Spot the Cat

I was just over at Breezy's blog and her post about her animals brought to mind a much loved member of our menagerie who passed away many years ago now. A cat called Spot, mainly because she didn't have any!! I know, it's a weird name, but that's kind of how it happens around here. Spot was completely white and, we think wild.
One pre-children summer on a last minute whim we took a week's holiday on an old narrow boat up the Thames from Shepperton almost all the way up to Oxford. We took my husband's younger brother with us. It rained almost the entire week, but we had a really good laugh along the way. It was an old working barge with the tiller out in the open air and therefore someone always had to be at the tiller standing out in the rain. Guess who we made stand out there?!
En route we visited my husband's aunt and uncle who lived in Wallingford out in the countryside. Whilst there they told us about the kittens who had been born a few weeks earlier and how they worried about one in particular who they thought might be deaf and they lived next to a busy road. And so Spot entered our lives. Even though she was a "wild" cat, being deaf made her strangely much braver and more friendly than her brothers and sisters and she was very happy to join in our boating trip and come home with us. Little did we know what we had let ourselves in for.
We brought her back to Addlestone and into the life of our other cats, Doilly and Turnip. Doilly was an extremely aloof cat who spent her entire time with us trying to be adopted into another family and actually did eventually succeed!! But Turnip was more like a dog than a cat in personality and behaviour, followed us everywhere, walked down the road and waited for us to come home, very loving. Then much to his disgust we brought home Spot, who just wanted to be Turnip's best friend. Spot took to following Turnip like a shadow. We used to have a taller than average fridge, and Turnip spent a lot of time up there because there was no way Spot to could attain such heights. Eventually Turnip learned to tolerate the imposter and they would be like bookends, Turnip one end of the sofa, and yes, there a respectful distance away would be his white shadow.
Unfortunately as Spot got older, she got more neurotic due to the deafness, and when anyone came to the house, she took herself off to hide in the airing cupboard - did I mentioned she was hairy and white!!
She also loved to just sit on the window sill and watch the world go by so if you came home and she was dozing, you had to tap on the sill to let her know you were there so she would not freak out.
Turnip came to a terrible end on the railway line - but that is another post however Spot remained with us and eventually with my in-laws for many, many years until she passed away. In the end she was like a senile cantankerous old aunt that everyone had to walk on tip toes around for fear of upsetting her.