So, my resolution about not letting Dim Sim in during working hours fell in a heap after one day. It’s raining this morning, and there he was, all wet.

He hadn’t eaten the dry food we left out for him last night, so I guess he wasn’t really hungry. He let me dry his paws. After a little gentle shoving, he did better at not being underfoot on the stairs, too.

The streets in the direction I think he comes from are kind of chaotic — narrow, busy, lots of motorbikes, people and dogs. Our lane is quiet. Our house is cool and safe and quiet. I can see why a cat would like it.

He’s chilling out here. I’m ignoring a lot of his meows, as if he wants to hang out here he’s got to learn that being noisy won’t get him very far. I think he’s showing signs of getting the picture.

I guess whoever took his collar off didn’t want the hassle of talking, or was worried about what their cat might have done — knocked over a pricless vase, killed someone’s expensive fish, etc. I’m tempted to get another collar and write a more comprehensive note.

We’re going away in March/April, and I’d really like to know the details of his situation before then.

I know that my worrying about him like this may seem incomprehensible to any local person I do manage to talk to, as the attitude towards cats here is rather laissez faire. People seem more interested in their dogs. But he’s so domesticated that I can’t help feeling a duty towards him, and I’d also like to let his owner/carer know what he’s up to.

We put the collar with the noted taped to it on Dim Sim yesterday. This morning he’s back without the collar. He was very placid when we put it on him. He didn’t try to remove it at all, so I would say that a human did. Even if no one calls, I think I can assume that someone either owns or is looking out for him.

He was indoors for a while yesterday, and by the end of the day I had itchy eyes. I don’t know if it’s because of him or because I had the door open so he could go in and out. It’s possible that I’m slightly allergic to cats, but I’ve never had a cat in a house without carpet, so I’ve never been able to tell whether I react to cats, carpet dust, or both.

Anyway, I’ve put a cardboard box out on the balcony for him. He seems to like it. He was looking kind of rattled this morning — as he has on other occasions — so I’m going to believe the guy who told me he might be coming up here because a dog chased him. He’s very vocal and attention-seeking, unlike the cat back home who just used to come in and sleep, so all other reasons aside, I’ve decided he can’t come indoors during “working hours”.

He’s curled up in the box. Maybe he just wants a safe spot to sleep in. (Also, it looks like it’s going to rain. Maybe he knows and wants to arrange shelter in advance. Last time he was really hustling to get inside in the early morning it was about to pour, too.)

We finally carried Dim Sim out last night and dumped him on the balcony. An hour later he was still there meowing. He’d eaten the food I’d put out.

This morning? Still there. Keen to come in. I’ve let him back in my room.

Now I really don’t know whether he has a house or not. Maybe he’s recently homeless, or someone who was feeding him isn’t feeding him anymore. Maybe a family bought a kitten and don’t want him now that he’s big. Maybe he’ll just take whatever he can get!

He’s playing a bit with the only toy I could find for him — a plastic tiger tooth charm on a rope from the “tiger temple”. And meowing. As soon as the supermarket opens I’ll get some cat food.

While I’m more than happy for him to hang out here on a casual basis, I can’t even think about keeping him. We’re away too often, and most likely one day we’ll leave for good.

We might have to put a collar on him with a note attached saying “call us if this is your cat”!

ETA: He’s still here. He ate the cat food and drank some milk. Now he’s exploring the room, checking out the confined spaces and possibly rating them on a scale of 1 to 10. I’ve tried putting him outside again, and he’s not into that at all! He is now sitting on the bed on the towel I put there for him.

Despite his foreign looks, he’s definitely a Thai cat. I tried stroking him with my foot, and he nipped me — gently, not breaking skin — as if to tell me I was being rude! (Feet are the lowest/dirtiest part of the body — you’re not meant to point them at people.)

ETA2: I put a little food for him in the garage area and left him there while I went out to get a collar to hang a note on. He was absent when I got back, to my relief, as I was worried that I’d gone too far with the hospitality. I need to steel myself a bit in that regard.

N.B. When I went out to get the food this morning, next door’s cat was in the garage area, meowing at me. Do cats leave hobo signs on “easy” houses?

Dim Sim has spent most of the afternoon indoors here. When he’s awake he meows a lot, seeming to be hungry, but turned his nose up at fresh raw salmon, so I don’t think he can be that hungry.

He has now discovered the bed in my room, and is sleeping in the valley between the pillows. ETA: He’s awake and meowing again. I don’t know what he wants. A particular brand of tinned tuna? Sex? Catnip?

He’s so big and so clean that I’m sure he has a real home somewhere. He isn’t neutered after all, but he hasn’t sprayed, just rubbed his head on everything a lot.

He’s back on the bed, washing himself. I’ve read that tom cats often have several “homes”, so it isn’t strange for him to be hanging around here. I’ll get some cat food, but only for occasional treats, as someone is obviously feeding him and he shouldn’t learn to count on this as a place to eat regularly.

Right now he looks like he’s studying the books behind the bed, but actually he’s fast alseep Possibly absorbing literature by hypno-osmosis, or something.

ETA, hours later: He’s still here. We keep opening the door for him and he keeps taking a brief look outside and running straight back to the bed. I tried to gently push him out. He lay down on the floor.

If he has a home, why does he want to stay here where there’s no food? Maybe his owners have acquired a dog, or they’ve had a baby and now they’re putting him out at night?

Or he just knows a sucker when he sees one…?

I was sitting here typing when a cat leaped onto my balcony from the balcony next door.

A magnificent cat. Either a huge female or a neutered male, tabby, sleek, fit, so glossy that its grey markings were almost silver.

You don’t see cats like that in Bangkok every day. It looked like it had walked out of a cat showroom. I couldn’t see a collar on it, but I’m sure it was someone’s pet.

It sat down and washed itself a bit. It was breathing a little heavily. It hung out on our balcony for a bit, then leaped over to next door’s balcony (it’s a row of townhnouses with adjoining large balconies). I went out and checked on it.

It was sitting by next door’s door, meowing at me, as if it expected me as the nearest member of the servant species to go over there and open the door. It had that whole “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me” thing going on on its general deportment. And a truly piteable, kittenish meow.

I don’t think it’s next door’s cat. I’ve never seen it before. I wondered if it had got up onto the balconies and couldn’t get down.

It came back onto our balcony and meowed at me. Was it an “I’m hungry, feed me, thou wretch!” meow? A “Help, I’m stuck!” meow? I could have let it indoors, but then I’d have to had put it out in the street, and perhaps, I thought, this is an indoor cat that got out one of the balcony doors and shouldn’t just be dumped in the street.

I went downstairs to see if any humans were around. By then the cat had jumped onto the next balcony and was sitting on the balcony wall, meowing. The people in that house were in their downstairs area. They said it wasn’t their cat, and asked a guy across the road. Not his cat either.

The cat went over the next balcony, and was lost to view.

There are a couple of ways a cat could get down, if perhaps not very comfortably, so maybe it found its way to the ground — or back to its own house.

In any case, it reminded me that I rather miss having a cat around. We used to share a neighbour’s cat. He spent a lot of time in our house. I think he liked our squashy sofa.

If the cat is free to wander, I rather hope it decides it likes balcony excursions and comes back for another visit.

How often do you find bras that fit, and are comfy (as far as bras go) and quite pretty, 5 minutes walk from your house, for about $15?

Just thought I’d balance the last post’s complaining with a few sounds of jubilation.

I go now to buy many bras for hoarding against future scarcity.

I’ve said before that this is a quiet street. And by Bangkok standards, it is. You won’t go deaf living here, there’s no demolition site or nightclub within earshot, no through traffic, and people mostly observe the legal hours for use of power tools. There are hours, sometimes hours at a stretch, when it actually is quiet.

That said, between the people who get up early and the people who go to bed late, and their kids and dogs and aircons and water pumps, I can find myself assaulted by noise pretty well all day long, too. And it’s my problem, not theirs. I get that. You can’t expect anyone to keep the noise down because a writer is trying to think or because someone who works from home just wants to take a nap or enjoy a little silence for no special reason. Although, honestly, I think you can expect people, out of common courtesy, not to talk at the top of their voices at 6 a.m. or leave their car parked under your window playing doof-doof music.

Well, I can expect it, but I won’t get it. I will get noise. Not because this is Bangkok but because this is Planet Earth and human beings are noisy. I’m sensitive to noise. I get the impression that I’m in a minority. I like many of the sounds of nature, though, so perhaps I should be living in a cave in Mongolia or something — but that wouldn’t be without its drawbacks.

Anyway, I feel like I’m often fighting noise. Earplugs, rain recordings, wandering the streets looking for a quiet corner of an alley somewhere — sometimes I really do get desperate and feel quite upset by not being able to get away from noise. I found a graveyard, a nice big one, which can be fairly quiet; however, the owners of the graveyard have turned it into a recreation facility with a jogging track, sports equipment etc — and karaoke machines. It’s awesome, actually. But thanks to the karaoke, the quiet stretches tend not to be very long.

There’s a mosque with a Muslim graveyard nearby, and it doesn’t have karaoke — but it also doesn’t look so open to the public, or at least not to the infidel.

I get tired because noises wake me up at night. And then, during the day, when some dog is barking, like it is now, and earplugs don’t keep it out and I just can’t think, I get frustrated and hot under the collar. It’s not that I don’t get any quiet, I just need more than I’m getting.

I need to do something. I can’t make the noise stop, so I need to find ways to deal with it. I’m considering hypnotherapy. I also want to try sleeping pills, something to help me sleep more deeply but without waking up groggy in the mornings. I’d be grateful for any recommendations.

I love architectural words. Cornice, pediment, dado, spandrel, blind arch — house porn meets thesaurus porn. It’s fetishistic, like technobabble or car talk. And I get frustrated when I don’t know the term for some architectural item.

So I was happy to happen upon this page about architecture in Ontario. It has a lovely lot of building terms, with pictures of everything. Ever wonder what to call the doohickey at the bottom of the spring of an arch? It’s a kneestone (and who knew that that bit was called the spring?) The ornamental parapet-thing on the front of a building, hiding the roof? A fractable. I espcially like the word for a fancy, raised element (usually a doorway) on the facade of a building — frontispiece.

(I paused at the description of Brutalism as “attractive”. Breauty is in the eye of the beholder? Though the Brutalist house, surrounded by trees, is very nice, I think. It looks clean and relaxed, and natural, like an updated cave.)

Well, it’s Melbourne Cup Day again. That rolled around fast! I was supposed to be back in Bangkok, but due to flood situation I’m still here. (Danger has passed for the city centre, it seems, so going back soon.)

Anyway, I’ve decided to make this the month where I try to knock that story collection into shape. I was feeling so neurotic last time I tried that I just ended up tying myself in knots over stories that probably don’t need much, if anything, in the way of changes.

Gunpowder Tea is still coming along. I realised I could simplify something that was annoying me and add an improvement to the plot. Still some thickets in the middle to hack through, but I have a more positive feeling now. It has taken me a long time to get comfortable with this one, but at last I feel like I’ve settled into the flow.

For a long time I’ve assumed that the purpose of human life on earth is to attend to the needs of cats. But maybe we’re destined for something even more wonderful…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ws6AAhTw7RA