Mishmash
The Summer of 1954 "I'm just going up the garden to paint the cat's eyes." That's not something one says every day. Yesterday I had painted the flaking Buddha and used the same black paint to refresh our old stone cat. He had been crouching on a paving stone for twenty five years. Under that slab is the grave of our first family cat - Blizzard. We acquired him from the RSPCA animal shelter at Bawtry one snowy day in January 1982. By the time we got back to Sheffield that night, a full-on blizzard was making driving conditions dangerous. We ditched the car and walked the last half mile back to our terraced house with me gripping the handle of the cardboard pet carrier in which Kitten Blizzard was miaowing in terror. This is how he got his name. You can't have a black cat with black eyes so I painted them green using oil paint from a tube. And I decided that from now on, he won't be crouching at ground level, he will sit on the stump of our old ho...