Misty and the snow globe...

Holly got a text from Goronwy our friendly Welsh farmer this week offering us a new kitten, a three coloured long-haired female - ginger, white and brown.

For a moment I almost said yes. I'm longing to have a cat around the house again; even it it is of the time-consuming, hairs-all-over-the-furniture, hair-ball throwing variety. I feel that life isn’t complete without a feline friend.

Then I thought about Misty, and as I remembered her I knew that it still wasn’t time. Besides I’m trying to sort my life out, simplify it - and having a young kitten around, whilst exciting, fun and guaranteed to make you go ‘ahhhhhh’ in a gooey, sticky, silly, voice at least a dozen times a day is hardly a life-sorting simplification.

Having a kitten around can be very complicated. Firstly there’s the litter training. Misty learnt this in hours thank Mu-Mu, but she was a quick learner. It can take months, years even - and then there’s the kitten games of hide-and-seek, run-up-the-curtains, shred-the-furniture, get-stuck-behind-the-radiator to put up with.

Kitten’s love to run away and hide, either in play or true scaredy-cat scaredyness - and in a big house it can be really hissing hard to hissing find them a-hissing-gain.

At first, during the night, we'd keep Misty contained in the kitchen where she could 'come to no harm', but despite this sensible and well thought through plan of action she still (as you may remember) managed to get into the sub-cellar under the kitchen floor resulting in me practically demolishing the house to get her out again.

And let’s not forget the stress and trepidation that comes with ‘first time out of the house’. It’s the stuff of nail-biting, nerve-wrecking, hand-trembling nightmare. We waited for three months before we’d gathered enough courage to let Misty out for that first time, and even then it was only for five minutes. It was extremely tense during those first few weeks as we waited and watched for her to come back home. She always did eventually, although sometimes we’d have to spend hours calling her name and tempting her with treaties in the pitch black, freezing, night only to find that she'd slipped inside hours earlier and was curled-up asleep in front of the fire.

Yes kittens tend to complicate, not simplify.

And of course then there was that final Friday; the one that I still haven’t written about yet.

So, no - thanks for the offer Goronwy but no new cat just yet. Even though I long to stroke, feed, talk cat-talk with, and write about his or her wonderful life - because it would be wonderful, I'd see to that.

I bought this cat snow globe on holiday in Exmouth in Devon about twenty years ago. I’ve never seen one like it since and until recently I never felt the need to give the cat inside the glass globe world a name.

This is Misty - she’s the only cat I have these days.