I was a cat with a manicure

For a short period late last year till earlier this year, all my front claws were coloured green and red - in keeping with the Christmas season.

Don't laugh. I've had enough laughter at my expense already, from my human as well as her friends who came to visit. It seemed highly amusing to them to see my coloured claws.

No nail polish was involved. The "manicure", courtesy of Softpaws, actually involves my wearing vinyl nail caps, all in the name of limiting my destruction of my human's furniture. [You can just make out the green tips on my front paws in the picture above. The nail caps were red with green tips.]

My human learned about Softpaws online and ordered two sets - one in green and red for the Christmas season and the other in her favourite colour, purple - on discovering that I had begun to destroy her new furniture. [As you may figure out, they didn't quite work, which is why she still ended having to give me up to Auntie S.]

After the Softpaws arrived in the mail, she eagerly tore open the packaging, read the instructions, and then summoned me. OK, I fell for it. She shook my can of snacks and I came running. Call me a sucker.

She held me down, trimmed each of my front claws slightly, stopping to give me a crunchy snack every few minutes. Then I watched as she put glue - yes, glue - into each nail cap before gingerly attaching it to each of my 10 front claws. My rear claws were left untouched because I don't use them for destroying her furniture.

When she was done with all 10, she gave me a few more of those crunchy snacks after checking that the glue had taken hold.

It felt weird and smelled weirder. I took a few tentative steps, treading gingerly, all the while feeling something on my claws that weren't part of my anatomy.

I licked them and then used my teeth to try yanking them off, but it was no use. It was something I was going to have to get used to, I guess.

I did get used to them. They weren't supposed to stop me doing my usual cat thing, like scrabbling about in the litter tray, or even stropping. The difference was that when I scratched any of her furniture, it didn't leave any puncture marks.

It seemed to be a solution, right? Well, not completely.

She was supposed to have checked my claws periodically to see if any of the nail caps needed replacing - and they would need replacing, either because I had succeeded in biting them off, or because she hadn't applied enough glue, or simply because my claws had grown out. When claw falls, nail cap falls with it.

So yes, this meant that if she weren't vigilant enough, I could still do damage with the odd exposed claw here and there. This is why, although Softpaws is a good product, it wasn't a water-tight solution.

Since moving in with Auntie S, my nails have grown out and all the nail caps have fallen off. Sigh. If I had a choice between wearing those ridiculous coloured nail caps [and staying on with my human] and doing without them while staying with these 22 cats in Auntie S's home, I'd go with the manicured look.

It is a small-scale change that I could live with. Now, I have to get used to a whole new environment, which is pretty tough. You know how we cats are such creatures of habit.