I'd completely forgotten about this one, which even inspired a Nice Hair comic (Nice Hair was a webcomic about someone who isn't quite me sharing a house with Tim and Fat Bob who are other people who have, er, hair a bit like mine.)
Hi Mister Neil,
I just want to give a suggestion for my favourite blog entry. It's gotta be the one titled 'Nasally inserted wake-up kittens' (http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2003/08/nasally-inserted-wake-up-kittens.asp) - that phrase alone makes me smile every time I think of it. I've re-read that post quite a few times and it never fails to give me the giggles at the mental image.
Cheers and keep up the good work!
(Also, for what it's worth, I'm one of the 50 people putting in together to buy Amanda for an afternoon in Melbourne in March. Freaking excited)
Nathan
Here you go...
Nasally inserted wake-up kittens
POSTED BY NEIL AT 2:39 AM
It looks like everything's working again -- thanks to all of you who helped in identifying problems.
So a hasty late night post, being typed around an asleep-on-my-keyboard medium-sized tabby kitten who rejoices in the name of Captain Morgan. He looks a little like Buddy-who-vanished, being sort of brown and sort of stripy, and was found by Lorraine hanging hungrily and miserably around the house a month or so ago. He and Coconut, Maddy's kitten, immediately became inseparable. Captain Morgan is a sweet-natured kitten, who has only one failing.
He waits until you're asleep, then climbs onto your bed, and tries to insert himself into your nose.
It never works, a hefty kitten being much larger than the interior of a nostril, but he keeps trying until you open up an eye and pick him up and drop him onto the floor. And then he bounces back onto the bed and tries to stick his head into one of your nostrils again. So you sweep him unceremoniously onto the floor, and bury your face in your pillow; and he sneaks back onto the bed and waits patiently while you go back to sleep and roll over, or just come up for air, and all of a sudden there's a small brown cat patiently trying to push its head into your nose.
Sooner or later he'll wake you up enough that you'll get up, carry him into the hall, and shut the door firmly, with him on the other side of it, and go back to sleep for the rest of the night.
I commented on this peculiar habit to my assistant Lorraine today, in the casual way you do when you don't want someone to think you've gone mad. "Er, Captain Morgan the kitten keeps trying to push his way into my nose while I'm asleep," I told her. She looked relieved. "Yes, he does that to me as well," she said. "I think it's because he probably wasn't weaned properly."
It's possible, I suppose, although I thought that misweaning just meant they sucked and chewed on things, not that they had grandiose fantasies about being nasally insertable, small wet muzzle first.
Sometimes I worry that one night I won't wake up, and he'll succeed in his bizarre quest, and in the morning there'll be nothing but the tip of a kitten-tail sticking out of one nostril to tell me he was ever here at all.
Which wasn't what I meant to type when I sat down to do this -- I thought I'd just stick up a bunch of interesting links before bed...
And here's one of the comics in question.
I adored Captain Morgan. We just hit it off. I liked him and he liked me, and we were friends for a few years, and then he was hit by a car, and is buried in the Pet Semetery down by my gazebo, under a rock. I dug the hole and buried him and said something nice and honest about him and said goodbye.
Labels: Nice Hair