touch salmon or sardines to save his life.

He won’t touch milk at all, except when it’s ice cold, in a glass.  The other day he couldn’t get his face far enough into the glass to reach the milk, so I poured some into a saucer for him.  Yes, you guessed it, he wouldn’t touch a drop of it!

I heard a funny sound outside the front door yesterday, and tiptoed out and caught Lazarus growling at a magpie which was sitting on the rail squawking at him.  I left him to it, as he’s too bloody lazy to chase birds.  His stomach hangs down and sways from side to side, so I don’t think his dignity would allow him to chase birds, even if his get-up-and-go hadn’t got-up-and-went!

Life can be hard living with a loopy cat, but I wouldn’t swap him for something sane!