Diesel

I think this could be Diesel's blog debut. I don't think she's been on here before. She's known by many as 'Scraggy Cat' but she wasn't looking at all scraggy today - to the contrary she was looking rather cute in her own kind of way.

Craig bought her from a rescue shelter years before he met me. He couldn't afford a posh car and was no good at etching so he used to invite ladies round to see his cat.

She's tiny. Craig calls her a bonsai cat. We think that perhaps she was hungry and malnourished as a kitten and that stunted her growth. Craig didn't have his nasty smokey habit back then which is just as well otherwise he may now be coming under attack for stunting his cat's growth through passive smoking! In fairness he's not at all to blame as she was older when he rescued her.

She's a real character. I can still recall quite clearly the first time my parents met Craig's parents. It was one of those things - it seemed like a good idea while sitting in my office at work to call the folks and invite them round for a barbecue that night. As if that in itself wasn't bad enough I hadn't even thought on about the fact that we didn't have a garden - just a bit of yard near the bin. As we all stood around burning dead flesh together and attempting to make polite conversation I noticed that my Dad had come with one shoe on and one slipper on. I was mortified and couldn't help but wonder what my in-laws-to-be would think. Thankfully Diesel came to the rescue. She prowled that yard wall commando style and quick as a flash swiped a piece of sizzling cow hide. No one saw her do it the first couple of times and we were all intrigued. It created quite a diversion from my Dad's odd footwear.

We don't know for certain how old she is. That's so often the case with rescue animals. We do think she could be knocking on for very late teens, rapidly approaching twenty perhaps.

She lives in the Nannexe and I think she's Nana's favourite indoor pet. She's been with Nana since I was pregnant with Miles. She just went for a holiday to give me a break from constantly vacuuming cat hair in late pregnancy (as said earlier she's a very scraggy cat) however, while she was there one of Craig's extremely irritating habits stopped. Prior to that it was a standing joke in our house that he should audition for a brass band. His nose was like a trombone. Once Diesel had gone though things really improved on the trombone front and consequently she has lived with Nana ever since - surrounded by her chums Woo Woo and Willie.