GIMP Gate

One of the things that we’d been planning to do once work had finished on the house, was to provide a home for some cats again. But since we were going on holiday in July, we didn’t want to be halfway through a cat adoption process or not have cats that were settled before we disappeared for a week. So we agreed we’d start looking once we got back from holiday.

The day before we went, I saw a FB post from a friend reposting a post from an old workmate of theirs who was looking for a new home for a beloved black cat. I didn’t do anything about it because it sounded fairly urgent and I was sure that the cat would have found somewhere by the time we got back.

We got back from Portmeirion on a Friday and battlehamster collapsed on the sofa after the five hour drive, while I started sorting laundry out. I was still sorting laundry and honestly expecting to hear some snoring when he bounced up the stairs to announce that he’d found a cat on FB. Same chain of humans, different cat. This cat had nearly had a new home but that had fallen through. Then it turned out that the other cat still needed a home too and could we take both of them. Of course we could.

So on the Tuesday we drove over to Cardiff to meet the cats and make sure that their current human was happy with us as prospective cat carers. She was moving to live with her new partner and the new landlord wouldn’t allow pets and that’s the only reason that she was trying to rehome the pair of them. And on the following Sunday she drove over to Bristol and delivered Fluffball and Chelsea and their small collection of belongings to us.

It’s been a chaotic fortnight since then. They’re both around 13-14 years, so we’re basically providing a retirement home for them. They haven’t been vaccinated for a while, so they’re booked in for that later this month. Fluffball is a very big floof of a cat, whose main motivation in life seems to be how many scruffles he can get. I’ve never had a cat that’s been so trusting so quickly. He spent about 36 hours being very, very sad and then he discovered that scruffles were on offer and crept out of his safe place for those and last night I was sitting reading on the bed and he turned up, demanded scruffles and then settled down with his head on my leg and had a snooze.



Chelsea is small black ninja. She’s probably not that small but next to Fluffball she is kind of tiny. And she’s deeply suspicious of us. It’s only in the last couple of days that she’s become comfortable snoozing anywhere other than under a sofa and she still won’t let us touch her yet. She’s apparently a mouser and she clearly wants to be outside. Alas for Chelsea, she doesn’t get to do that until she’s been here for four weeks because we want to make sure that she knows that this is where the food happens and that she won’t just run off. On the plus side, she gets to have a cat flap for the first time in her life, so she can come and go as she pleases. (Give or take us locking them in on fireworks night). She gets a little braver about people every day, so I think we’ll win her over eventually.