Chris Pascoe – författare

In the long history of mankind's relationship with felines, one cat stands head and shoulders below the rest. Highly inflammable, the glass-jawed Birmingham lurches from one catastrophe to the next. Through encounters with washing machine spin cycles to his lovelorn pursuit of the aggressively uninterested Sammy, Chris Pascoe's hilarious book paints an intimate portrait of the author's calamitous relationship with a cat wholly unsuited to being feline. Persistently molested by an irate sparrow, physically incapable of negotiating the intricacies of the cat-flap and with a near-fatal appreciation of the effects of gravity, Brum nevertheless remains steadfast in his subconscious pursuit of oblivion. Worryingly, these stories are true. Will nine lives be enough?

You can take a cat to water but you can't make it think. Last summer, Chris Pascoe decided to do something monumentally stupid. He decided to stay at home with his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Maya and disaster-prone tabby Birmingham, Brum for short. And also with Brum's rather vicious live-in-partner-girl-cat Sammy, who he intended mainly not to wake. Let biting cats lie. Why he believed time with Brum would, with all the years of contrary evidence, be quality he's not at all sure . . .The result is a series of tales of death-defying feats.  Paddling pools, gazebos, small birds and kitchens - all aspects of normal life can take a dangerous turn with the presence of Brum. Pascoe tries to train the tabby, restrain the tabby and even researches the stories of other danger cats in a bid to keep Brum alive a bit longer. And amazingly, despite the efforts of his exuberant two-year-old with a plastic mallet, he still is.