Category: The Continuing Adventures of a Wayward Meerkat Kit

Part 1 (scroll down for Part 2)

In Western Australia, we’ve been fortunate in avoiding the prolonged pandemic lockdowns that the rest of the world refers to as ‘the new normal’. Kit assured me that any kind of normal would be new territory for me. In any case, last week, Kit and I were resigned to spending the week in lockdown with no one for company but each other.

“It’s so unfair!” Kit exclaimed petulantly, stamping his hind paw.

Ignoring that thinly disguised insult, I told him, “When I was a little girl and my grandmother came to stay, she used to make up stories to tell me. How about we try that?”

“That sounds less boring than the TV programs you let me watch,” Kit conceded, “I’ll go first in case you do one that sounds like a lecture.”

“Fine,” I agreed magnanimously.

Kit’s story went something like this.

In the olden days, about 2002, far away, in the wilds of Tanzania, my Grandpa Meerkat joined an expedition to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. In case he got bored, he invited his human sidekick, Uncle Dave to tag along.

Grandpa Meerkat was well versed in the modern technology of the time and booked the expedition through the internet. But you couldn’t pay online back then. In the end most of his luggage consisted of cash. He was quite pleased he had invited Uncle Dave, who had a great many pockets, and generously agreed to carry the money.

Anyway, once the tour was booked, Grandpa and Uncle Dave travelled on the back of a truck from Botswana all the way through Zambia to Tanzania. The trip was largely uneventful, as there were no windows in the back of the truck, which was a complete waste of scenery. Grandpa described the journey as being not unlike that time he got trapped in a tumble dryer- hot, dark, bumpy, and smelling slightly of elephant dung.

Eventually they arrived in the town of Moshi and made their way to meet the others at a small, ramshackle guesthouse, curiously named, The Grand Hotel.

The party consisted of the usual assortment of overprivileged westerners, who sat around drinking sugarcane liquor and trying to outdo each other with the number and variety of animals they had spotted on safari (and also the number and variety of drinks they could hold down).

Once it was established that everyone claimed to have seen the Big Five, the conversation moved to bird species. By this stage, some of them were quite drunk. I paid careful attention when Grandpa relayed the bird names, so I remember them all: the dowdy long-beaked wallflower, raging pipsqueak and wrong-bottomed scoundrel. I hope to see them all in the wild someday. They’re obviously all very rare, as I haven’t found them mentioned on Google. And I might be wrong about the raging pipsqueak. That might have been Uncle Dave’s nickname for Grandpa.

Part 2

Eventually, Grandpa found himself endeavouring to make polite conversation with a young gentleman in such a state that no one was going to be offering him their car keys any time soon. After introducing himself as a meerkat adventurer, he asked the young man what he did for a living.

“I’m an assassin,” the young man slurred.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to tell people,” Grandpa replied, unphased.

“I didn’t say I was a good one,” the assassin explained.

“How many meerkats have you killed?” Grandpa asked carefully, eyeing the exits.

“None. You lot don’t go around making trouble. I mainly focus on humans,” he replied, squinting and failing to focus on anything at all.

Grandpa exhaled, “So how many people have you killed?”

“Just one so far. But I’ve killed him a lot.”

“So, is he actually dead, then?”

“Mostly. Sort of. He’s very unwell. I’m actually still studying, so I’m practicing on him. I’ve been killing him once a month for ages.”

“Poor guy.”

“Poor guy?! He’s killed a lot more people than I have. A lot,” he repeated despondently, staring into his drink.

“Right. Well, carry on then, ha-ha!” Grandpa squeaked scurrying off to the relative safety of the rest of the party, who were now eagerly engaged in the process of setting fire to their drinks, and in several cases, their nostril hair.

Grandpa approached Uncle Dave, “I’m out of here!” he declared in a loud whisper, “This lot are crazier than a man mowing his astroturf.”

“But don’t you want to conquer the mountain?” Uncle Dave asked in surprise, casually extinguishing his nostril hair.

“Not particularly,” Grandpa replied, “In hindsight, climbing a mountain that starts with, Kill a Man isn’t the best idea I’ve ever had. Some people around here might be inclined to take that a bit too literally. I’m going to hitch a ride home and do some bird-watching on the way.”

Kit concluded, “So, Grandpa Meerkat hitch-hiked back to Botswana, describing, naming and dodging many bird species along the way, including my favourite, the gold-plated twerking twit. I did find a picture of this one on Google, but they got the name wrong.”

In the lead up to Xmas last year, Kit and I decided we’d had enough of wrapping paper. Earlier, I had described the lifecycle of paper to Kit. He was horrified to discover human priorities where tree-use is concerned. First, we acknowledged the social importance of gift wrapping (absolutely imperative if you don’t wish to become a social outcast, according to Kit, who would much prefer to be a social incast). Apparently, much lower on the priority list is maintaining a sufficient number of trees to photosynthesize, thereby renewing our oxygen supply. The pervasive opinion seems to be that chopping down trees is of little consequence. Kit suggested that this was a trifle odd. Only he didn’t say that. He said something a trifle more descriptive.

So, there remained a problem. How could we save some trees whilst presenting our presents presentably? Kit and I decided to solve the problem. First, we set out to buy some Christmassy print fabric and ribbon. Kit was quite overwhelmed at the big store and got a bit overexcited. Thanks to my timely interruption of his antics, and apologies to the staff, he managed not to make any enemies (at least not permanently). I distracted him by asking him to ‘help’ me carry our supplies. His assistance made little difference to me. He may he have been carrying a spool of ribbon, but I was carrying him!

Once we got home, I unpacked the sewing machine, or ‘sewer’ as Kit calls it. I have never corrected him. It’s only the written word that poses a problem. Kit helped me measure out and cut the fabric. The print on the fabric was of platypuses in Xmas hats. At first he didn’t like the idea of cutting through any of the platypuses. Fortunately, I managed to talk him round, and left him cutting ribbon, while I got down to business sewing little gift bags.

A few hours later we had all we needed to wrap our Xmas presents. A dozen pretty gift bags that can be reused, and even washed and ironed to keep them fresh. Our sense of accomplishment was quickly followed by deflation as we realized we now had to actually do our Xmas shopping. But we’d had enough for one day. While I went to make dinner, Kit settled down with his coloured pencils to draw platypuses sawn in half with their innards hanging out.

Recently I was telling a friend that, although I am in my forties, I don’t use a regular moisturiser, just rosehip oil.

Kit interjected, somewhat indignantly, “Yes you do!”

“What are you talking about?”  I asked.

“What about that Dynamic Lifter stuff in that bottle you keep in the bathroom? It sounds like a sort of facelift in a bottle to me,” he reasoned.

“Not unless you’re a plant,” I replied, laughing, “It’s for Spike Milligan” (my cactus).

Kit gave me a long hard look and said, “Plants don’t have faces,” in a tone generally reserved for toddlers and the criminally insane (and I have it on good authority that the only difference between those two categories of people is age).

“It’s actually plant food,” I explained.

“Then why are you rubbing it into your face?!” he exclaimed, adding, “It smells like shit!”

“That’s because it has manure in it,” I admitted, “That’s why I keep it in the bathroom. And I don’t rub it on my face. Whatever made you think that?”

“It’s in the bathroom, where you do all that secret women’s business! But more to the point, now you’re telling me that despite not having faces, let alone mouths, plants actually eat. And what they actually eat is shit? How exactly do they do that?”

“Well, yes, they seem to like manure, among other things. Compost is good too. They eat by sucking the nutrients out of the dirt through tubes in their stems or trunks called xylem. Like sucking a milkshake up through a straw.”

“The food must be pretty runny to go up a straw,” Kit speculated, “And if it’s mostly shit (even worse than your termite patties haha!) that basically means that  they eat by sucking diarrhoea up through a big straw.” He shook his head in disbelief.

“The world’s gone mad,” he muttered and, without a hint of irony, informed us that he was off to investigate the culinary potential of the local invertebrate population.

This morning Kit went out to the balcony to test the weather. He came flying straight back in again. Literally.

“I am not in Chicago, and I am not in Windy Wellington,” he huffed, getting back to his feet, “And Mother Nature would do well to remember that!”

This last week, the weather has been a bit blustery, and it has been getting on his nerves no end. So, to make the best of it, we made a kite, and walked to the park to fly it.

Kit noticed the speed sign in the image below. It seemed to require a speed limit of 0km per hour. We agreed that it seemed a bit unreasonable, being as it was, on a path.

“And the whole point of paths and roads,” said Kit, “Is for you to move along them. Obviously, I am excluding the Kwinana Freeway between three and six pm. During rush hour, its purposes seem to be to get you sunburned on your right arm, and make you wish you’d gone to the loo before you left work.”

“Even Spike Milligan [my cactus] can go faster than that,” Kit exclaimed.

“Since Spike Milligan is on the balcony, firmly planted in a pot that is not going anywhere, I strongly suspect that 0km per hour is his top speed,” I countered.

“But actually, you do move him sometimes to be closer to the sun,” Kit argued, “So even if it averages out to a really slow speed, it’s still not completely stationary.” He looked smug.

“Well bugger me! I do believe you’re right for once,” I conceded.

“Once?!” he squeaked, “That’s at least the second time since breakfast.”

“Sure,” I muttered under my breath, “If you mean breakfast on the third Tuesday of last January.”

Fortunately, he didn’t hear.

As we were getting ready to go (rather reluctantly on Kit’s part) he suddenly piped up, “Actually, you can’t take me home. We might get arrested!”

“What have you done now?” I asked with trepidation.

“Nothing, but the speed limit is 0km per hour. So, if we leave, we’ll be breaking the speed limit, which is breaking the law,” he said hopefully.

“You don’t actually get arrested for speeding,” I explained.

“Oh,” he looked crestfallen.

“You just get a fine. And here is a list of things I am more worried about than getting that fine: Coming in at Number Three: Plastic pollution. Two: Climate change. And Number One: Telling a certain meerkat that we really must go home now!

Kit fully justified worry Number One as I dragged him home biting and squeaking.

Kit and I were having an argument.

“There is no such thing as a Rusty Spotted Forkbill!” I exclaimed.

“What’s this then?” Kit retorted, dragging a stinking semi-feathered monstrosity from the bowels of a shopping bag.

I peered closely, recoiling at the smell, “It appears to be a dead pigeon…and a fork! I can see the sticky tape on its beak!”

“Don’t be rude,” Kit squeaked indignantly, “He’s an amputee. I was helping him with a new beak.”

Good grief! That meerkat has an answer for everything. Maybe I should send him to law school.

“Well, it looks like being an amputee is the least of his problems,” I observed, “Hey! Isn’t that one of my good cake forks? That’s really unhygienic!” I objected.

“You can wash it,” he suggested.

“Who can wash it?” I asked.

“I will wash it for you, Mum,”

“Thank you,” I said, “But what brought this on?” I asked, “Why do you feel the need to prove to me what you saw?”

“Well, you make up bird species all the time,” he said accusingly, “Like great tits, goatsuckers, and blue-footed boobies; they don’t exist.”

“I’m sorry Kit, but they really do exist. For some reason, lots of bird species have quite preposterous names. I’ll show you some YouTube footage of them. But, what about this Rusty-Spotted Forkbill? You didn’t discover it; you invented it,” I said gently.

“You just don’t want to believe that I could discover anything!” he complained, petulantly stamping his hind paw.

“I would believe it if you told me you discovered a new strain of bacteria in the corner of your bedroom,” I said, trying and failing to lighten the mood.

“You never let me use my imagination anymore,” he complained.

“On the contrary, I would prefer that you did use your imagination,” I argued, “Perhaps you would like to imagine my expensive cutlery attached to the carcass of a pigeon.”

Kit looked so crestfallen that all my anger evaporated.

“Tell you what. How about I get out the coloured pencils and some paper, and you can draw what you saw,” I suggested, “That way you get to use your imagination, and I get to keep rotting corpses out of the house.

So we reached a deal. Kit will no longer bring home long-deceased animals, and I will keep his supply of pencils handy and sharpened (meerkats have trouble with this as they lack opposable thumbs).

Below is what Kit swears he saw on the Swan River, which he now refers to as the Forkbill River.

One fine autumn day, last weekend, Kit and I spent a good deal of time dressing warmly. When we were so swaddled that we could hardly bend our limbs, due to an overabundance of sleeves and trouser legs, we took Milly, my bicycle out for a ride.

After shedding several layers to facilitate the crucial act of pedalling, we set off along the bike path winding along the Swan River.

The area is rich with bird life, and that day was no exception. From his vantage point in Milly’s basket, Kit enthusiastically wrongly identified a dozen species of bird. He says I am worse at bird watching because I think everything is a cormorant. In my defense, there are no less than three species of cormorant that live locally.

We cycled along bickering happily, me telling him that there is no such thing as a Rusty Spotted Fork Bill, and him accusing me of Chronic Geriatric Myopia.

Unfortunately, as we rounded a bend, a magpie swooped us threateningly. While it is well-known that magpies often swoop people during nesting season, it is less well-known that they don’t particularly like Kit at any time of year. This may be because he occasionally chases them wielding cutlery, and shrieking obscenities.

Kit was terrified, “Go, Mum! Go!” he squeaked, yelling obscenities, and scrabbling around for spare cutlery.  So off I pedalled like a bat out of hell, Kit shouting and waving a teaspoon from Milly’s basket as threateningly as possible (that is to say not very threateningly at all).

By the time we reached safety, poor Milly had sustained a puncture to her front tyre.

When we got home, Kit’s Dad offered to take her in to the bike shop the next day.

When he got home I asked him, “How did you go?”

Kit immediately answered for him, “We couldn’t fit Milly in Dad’s car, so we took off her front wheel, and just took that to the bike shop.”

Kit’s Dad coughed. “We?!” he asked, rubbing a bruise on his leg.

“Well, if you had only stopped screaming, ‘Ow!’ and listened to me, it might have turned out a lot better,” Kit retorted.

They glared at each other.

Kit turned to me and continued, “Dad took in the wheel to show the bike doctor, and asked him if he could fix it. Then the bike doctor gave him this funny look, and said, ‘Maybe, but I’m going to need a lot of parts!’”

Kit enjoys being part of an interspecies family. (If you value the skin on your ankles, don’t ever call him a pet!) It enables him to feel superior due to all the skills he possesses that humans don’t. Like digging holes, and…..digging other holes in different places. He considers us disabled because we require tools to achieve this.  I consider him a tool (for digging holes, you understand; who needs a trowel when they have a meerkat?)  

Our opposable thumbs are something Kit is not remotely jealous of, explaining that they would only get in the way of digging a good hole. I said that they are useful for holding a pen. Kit said he prefers to use my laptop anyway. (How else could he read alarming misinformation on the web, and get the wrong end of the stick about virtually everything?)

Kit’s comprehension is much better than his writing. He says that this is because comprehension does not require his paws, which are tiny, only his brain, which is enormous! To illustrate how much more intelligent he is than me, he requested that I share the following story (something he would never have been stupid enough to do):

“One grocery shopping day, Mum couldn’t find any paper to write her shopping list on. Most people would use their smartphone, but she’s like, a hundred and twelve, so she doesn’t have one.”

“Excuse me?!” I interjected.

“In meerkat years,” he added hurriedly, and continued, “So, she tore the label off a tin of lentils and wrote on the back of it. She’s done it a few times since, so now we often eat tinned ‘surprise’ for dinner. It could be peaches. It could be baked beans. I made up this game where you shake the tin and guess what’s in it. Then she has to open it, and make dinner out of it. If you get it right, you have to eat it! Actually, even if you get it wrong, she still makes you eat it. The worst dinner was brown lentils and peaches.”

Kit neglected to mention that this only happened once, and I have since started writing on the tin in permanent marker if I feel the need to pinch the label. He is lying about the lentils and peaches. Kit says I am spoiling the story. So I’ll end there before I ruin it completely!

Last weekend, Kit’s Dad and I went out for dinner. It a relief to finally be able to leave Kit alone as an adult meerkat, without having to worry about a baby-sitter for his personal safety. Although, I sometimes wonder if we should get a baby-sitter for the safety of our home when he is in it alone. But, to his credit, so far he has not set fire to anything he couldn’t put out.

As I stood at the bathroom mirror attending to my make-up, Kit sat on the counter watching in fascination. “Why are you doing that, Mum?” he asked.

I answered, “So I’ll look nice when your Dad takes me out.”

“But, what’s the point?” he persisted. “Since you turned forty, you’ve really let yourself go, but that doesn’t worry Dad at all. He could probably get a much younger woman than you, but honestly, I don’t think he can be bothered with the amount of personal grooming that would take.”

“Well, that’s charming!” I thought, saying only (knowing very well that I was going to thoroughly regret it), “Would you like to elaborate?”

So he explained, “From what I’ve googled*, in most species, the males have the higher sex-drive, so they are the ones that need to attract females, who are usually very picky. So, why do human females make so much effort to make themselves attractive to males? I don’t think there’s a woman alive who could not get herself a man if she wanted to. I’ve met men who would date a hole in the ground!” he assured me.

He continued, “In bird species, it’s the males who have beautiful but, unwieldy feathers sprouting from strange places. Whereas, human males are more likely to have hair sprouting from strange places, and many men don’t do very much to make themselves attractive to women.”

“Kit,” I said gently, “That’s a bit of a generalization.”

“But women say stuff like that all the time,” Kit countered, “It’s all over the internet!” (At about this point the afore-mentioned regret kicked in.)

I am now plotting how to limit Kit’s internet surfing without him noticing too much. It really won’t do to have him being right like that!

*I use the lower case for ‘google’ because I am generalizing. We actually use the search engine Ecosia because they use their profits to plant trees. Kit thinks this is pretty cool because they produce oxygen, and he enjoys breathing so much that he does it on a regular basis.