The Cats of Conjury Nook

The Cat and the Moon by W.B.Yeats

Please skip this page if you aren't dotty about cats. I do like dogs as well, but feel it isn't fair to keep one, since I work full-time. If you're a cat-owner, you already know what intensely individual and eccentric characters they are. At the moment, you'll find five cats at Conjury Nook.

 

• Cally

  also known as Caliban, because she's such a monster. She's a calico cat, a patchwork of white, orange and black, and was born in 1988, which makes her almost 13 now. She's a tiny little thing and weighs hardly anything but, now that she's senior cat, she rules over all the others with an iron paw. She has a tiny head, earning her the nickname 'Ratbrain', half of which is black and half ginger - I'm sure that all her evil thoughts come out of the black half! She was an absolute hooligan of a kitten, keeping me awake for the first three months of her life, and also a teenage mother, producing a litter of three kittens before I could have her spayed. I kept the kittens and still have two, her daughters Pit and Dread.

  
  
  
• Pit

  is twelve years old and mainly white with black splodges. When she was small it looked as if someone had dipped the fingers of one hand in black paint and marked her back. She loves visitors and makes a big fuss of them. She has white ears and, as she loves to sunbathe, they get sunburnt in the summer.

  
• Dread
  is also twelve, a big roly-poly calico cat with a pale ginger tip to her tail, like a powder-puff. As a kitten she was known as the Nameless Dread, and the name stuck. Her latest nickname is Purry-Furry-Nose and, like Ozzy, she likes to sit on the laundry rack, while I quake in fear and expect the lot to come tumbling down!
  
• Mojo
  came from my friend in Berkshire. On the drive home she crawled out through the bars of the basket and had to spend the rest of the journey curled up in my lap, which made it really difficult to change gear! Her nick-name is Missy Long- Tail, which like everything else about her is long and slender - if she was a person, she'd be a supermodel! She's seven years old, tabby and white and, like her mother Angelica, considers that a day without killing something is a day wasted. Her favourite trick is to bring live frogs from the neighbour's pond into my kitchen. She can't bear to be told off and will swear at you if you use the 'N' word - no.
   
• Ozzy
  is six years old. He came from the Cat Protection League, with his brother Iggy, and is a very nervous little cat. His full name is Ozymandias, taken from the poem by Coleridge - "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look upon my works, you mighty, and despair!" He's a small tabby cat, "with tiger stripes and leopard spots" and he hasn't got a purr. He likes to sleep in high places. The laundry rack over the bath and the top of my word-processor monitor (why don't they make them flat, so a cat doesn't roll off?) are two favourites, or he curls up at my feet, on my slippers.
  Sadly, Iggy was run over in February 1999.

You may wish to visit the page dedicated to the memory of some of my previous cats - wonderful characters all!