Cats...

No, not the musical. Which I've never seen, though I loved Old Possum's Book of Cats and used to know a couple of the poems off by heart - Skimbleshanks the railway cat was my favourite, followed by the Jellicle cats.

I was making a card to share this week using a lovely Siamese cat image from Art Neko, and it prompted me to dig out a couple of old memories - and photos.

As a family, we always had cats, usually three at any given time. Many were rescues, but we had a couple of more pedigree ones, and one was indeed a Siamese; Pandora. It has to be said that of all our cats she was the least likeable in terms of personality, and most like what non-cat people think of as typically feline, selfish and self-contained. But - she did love travelling in the car and consequently came on a few family holidays with us, so here's a photo of me, aged about 8 or 9, up in Donegal, the north-west corner of the country.

My own cat, whom I had from when I was about four or five till - well, she stayed at home longer than I did and lived on till after I was married, was also more pedigree than most - a Siamese-Burmese. And she was a sweetheart. My mother said that when I was very small, she always knew when I had gone to sleep because that was when Andy would join the rest of the family downstairs until they went to bed and then she'd return to my room. At one stage my mother thought she wasn't doing my bronchitis any good and tried banning her from the bedroom, but after a couple of nights when she kept everybody awake throwing herself against my door and crying, the ban was revoked. When a car hit her and broke her back leg she still insisted on sleeping on the bed, and after a couple of years recovery time was soon back ratting again. She was a devoted mother - no rats for her kittens, she managed to catch and bring rabbits back to the house a couple of times while they were still little.

Brambles was a much later addition to the family, well after I had left home. His owners were moving, and my parents took him in. He'd previously been a 100% indoor cat, and for a couple of months he lived on his own in an upstairs room while he acclimatised to the idea of living with other cats - and a dog. But as you can see from the photo below, he took very happily to spending time outdoors in the sunshine.

The card was made very simply, I inked the image with markers and huffed before stamping. A lovely line image like that doesn't need much!