Paws for thought ... Introducing Tess

This category (I have a few!) is about cats. Just my cats to start with, but I'm hoping others will join in. After all, cats seem to dominate Tik-Tok, youtube, Facebook, Instagram ... so everybody loves them, right?

I have 3 cats. One went missing a year ago, but I still think of him as one of the family - more about him later. I could post an avalanche of pictures of my cats - I have more photos of them than of my grandchildren - but I'm going to be a bit restrained, so I'll start with my first cat - well my first since I was 40 anyway. Perhaps I'll write about all the others one day, and about our monkey, but for now I'll stick to these three.

This is Tess and she came to us from Cats Protection in Bridgend when she was 7 years old.

She was a sweetheart from the start. But it wasn't long before I knew something was wrong. I had been told she'd been spayed, but just a few weeks in, tom-cats started to yowl at the back door, and jump on her when she went out. One day I came home and one of them was having his way with her on the kitchen floor. She didn't seem to mind ...

I took her to the vet, who said it sounded as if there was some of her uterus left inside after her operation - and a blood test confirmed she still had the hormones in her. So - she was spayed again. Poor little thing!

I bought her a bodysuit from the vets, the smallest they had, but she was so dainty that she could pull her legs inside it. Then all she could do was to roll around like a sausage with a head ...

I kept replacing it, but it was no good.

So I made her one, from a baby's bodysuit. In fact I made her several. I had some strange looks from the girls in Next when they asked how old the baby was and I said 7 ...

Tess soon recovered though, and learned to help around the house. With my sewing ...

... with some DIY ...

... and even some babysitting.

Since then, she's learned to use a laptop, ... ..

... to help me with my poetry,

... and even do some Maths

... although she gets easily bored .

Next week I'll tell you about Timmy, and how he came into our lives.