Goodbye Lou, Hello Louise

Irene (pronounced something like eeh rainy not eye reen) runs a little charitable setup called Gatets sense llar del Pinós. Google translates the Valencian to English as Homosexual kittens of the Pinós but I think that may be a Google glitch! Translated to Spanish it says Gatitos sin hogar de Pinoso which is something like Homeless Pinoso Kitties.

Maggie looks at Irene's Facebook page quite often. She'll say "Oh, look at this poor old cat, with three legs and a duff eye that has been abandoned" and I'll respond with something along the lines of "Well, we've got plenty of space, what's another cat to us?" Maggie thinks of the feeding, the damage to the house, the things being pulled off the shelves and the vet's bills and common sense saves the day. But, a couple of weeks ago there was a picture of a few weeks old Siamese like kitten with watery eyes on the Facebook page. Usual comment from Maggie, usual reply from me. I'd reckoned without the euphoria of the English quarter final victory though. So we now have a newish kitten in the house. Bea and Teo aren't happy about the new arrangement but the violence has been low key to date.

The first name that popped into my mind for a male "Siamese" cat was Samuel. So we had a provisional name. The name may not be definitive though, There has been a small scale discussion on Facebook against his picture. I just sent a longish reply to someone who posted there and I thought to repeat the comment here....

We have this sort of tradition of proper names in keeping with calling them him or her rather than it - Matilda, Mary, Eduardo, Harold, Beatríz, Teodoro and Gertrudis to date though, on a day to day basis the names inevitably get shortened and we use both the anglicised and hispanic versions. The cats that don't get a proper name - Mr Big Balls, Stripy Pants and Hissy Missy are the ones that only sponge off us but never get to pull threads on the sofa or lie in front of the pellet burner. So Samuel, which can be pronounced like the better Tadcaster beer maker or in a Spanish sort of way, as something like Samwell, works fine. Then Maggie wondered aloud about Sebastián so I started looking through names that began with S  because we thought S to go with Siamese. A bit like Martin, Melissa or Mandy the Meyncoun and Paco, Pedro or Penelope the Persian. We both liked Sancho. Sancho of course was the proleterian hero, the voice of reason behind The Knight of the Sad Countenance, El Quijote or Don Quixote so, although there is no obvious English equivalent I definitely approve of Sancho as a name. But I like Samuel too.

So, if you have any thoughts; vote!, vote!, vote!.

Lovely

Just a bunch of assorted trivia that has tickled my fancy in the last couple of days.

There are a lot of stars in Culebròn. That's probably an incorrect assertion. I suppose there are exactly the same number of stars as there are anywhere but lots of them are easy to see from Culebrón because we get lots of cloudless night skies and there's very little light pollution. That's not quite true either because, at the moment, we have a dazzling Christmas light display which, for the very first time this year, features a spiral of LED rope around the palm tree. The Geminids meteorite shower was flashing across the sky all last night though in an even more dazzling display. Lovely.

We went to the flicks yesterday evening, we often do. We'd been to visit someone and we were a little late away; we went the long way around so we arrived at the cinema a few minutes after the advertised start time. The cinema we often use shows the sort of pictures that don't always attract a lot of advertising. So, sometimes, if the start time is 6.15 the film actually starts at 6.15 but, then again, if it's a bit more Hollywood, the 6.15 film might not start till 6.30 after the trailers and ads. Whilst Maggie waited to buy the tickets I went to have a look at the monitors to see if the film had begun. If it had we had a second choice. The manager, who was on ticket collection, said hello, lots of the staff greet us by name nowadays, and asked me which film we wanted to see. I told him. It was due to start 10 minutes ago he said, but there's nobody in there so I'll start it when you're ready. A private showing and to our timetable. Lovely.

Bad keepers that we are we'd missed the annual update of the vaccinations for the house cats. I took them both in today. I was amazed - apart from the chief vet everyone that I saw in the vet's surgery/office is doing or has done at least a couple of English classes with me. Of course I shouldn't be driving but I thought the 5kms in to town wouldn't hurt. As I drove Bea home she had a bit of an accident, bowel wise. She's not a big fan of car travel. At the exact moment that the stench of her reaction assailed my nostrils the very obvious yellow van of the bloke who looks after my motor went the other way. He flashed his lights in greeting. I would have waved back but a bit of chrome trim chose that exact moment to fly off the front of the car and bounce off the windscreen. I went back to get it later, on the bike, and fastened it back on to the car with duct tape as a temporary repair. Lovely.

And finally, yesterday, we passed the bodega/almazara in Culebrón. There were a stack of cars and vans queuing to hand over their olive crops to be pressed into oil by the almazara, the oil mill. The bodega, the winery, did its stuff back around September time. So I strolled over with the camera to take some snaps. I have no idea what the process was but I liked the small scale nature of it. Little trailers full of olives, plastic bags full of olives, people standing around and chatting waiting to have their crops weighed in. The cars are obviously modern enough but the process is probably as old as the hills. Lovely.

Invasive manoeuvres

You will remember we had trouble with a white cat that invaded our garden. The cat was nice enough but it didn't get on with our two. They hid inside, afraid to wander the garden. We were glad when the white cat disappeared.

There are colonies of wild and semi wild cats in Culebrón. Some probably get occasional food from humans but others live off what they hunt or can scavenge from the big communal bins. A young female tabby realised that the open door to our kitchen, at times, offered access to free food left over by our satiated cats. She was a persistent little cat, despite the water pistol, despite the occasional hosepipe assault, despite the shouts and clapping hands, she kept coming back. Our cats had no real problem with her, an occasional hissing but nothing profound. We are softies. We gave her food, always away from our house, but we did feed her. An easy if unreliable and sometimes contradictory feeding station. She was also human friendly, happy to be stroked.

A couple of weeks ago we decided to take her in. She would have to go to the vet and be checked. If she had something infectious then she was on her own but so long as she was basically fit the sofa and TV awaited alongside three square a day. Uncannily the cat failed to appear mewing on our window sill on the days when I was free to take her to the vet. Until this morning.

"What's her name?," they asked at the reception desk. "I didn't choose this," I replied quickly, "Gertrudis". A couple of animal keepers in the waiting room agreed that it was a nice name. When Cristina, the vet, beckoned us in to the surgery she called the cat by name with a smile on her lips. "Basically fit as a fiddle, obviously she's got worms and fleas but she's a sturdy little cat - nice temperament too". I arranged an appointment for the sterilization next week, paid the very reasonable flu jab and deparastiation (is that a word) charge and we came back home.

So we now look after three tabby cats difficult to tell apart at a glance - Beatriz, Teodoro and Gertrudis.