It's Minty, not bah humbug.

There's never enough cats, so we got another one. Ladies and Gentlemen (and all other genders obviously) meet MINTY!

I'm happy, honestly.

We travelled over to Rhyl to meet her, packing many cat treats for the many cats that we were to encounter, and a carry case, on the off chance that we would be coming home with her.

Cheryl and Jade are lovely people, and totally dote on their various cats and dogs, and Indy the man hating parrot, who started to shriek at me the second I said hello to him. Some parrots just want to watch the world burn. We were assailed by tiny grey kitten that demanded fuss, by their dear three legged cat, and then a little black and white ball of fuzz was bought over to meet us. The ball unfurled to reveal possibly one of the smallest, saddest looking adult cats I have ever seen. It made my heart cry a little bit to see how minute she was. She  is about the size of a nine month old kitten. She is three. She came over for some meaty treaties, and calmly and politely devoured them. She then scuttled away and hid under a table, watching warily with those achingly sad eyes. She was very very shy, and a bit jumpy, but clearly curious. Eventually she pottered over and had a fuss and climbed on us a bit. The humans sat around and chatted for a bit, watching various cats slink about, and admiring the new secured garden, upon opening the window to the garden a tsunami of cats flooded in. Big ones, small ones, ginger ones, calicos, black cats. Cats cats cats! Cat heaven! They mobbed the hell out of us for treats and fusses, and even put on a gladiatorial exhibition for us. A sea of twirling happy fur washed about our ankles, chirruping and meowing.
Eventually it came time to leave, and we decided that minty really needed to come home with us.
It was quite emotional for Cheryl and Jade, both of whom had something in their eyes. They've put a lot of love into this cat. There is something special about her.

I dribble.

She fell asleep with her head in my hand on the way home, and dribbled on it.

She is really really small, I shall measure her at some point. She weighs virtually nothing, and has extremely short legs and very big ears. She also has massive paws. Prevailing thought is that she has been seriously malnourished since an early age, and it has stunted her growth.

If you look at her from behind, the black markings on her legs form a little heart.

Her eyes look sad because she has had a prior infection that has left them droopy. She is also recovering from keratitis, but is mending well.

When she was spayed, the vet found her uterus was really big, indicating she had several litters of kittens, and when she was rescued she still had big nipples from feeding the little ones.

Someone out there has been a shit human to this cat. I'm glad I don't work for the RSPCA or cats protection, because arson and being all stabbity is frowned upon.

She's settling in well, and does love laps, which is awesome. The others have reacted with varying degrees of interest. 

Winter keeps trying to play with her, but for once is being good and backing off when she gets scared.

Shoe just hisses and growls. To be fair she does that to all the others anyway.

PC varies between staring like a fuzzy owl, and doing an impression of a theramin. She is a weirdo.

Splatto is just breezing about like a wafty tube cat, occasionally doing the parroty curious neck thing, but being pretty chill.

In other news, the broken boiler is fixed, so now our house won't smell like an oil refinery anymore. This pleases us. Winter had been checking to see if the radiators work. apparently they do, because he stayed close to one for so long that his bones melted, and he became cat rope.

Go on without me, I'll be fine!

If you want to follow Minty and her sad eyed musings (mewsings?) she has a facebook page. She insisted she needed one, I don't know why, as she can't read.

Minty's page.

Food tester feline and television cat.

Life is back to its regular schedule now. Except we had snow! Great flakes blowing about, and clinging to everything, little birdies sitting in the trees looking very unimpressed and waiting for me to refill the feeders, schools closed, buses running slowly! Armageddon! Snowpocalypse!

Went to sleep in Wales, woke up in Skyrim.

I plowed through it on my way to work, striding against the wind as the mighty snow reached over the soles of my boots. Yup, you guessed it, Britain was bought to its knees by about an inch of the white menace. It wasn't even there by home time, having melted as people looked at it. Those of you who are reading this in the USA, and Russian Federation - or pretty much anywhere that has ever had snow - please feel free to mock us on the total panic that ensues every winter. Its bloody silly, so it is.

All this cold has meant that the cats have mostly been staying in. Cats all staying in one place leads to trouble. Winter is pretty good with his hoomins, but he is, to be blunt, an absolute douchebag to other cats, with the exception of splatto. It's not that he is nasty, he just wants to play. he does seem to forget that the others are delicate small girl cats, and don't want to have the cat equivalent of playing under 21's rugby with him. He's small, but very muscular. Dense you might say. So he's been hurtling about, in between melting into a semi solid on top of the radiator, impressing them with his acrobatics, and his ability to knock them over.

Winter "Playyyyyyyy with meeeeee!" (complete with doppler effect, as he is moving at nigh light speed)

Splatto " HAHA! OK! Wait......OOOOF!" (as The douche cannons into her sending them both flopping all over the place)

Shoe and PC wait on lofty perches, gently doing stretches and waiting to paff his lordship in the face if he tries anything.

Why they no play? Fine, I shall sit upon this bag of rubbish!

Meanwhile Shoe has been perfecting her thieving skills. She has a twirly villainous moustache, so it is fitting for her to be a master moocher. Now she needs a lacy eyemask like a lady highwaycat. Her main target is teabags. Yes. Teabags. Ruth reported this shennanigan a couple of weeks ago, and I thought it was a one off, a bit like when PC dragged half a loaf of bread into the living room to indicate she was hungry, but no! Shoe is a pathological thief of tea, (a proper tea leaf, as they would say in London). She is brazen, and doesn't even have the good grace to give us the thin eye, or look guilty. I have video evidence, captured at great peril.

Evidence of larceny

The little sod has been trying it with other things too. She nabbed a slice of cheese (win), has attempted to steal some ginger bread (fail), baked beans (soggy footed fail), and stuck her paw in Ruth's ready brek porridge. That left her looking freaked out at why the hoomin was eating dust.

PC has decided she is a window, or something. She's taken to sitting on the sound bar, and leaning against the tv because it is warm. This has made subtitles difficult to read, and a lot of the orphan black and  vikings characters have been replaced with her fuzzy owly face.

I am a viking.

I am a viking


stay warm and safe folks!

The living and the dead, not the living dead.

We have been on a bit of a holiday/visit with my parents in that there London, city of a million smells. Mum and dad were most pleased to see us both, as due to crap mental health and poverty, we have not been down in many a long year.
Spent the evening chatting, and then went to bed early as the road trip had been tiring, for Ruth because she was driving, and for me because......actually I have no reason to be tired in cars as I just fall asleep like a toddler after about twenty minutes.
A pleasant yet wet day dawned on saturday, and we went shopping in Dartford. There were ducks to look at, and the place had a nice community feel to it. Been years since I went to a proper London market, all the smells, and stall holders yelling their wares "APPLES EIGHTY PEE A PAAAAAAAAAND" "GIT YER FISH! FRESH 'ADDOCK, LUVERLY".
The evening was spent showing how clever we all were by answering questions on various quiz shows. It was a day that took me back to my childhood.
Sunday.
Sunday was the day when the family descended. Both brother, both sisters in law, and five kids. I fell asleep in the conservatory, only to be woken by my brother Daniel, waving yellow fruit at me, and yelling "Banana penis!". He's forty two. He's also an idiot.

Like I said. He's an idiot.

He grabbed a guitar (despite being a total fool, he is an excellent guitarist) and we did some soft rock, and Seth Lakeman songs, which was lovely.

I got to meet my nephews. Joshua, who is as tall as me now, and like a typical teen, had his headphones on, and was watching videos of other people playing computer games, but he smiled and nodded in recognition, Michael, who is a small sandy haired power house, and Jake who is tiny, and hit me in the head with some lego as a greeting.

Bother two, Stewart, arrived with his family a bit later. His lovely wife Claire was all smiles as usual, and Lilly, their daughter was instantly a whirlwind with michael. She's a charming pixie child, and has the charming wiles of a Bene Gesserit matron mother.

The youngest, louie, sat and stared owlishly around, occasionally wiggling. He cried when I picked him up.

I ended up playing under the dining room table with the rest of the kids.

from left, Joshua, Louie, Michael, Lilly, Jake. They look calm now.

Lilly and Louie seemed to really like Ruth.

Much fun, and wiggling.

It was a very loud experience, but so good to catch up. Mum insisted on a photo of her three idiot offspring. the only problem was as soon as we sat next to each other, I pinched Daniels nipple, and Daniel punched Stewart in the nuts.

Brothers never change.

See how Stewart is protecting himself.
And yes, that is a stuffed toy dog on my shoulder. He's called mister woof.

We slept well.

Monday was adventure day. Highgate cemetery beckoned ( figuratively speaking, neither Ruth or myself are dead). We hopped aboard the train, and to our surprise, didn't need tickets! We could pay with contactless! Truly we are living in the future.

The journey was pretty easy, and with a small help from google we made it just in time for our tour.

Highgate west gatehouse.

Highgate west cemetery is gorgeous. Over the years self seeding trees have gradually reclaimed what was once a swathe of grass, transforming the area into a liminal place of dappled shade, with headstones and tombs rising from their midst like so many mayan ruins. The sounds of the city fade away, leaving bird song, rustling leaves, and the squeak and patter of squirrels.

Beautiful decay.

The group went around the cemetery, with a most informative and helpful guide, who told us stories and information about some of the people who now resided beneath us. The was the victorian soldier, whose tomb was shaped like the peninsula he fought upon. The resting place of dissident Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by the kgb. The first plot to be filled, not by a rich noble, but by a common woman called Elisabeth, whose husband had her interred there so the grave wouldn't get robbed, like his daughters had. The famous british prize fighter who forever lays beneath the effigy of his favourite dog. The ruthless menagerist and self publicist whose last resting place is under a sleepy lion. The man who had the largest horse slaughter business of his day. So many lives past, so many fascinating insights into our history.

plot 1 Highgate west.

The catacombs, beautiful but sobering.

The circle of Lebanon, not actually in Lebanon.
There's a lebanon tree in the middle.

The Egyptian avenue. Flashy Victorians were flashy.

There are rare bats and spiders in the catacombs, and as we made our way around the bats flitted about us, clearly not pleased at strangers trudging through their house. We didn't see the spiders. So that's good.

There were an amazing array of people around us, all gently returning to the soil together, from father of electricity Michael Faraday, to the sad grave of some unnamed teenage prostitutes. 

He would be shocked at the size of his gravestone.

The empty patch is the last resting place of some victorian child prostitutes.

It was a long walk round, and my gammy knee was playing up, so we went for lunch. 

After a suitably delicious repast it was time to visit the east cemetery. But that is another post.