I told you I would come back as a cat

Smell first, eat later. I love flowers.

Getting fat but I can still make this leap ... must focus, get in the zone ...

Worried I won't make the next jump...

Warming one paw over the radiator

This is how Yoshka spends most of the winter now. After eating she'll pop out and have a gossip with the other cats, hop up on the fence, then the shed roof, then next door's conservatory roof, then she'll saunter in, jump up onto my wife's desk where I have laid a blanket for her, and she'll settle down for a good 6 or 7 hours of nothing, really, but always with one paw on the window sill so that the heat from the radiator is trapped under her front leg. I guess it warms up her chest or whatever. My wife isn't too happy about losing a good portion of her desk real estate, but she's easy-going enough not to make a song and dance of it.

And that's it - totally boring, but Yoshka's happy. And you don't want to make a cat unhappy, that's for sure.

I can wait, believe me. You will not win.

What forces of hell have I unleashed outside my back door? How on earth do other cats get to know that occasionally, yes, I feed a stray? They're queuing up now from the moment I wake up to when I lay my little head down to rest. It's embarrassing - they're noisy, they squabble, they're very indiscreet.

But that still leaves my first question unanswered: how do they tell each other and why? Sign language? Yet I read that cats are so stupid they don't even have an IQ, they have an EQ, which quite frankly annoys me as I have often chatted to my cats thinking that we might be meeting on some conversational level, if not an obvious one. Here's one who thinks he'll kind of hang around hopefully outside my back door - it won't work. Well, it might .... cheeky sod.

Out? Are you mad? It's freezing out there!

Nice day to give my right claw a workout on your head

I want your dinner. It's fish. I'm a cat. Get it?

The Jealous Overseer

Yoshka spends a good deal of her day at this window, sticking her nosey little face out the window, watching to see if I am stroking any of the neighbourhood cats, sharing her food with them, making their lives comfortable on cushions on the bench in the garden. She is right to be suspicious - I am indeed doing this. I am far from being monogamous with my love for cats. Deal with it, babe!

The territory triangle

Just barely noticeable, this snap shows three cats, all respectfully keeping their distance, and you can draw an equi-whatsit triangle between all three.
None is in his or her own garden.
The white one on the bench in my garden is not mine, the black and white one in next door's garden to the right, lying on the slate path in the middle is mine and the one on the shed roof at the back on the left is Tigger, who used to live in the house where the one on the bench now lives, but moved next door instead.

They lead very complicated lives, don't they?

I have a dream

I have a dream. One day the owner of the lovely cat who visits my garden everyday, and who hangs around on the bench peacefully watching the world, will come to me and say "Look, I just can't look after him any more, and the dog is driving him crazy. Could you ..., I mean, would you mind...?"

Yoshka will look up at me and indicate her approval, and I'll nod my head to the woman and say "He's in good hands now. You may visit anytime you want."

Then with a guilt-free conscience I will open the back door for the first time to him, and he'll come in from the cold and make himself comfortable on a chair. I'll peek into the room later and find Yoshka curled up alongside him.

This is my dream. It's small, but it's mine.