Useless plaster cat!

Just inside our front door, sitting on a little shelf and pointing inwards towards the heart of our home in the approved Feng Shui position, sits a Japanese ceramic “lucky” cat like the one in the photo. This is meant to bring money into our household, but it clearly doesn’t work, because NOBODY EVER CLICKS ON MY GOOGLE ADSENSE LINKS. I’ve been writing my blog for four months now and the total payment accrued is less than $30! The damned plaster cat is worth more than that! Google won’t even send me a cheque until I reach $100, and I might be dead by then! (I’m not particularly greedy, but I would like to make a small contribution towards my veterinary bills just once before I go.)

Apparently though, nobody makes money out of blogging except for a few fashionable young women who write about sex. Unfortunately, as a neutered male cat, that subject is more or less beyond me. (Sometimes I get a bit of a residual urge, climb on top of my sister, grasp the fur at the back of her neck in my mouth, and sort of push my hips at her. Then she growls at me, spins around and hits me in the face with her paw. At this point I tend to forget what it was I was doing, and wander off for a drink of water or something. That's about as sexy as it gets in my life, I'm afraid.)

My blog may be more cats and cooking than shags and shopping, but there must be someone out there who can see a commercial opportunity in it. Any publishers thinking in terms of a nice little hardback for the Christmas market should e-mail Martin (see profile for address), and we'll get back to them.

Anyway, dinner last night for Annie and Martin was suppli al telefono, which is left-over risotto formed into balls around pieces of mozzarella, coated in egg and breadcrumbs, and deep-fried. You break open the balls and the melted cheese forms strings like telephone wires, hence the name. M served them with a home-made tomato sauce flavoured with garlic, a little chilli and some flat-leafed parsley from the garden.

To return to the ceramic cat before I sign off – Martin told me the other day that in Spain, instead of saying “as blind as a bat” they say “ciego como un gato de yeso”, or “as blind as a plaster cat”. I love that!