New Year Fasting

And the cat’s feeling the heat

Once a month, I go around my house with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge and I clean my skirting boards.

‘My God, Michelle,’ I hear you say. ‘You are a paragon of cleanliness. What hygiene, what purity, what sanitation! Skirting boards. Every month. What a loser — I mean, what a woman.’

Before you are overcome with awe, let me elaborate: if I don’t clean the skirting boards, my living room starts to resemble something out of Sweeney Todd. Because every month what I wash off are spots of congealed blood.

At night, when my husband and I are in bed, downstairs becomes a killing field.

The cat has a cat flap, and during the night, carnage ensues. He brings in mice and slowly bleeds them to death by puncturing their bodies with his fangs and claws and to keep them awake to their misfortune, to prolong their torture, he tosses them against the skirting boards where their little bodies spill their blood.

When they are dead, when the cat can get no further pleasure, he loses interest. He gives them a final prod with his claws just to see if he can squeeze out one last drop of entertainment, but when he realises they have died, he flings them on the stairs where my bare feet discover them the following morning.

‘Why doesn’t he eat the mice?’ I have always wondered, fresh meat and all…

But wonder no more. It’s 2022 and the Scorziello household is fasting. Our eating window is five hours a day, from midday till five o’clock. All because over Christmas I’ve been reading David Sinclair’s book, Lifespan.

Sinclair is a Harvard Professor of Genetics, who has done much work on longevity and ageing without disease. Apparently, studies show that when you eat is more important than what you eat. Studies done on mice, grouping them according to whether they are fed more carbohydrates, fats or protein, were completely eclipsed in terms of longevity by mice who had just a one hour window of eating.

Sinclair adds that besides shrinking your eating window, if you also eat predominately plants, sleep well, and exercise, you go far to protecting yourself from the diseases of old age.

As my goal is to live to two hundred so that I can perfect my writing style (I figure it will take me that long), I am always alive to longevity advice from qualified, respected scientists (I don’t do quacks).

Besides extending potential longevity, Sinclair also had this throw away remark: ‘You will look better.’ Well, I’m all for gilding the lily.

We have also roped our cat into fasting. He has put on a bit of weight and needs to lose it. On a recent visit to the vet, I learned that many cats have become diabetic due to lockdown, with their owners being around and feeding them more.

The cat’s not happy about it and he says the new sofa being delivered next week will get an uber-shredding. But as I said to my husband, ‘You can either have pristine furniture and carpets and no cats, or you can have cats and to hell with the furniture.’

Anyway, last night, just before we went to bed, the cat barrelled through the cat flap with a mouse in his jaws. I shouted at him to drop the mouse so I could put it back outside. But he was having none of it.

With a ‘Fuck you, I’m hungry,’ flick of his claws, he pinioned the mouse on the floor. There was no flinging against the skirting board, no prodding, no puncturing of fur and flesh with fang and claw. Instead, swiftly, deftly, he ripped off its head, devoured it and then crunched its body. The sound of the mouse’s ground bones was horrific. Only a small, pathetic, glistening heap of intestines remained for me to clean off the kitchen floor.

It’s all to do with hunger. The more hungry a cat is, the quicker he will kill and eat prey. If he has his food provided out of a can, he does not need to eat his prey. Instead of seeing the mouse as food, he treats the mouse as sport and indulges in a bit of idle-time torture.

So it’s one week into the fasting. So far I’ve noticed little difference in myself. However, the cat’s losing weight, the mice are no longer being tortured and the skirting boards are looking great.