The year of the Cheshire Cat

This stamp is one of a set of 10 issued by Royal Mail
to mark the 150th anniversary

The world-famous grinning cat turned 150 years old in 2015. Not bad for a literary creature that was originally imagined simply to amuse a small girl named Alice (daughter of Henry Liddell, the Vice-chancellor of Oxford University and friend of author Lewis Carroll). Since its publication in 1865, Carroll’s masterly tale Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has never been out of print and, in the subsequent 150 years, the work has been translated into more than a hundred languages.

Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on 27 January 1832, spent his early years in the village of Daresbury, in Cheshire, where his father Charles Dodgson was the vicar (from 1827 to 1843) of the local church, All Saints’.

Not surprisingly, Daresbury is proud of its famous son. In the church, Carroll is commemorated in a special stained glass window. As well as a Nativity scene, the window also depicts scenes from Carroll’s life: the Cheshire Wheatsheaf, representing the country where he was born; the shields of Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was educated; and a pair of compasses and the Lamp of Learning, symbolising his considerable skills in mathematics. And, at the bottom of the window appear some of Carroll’s unforgettable fictional characters, including the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, the mad March Hare, the Mock Turtle, the Dormouse sitting in a teapot and, of course, the inimitable Cheshire Cat. (Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been to Daresbury but you can see the window here.)   

I’m sure it will also come as no surprise that the whole of Cheshire celebrates its name being associated with the famous grinning cat. There are Cheshire Cat public houses in Christleton and in Nantwich (its signs appear in the photograph below), a company of that name provides themed parties and events, and you can enjoy tea and cake in the Dormouse Tea Rooms in Daresbury.

The inspiration for the fictional Cheshire Cat character is claimed by several places. There is a 16th-century sandstone carving of a grinning cat on the west face of St Wilfrid's Church tower in Grappenhall, a village very close to Daresbury, but there is also a cat carving in Croft church, where Carroll’s father was rector for 25 years, and a cat gargoyle in St Nicholas Church in Cranleigh, where Carroll used to visit.

The origin of the Cheshire Cat, though now largely associated with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, does, in fact, predate the book and it seems Lewis Carroll merely elaborated on the idea of a grinning cat when concocting the mischievous character for his tale.

During the six months I lived in Cheshire earlier this year, I searched for the famous grinning cat but never found him. The cats I encountered never displayed that famous grin and were, on the whole, rather taciturn. Certainly, none shared any pearls of wisdom similar to those uttered by the fictional Cheshire Cat, which are what I love most about the character. I’ll leave you with some of my favourite quotations:

‘I myself don't need a weathervane to tell which way the wind blows.’

‘Every adventure requires a first step. Trite, but true, even here.’

‘Those who say there's nothing like a nice cup of tea for calming the nerves never had real tea. It's like a syringe of adrenaline straight to the heart!’

‘Only a few find the way, some don't recognize it when they do – some ... don't ever want to.’

‘If you don’t know where you want to go, then it doesn’t matter which path you take.’

And, my particular favourite, ‘I’m not crazy – my reality is just different from yours.’

Cambodia's Cats

I am a cat person and I miss not having cats in my life. It’s one of the very few negatives of an itinerant lifestyle.

On the positive side, there are lots of cats here in Cambodia so, although I don’t have one of my own, I do get to talk to them and pat them and photograph them.

Apparently, there are no breeds of cat peculiar to Cambodia, though many of the cats here have no tails, short tails, or kinked broken tails. At first I thought either the cats here were very accident-prone or the subject of cruel acts.

I consulted Professor Google for an answer, which produced some bizarre results. One writer mentioned the people of Indonesia breaking the tails of cats so the cats wouldn’t be allowed into heaven when they died, thus leaving more places available for humans. Another reported a legend in which a cat did something to annoy a god and was punished with a broken tail. One more sensible explanation was that a calcium deficiency in the mother cat caused a malformed tail in its kittens – but why only in the tail?

The truth, in this case, is indeed stranger than fiction, as the misshapen tails are the result of a very odd genetic mutation, common throughout Asia, and they were, in fact, noted by that famous evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. There’s a good factual report of various cat tail mutations here. 

Apart from this oddity, the cats here are really no different to any other cats around the world, except perhaps for being a little skinnier. In a poverty-stricken country, there’s not always enough food for pets.

So, here’s a pictorial tribute to some of the cats I’ve met and a few of my favourite cat quotes.

Charles Dickens: What greater gift than the love of a cat.

Robert Byrne: To err is human, to purr is feline.

Robert Heinlein: If you would know a man, observe how he treats a cat.

Sigmund Freud: Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Robert Southey: A kitten is in the animal world what a rosebud is in the garden.

Ernest Hemingway: A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

Jules Renard: The idea of calm exists in a sitting cat.