Tales of the cats

19/09/2024

Callie the cat appears precipitately from outside, jumping through the curtain onto the bed. The curtain, to the watching person's surprise, does not move.

24/05/2024

Callie follows the wheelchair on its way to the shop. When the wheelchair turns the corner she stops following and visits the people who live in the corner house. She always does follows and always stops there, much to the relief of the wheelchair driver, as that is a main road with trucks thundering down it all the time.

24/07/2023

Callie is relieved that she does not have to endure any herring gulls. She is now getting the proper amount of attention from the people and no birds approach to bite her suddenly. She is making up for the days she spent avoiding the monstrous visitor by spending extra time sprawled on one or other of the people's beds.

28/06/2023

Callie surveys the 5x6 foot cat toilet that the people have prepared on the lawn for her. She dislikes the four rose bush roots that the people have planted in the middle of the expanse and digs them out. There they lie, stone dead. She has also dug out some bulbs, which are quite happy to grow and flower just where she put them. The people are considering what to plant in that space. Perhaps some nepeta will meet with Callie's approval.

31/05/2023

The people love Callie, who seems to have recovered from her injury without visible sequelae.She is getting older, though, and takes her sleeps very seriously:

"I came, I saw, I conked" should be her new motto.

13/05/2023

13/05/2023

Callie the cat is now back to the correct number of holes. She developed two extra holes in February, one on her flank that grew to about an inch in diameter and a spare bumhole that luckily didn't pe*****te her innards. We think she got bitten by an animal. She was in agony and feverish, she then got an antibiotic injection and kitty paracetamol syrup for a week, and to her fury was kept indoors while the painkiller was in her system. Long after the trauma she was looking dreadful, but now there's no mark.

04/12/2022

Callie at 9 years old is not as sprightly as she used to be. The winter days are chilly and she has discovered a nice place in a drawer to sleep. The people found her after searching for some time and spread a towel over the bedclothes, but she moved it aside so she could lie on the duvet cover.

29/09/2022

Callie jumps off the bed and growls furiously through the window, her hair raised in anger. The people close the window and peer out into the moonlight, while Callie buzzes steadily at the glass. Eventually the people detect the interloper, a black cat sitting below the window and staring up at Callie. Now the people know why the neighbours thought Callie had lost her collar.

14/07/2022

Callie keeps an eye on the people as they open a new, unsullied tin of mince, ostentatiously remove a spoonful and put it in a clean dish in front of her suspicious stare. Having ascertained that there are no pills crushed into the mince, she tucks in.

13/07/2022

Callie is disgusted with the people because they have tried to give her pills. She scratched one of the people, jumped through the window and stalked past the other person, pointedly ignoring her. The people, while they sympathise with Callie, still think the medicine is a good idea, but these attempts have been going on for almost a week now.

27/04/2022

The people are sad because Basket and Bunty have been killed. An animal came through a hole in the fence and took them from their box. It took Bunty, the black silkie, away, and left Basket's body near the hole in the fence.

Now there are no more silkies to help the people with their gardening, to gobble up the slugs, to scratch in the flowerbeds, to make an egg or two a day or to fertilize the lawn liberally. The people can remove the little fences protecting the rockery, right the swing seat and clean up the decking. They are bereft.

18/04/2022

Poor little Squash the silkie bantam has vanished. The people think she was taken on Saturday night, perhaps by an owl. It was a full moon and cloudless, so she might have got out of bed thinking it was day. She made no sound and left no signs of a struggle. There was a noise which woke one of the people and Callie, but that was the sound of something landing on Callie's rickety table outside the window, and Callie and the awakened person peered out for a few minutes and saw nothing. Callie went outside because she knew something was up, but the person went back to sleep without suspecting anything.

In the morning the people rushed off to their all-day appointment and only realized that one of the birds was missing when evening came, time to tuck the birds into bed, and Squash was nowhere to be found and Basket and Bunty were upset and nervous. At that point the people realized that nobody had seen Squash all day, she hadn't come for breakfast and in the afternoon when one of the people briefly rushed out to fetch a bucket, they had ignored Basket's plaintive clucking and not seen the other two at all.

The people do not think it was a fox or marauding cat that took Squash, they think it was whatever made the noise on Callie's table, and Callie's reaction to that had been puzzlement, not annoyance, and they also do not think it was a fox, because they have never seen a fox in this neighborhood. Whatever it was, Squash is gone now and the people are sad.

10/04/2022

Callie has shucked off her collar and is wandering around the garden stark naked. The people already miss her little tinkling whenever they call her - or rather, on the occasions when she comes instead of looking away. She does have a microchip, but the people know that she looks just like any other black cat and should rather be visibly marked as having a home. But she is rather choosy about what she wears and will quickly remove any collar she does not like.