Raining today again!

My dear cat Pangur Ban died two weeks ago today. He was a birman. My friend Anne gave him to me when he was 6 weeks old. He had a hernia and said we should call him Hernie! Not a name for such a very posh cat, no. Pangur Ban it had to be. That was 1993.He used to come camping with us and he visited Exeter too. The children thought it was very funny that we had the kitten in our bedroom.

Pangur turned out to be a nurse cat. I realised it when I had pressures on me and I would get tired and not have the sense to rest. Pangur would become agitated and run from me and up and down the stairs until I had to see what he wanted. Then he stood at the top of the stairs. When I got there he kept leaping up on the bed and coming back to the landing. When I got to the bed he began to purr and I would realisehe was trying to make me lie down. He would sit on my chest for a minute and then go and sit behind the door. He did that quite a bit even in recent months. He knew when I needed a rest and I did not and do not yet know!

Pangur was the first pet ever I had. I was used to cats on the farm in Ireland and we did spoil them but they were more farm cats and they did not like being with us too much in case they would miss the wonderful night life that cats are renowned to have in the farming world. When I married Stuart, a story for another day, I inherited the care of Nipper, the cat belonging to Stuart's late mother. A ginger tom, well named. He had joined in the grief of husband and son and was hard to please when it came to people. It took me two years to get him to allow me to groom him. No matter how hard I tried, he resisted my advances until I stopped trying and after that I could not get him off my lap. Our house became the place where whoever was holding the cat could not be expected to do anything else! Gradually the two men caught on to this and I ended up making the tea from time to time. He teamed up with Monty stephens who called for him every morning and off the two would go on patrol returning for a late breakfast and a rest before the second patrol when Monty arrived and waited patiently for Nipper to get ready.

Pangur was topcat in the house and in Poltisko Terrace. He did not team up with any of the other cats although I saw him training Harry Potter one day when Harry was about a couple of months old. It would not surprise me to see him emege as topcat one of these days. KJenny Dreoilin is here with me, now 10 years old. She is Stuart's cat. She does not know what to make of all this change. She is lovely and keeps a close eye on me. She loves company and talks all of the time.