MEET THE CATS
Another Fat Summer
Every year – well, every week if we’re honest – the same promise is made: I shall burst forth from my tomb of stodge and unveil the radiant truth of my body, long concealed inside this frumpy, fat swollen avatar...
Every year – well, every week if we’re honest – the same promise is made: I shall burst forth from my tomb of stodge and unveil the radiant truth of my body, long concealed inside this frumpy, fat swollen avatar.
She signs up for "Hot Yoga for Hot Cats" but spends most of the class pretending she's in savasana while secretly eating a family-sized bag of Dreamies from her gym bag. Gave herself repetitive strain by doing that old school drill – palms pressed together, elbows flapping – chanting, "I must, I must improve my bust" for half an hour straight. The only thing that grew was her wrist pain and her disappointment.
Then she tried the juice cleanse – until she realised gin counts as a liquid. Her stint with intermittent fasting collapsed the moment she saw an all-you-can-eat prawn buffet, interpreting the "intermittent" to mean every 15 minutes.
She swears by the power of the mind now – weight-loss subliminals on repeat, promises of a thinner, shinier her. But she can't stay on track: one minute it's weight loss, then motivation, next it's heal your inner child, fix your finances, unlock your inner goddess. By the time they finish, she's already through half a cheesecake, nodding along like it was all part of the plan. She even bought a treadmill, but uses it solely as a catwalk for trying on swimwear and rehearsing her slow-mo Baywatch runs.
So here she is again – Another Fat Summer. The scales may have mocked her, the treadmills may have buckled, but she refuses to surrender. Bloated and cranky and on her fifth piña colada, her ducky rubber ring firmly wedged into position, engineered for maximum deflection and dramatic poolside intimidation. It wobbles like a force field of denial, ready to be weaponised at a moment's notice – one sharp bounce and it will flatten any fool who dares comment on her summer body.
It all began in the summer of 2003, after hearing that song. From that moment on, she was hooked – playing it on an endless loop until every beat, every line, was stitched into her whiskers. Then one night, mid-chorus, it hit her like a divine revelation. This wasn't just a track. It was a prophecy. A calling – her calling. Her destiny was clear. She was to become the milkshake, to spread its frothy gospel to the world. All shall shake, all shall slurp, all shall worship.
Read moreThe Gospel of Kelis
Neurotic Cature
A life of being blessed by the gods of glitter. She had everything: endless Cristal, feather boas made from endangered parrots. She never queued, never had to drink house wine. From Monaco to Dubai, her life was a carousel of sequins, velvet ropes and tomcats called Jean-Luc. Floating from soirée to soirée, the toast of every charity gala (despite never giving a penny). But sometimes, beneath the chandeliers and fake eyelashes, slumped over her fourth bottle of Crappy Cliquot, she realises: she has everything, yet absolutely nothing.
Read moreBored and Bougie
No one remembered when she started, but she prowled the Vogue offices as if she owned them. She wore several shades of leopard at once, named her handbags after Russian ballerinas, and claimed her mood boards had been "shortlisted for the Turner Prize, spiritually speaking."
Read moreShe started out as Mauricio Lou Fandango, with a jawline like a car crash and dreams louder than her wardrobe. She came up through the glamour circuit, dazzling judges with her fire-breathing baton act and suspiciously strong biceps.
Read moreHello Boys
She didn't know how long she'd been out of it, but she woke up face down in a tangle of prickly bushes by the railway tracks, wrapped in brambles, crisp packets and regret. Birds had moved in and built nests. One had passed out and become lodged in her hair like a spiritual adornment from Claire's Accessories – and that's when it happened. Through the hangover, through the thorns, through the faint smell of Strongbow Dark Fruits destiny...
Read moreAmy Fleabag
Just Call Me Kitty
She clawed her way into Fosse’s inner circle with nothing more than a feather boa, fake résumé and limitless cat-sass...
She clawed her way into Fosse’s inner circle with nothing more than a feather boa, fake résumé and limitless cat-sass. For three weeks she was ‘IT’...... smoking in rehearsals, seducing understudies, hissing at the lighting crew.
Her Fosse posture was legendary – hat tipped like a dodgy poker dealer, fingers splayed as if mid-jazz-hands exorcism and pelvic punctuation so aggressive it required subtitles.
Fosse called her a raw, unstable genius.
She then improvised one too many pelvic thrusts, slapped a producer with her tail, and allegedly urinated in Verdon’s tap shoes.
She was found in a sequinned heap behind The Latin Quarter muttering, “I WAS the razzle dazzle.”
Now she lives off memories, marinated olives and OnlyFans subscribers with a kink for fish......but she still wakes up every morning to ‘All That Jazz’ screaming, 5-6-7......ME!
Botox Betty
She was once the scandal of the oceans — Botox Betty: smooth of face, hard of heart. A feared plunderer of ports and pillager of pearl necklaces. Along with her nearly-naught gang of talent-show hopefuls, who never quite made it out of the holding room, she raided ships — not for treasure, but for vanity cases, mirrors and anything that looked vaguely sequinned.
Her bougie plunder was always fabulous and legendary within the shallowest of circles — those that confused shine with substance.
Her downfall came during "The Great Mascara Shortage of '88", when she led a disastrous raid on a Korean cosmetics schooner that turned out to be armed with cannons and superior eyeliner. The battle was fierce. Amid the chaos, her crew legged it without hesitation, vanishing into smoke, sequins and self-preservation. During the mutiny, she tripped over her own feather boa and fell into a vat of sequinned fishnet decorations.
She stumbled out hours later with a glittering fishtail, striking poses as though nothing had happened...
But with her crew gone, the weary Korean captain took one look at her and decided that the only fitting response to such a newly acquired accoutrement was to toss her straight overboard.
Adrift and alone, with nothing but a cracked mirror and half a bottle of rum, she dragged herself into a giant clamshell and, in true diva fashion, was reborn. She declared the shell her stage and became the undisputed queen of clamshell cabaret.
Now she belts out soggy renditions of Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On. Her audience consists mainly of drunken conga eels and the occasional sailor who mistakes her for a lighthouse.
She tells anyone who'll listen that she chose art over piracy — yet sometimes, just sometimes, when the moon is bright and the rum runs dry, she still dreams of plunder, pearls and the smell of gunpowder.
Here Comes Bubbles!
Bubbles and her sister were born slightly conjoined — fused at the hip, with a tendency to hiccup every time someone said "Bingo." When the surgeons finally separated them, Bubbles immediately declared herself the winner — "the glamorous one." Her sister, by default, became "the other one."
Bubbles became a full-time party girl, storming sticky dance floors from Wigan to Wolverhampton in a haze of animal print and eyeliner thicker than electrician's tape. Her sister was dragged along as the unwilling stooge — the grey backdrop that made Bubbles' sparkle shine even brighter.
The act worked: one loud, one quiet, both unforgettable... although only one was thriving on the attention.
Then one night, the act came to an abrupt end.
An evangelical sect calling themselves The Church of the Litter Tray Saints arrived — a travelling mash-up of hymn sheets and pyramid-scheme salvation — handing out leaflets promising eternal life and free air fryers.
Before the raffle had even begun, her twin disappeared in a puff of salvation, scrubbed clean of all sins against fashion and swallowed whole by scripture. Wiping off her eyeliner, she announced she'd found the road to paradise.
Bubbles replied that it looked suspiciously like the No. 47 bus to Grimsby Fish Market.
Bubbles never forgave her sister for daring to step out of line. She had dressed her, painted her, controlled her — and this was the thanks she got.
She carried on alone for a while, but it was never quite the same. Eventually she gave up the party circuit and can now be found haunting the middle aisles of Aldi.
To everyone else she's a wreck in leopard print.
To Bubbles, the show simply goes on.
Her sister returned once, eyes blazing with holy fire and pamphlets in paw, begging Bubbles to follow her into the light so they could be twins again for eternity.
Bubbles blew a bubblegum bubble the size of a melon, let it burst in her sister's face, snapped her fishnets and snarled,
"If paradise doesn't have a Dorothy Perkins, I'm not interested."
The offer of salvation was politely declined.
Her sister marched back to God.
Bubbles strutted straight to the half-price sale at Poundland.
She started out as a hostess in a cocktail bar — tray in paw, sequins catching the light, her smile wide enough to distract from the fact that she was drinking the daiquiris before they even reached the table.
The Flamingo Lounge loved her chaos at first — and she loved the attention, the glamour and the ever-flowing cocktails. She was the glitter-and-alcohol-soaked darling of the bar, able to balance a tray of gin slings in one paw while knocking back her own glass and winking at the saxophonist.
By the end of her shift, she would be slurring drink orders in broken French, perched on the piano and serenading tipsy businessmen with Shirley Bassey classics. She set her hair extensions on fire while leaning over candles and once served an empty glass because she had needed to “drink the sadness out of it.”
She was the scandal of the lounge, and the regulars loved her.
Eventually, the cocktails stopped being part of her job and became her whole personality.
Then came the mirror…
One night, in a vodka-fuelled stupor, she hurled a rhinestone stiletto at her reflection for looking at her strangely. The glass splintered and, like Tennyson’s cursed lady, the crack became her undoing.
The following evening, she went a step too far. In a fit of misguided showmanship, she attempted to juggle three bottles of Moët across the dance floor while the pianist struck up Big Spender. Two shattered on the marble. The third she caught triumphantly — only to drink it straight from the bottle before collapsing into a fountain of champagne and broken glass directly in front of Big Louie Spumante’s 50th birthday party, sparklers smouldering in the cake and his fourth wife frozen mid-toast.
Management had no choice. The toast of the bar had become a cautionary tale.
She swears it was the mirror that stole her luck, though in truth, the only curse was the bottle.
Once, she was the toast of the bar. Now she is the ghost of a glittering act, trapped with the reflection that broke her.
MEET THE CATS
Crappy Cats posters are an A3 sized professionally printed digital posters on 300gsm matt white board.
The print is a faithful reproduction of a mixed media/ digital drawing-collage.
The print can be framed or simply hung from a bulldog clip if you so wished.
Print dimensions: 41.5 x 29.5cm approx (including border).
Image dimensions: 40 x 28.5cm approx (without border).
Each picture is signed and will be carefully packaged in a bio-degradable bag, backed with a piece of sturdy 100% recycled card.
Printed in the UK.
Care advice: Please do not display printed artwork in direct sunlight or damp conditions.
Please note that every care has been taken when photographing this for your perusal, however, there may be a slight difference in colour due to your screen setting.
*When you have completed your purchase, please check your spam folder if you haven't received an order confirmation email.
I would be ever so grateful if you could let me know when your parcel arrives.
Please note that the framed print image is for mock-up purposes only.
