Pusskin moves on

It’s been time to say farewell to Pusskin, our foster-cat. He was, and is, a delightful cat and he has moved on to a new permanent home in Oxford with Emma, Matt and their cat. Having another cat for company all the time should make sure Pusskin never gets bored. Emma says that their cat has noticed that if he sneaks up on Pusskin it startles him, and he’s started to make a chirruping noise as he approaches. That’s one problem we never had to solve – no human can creep up unnoticed on a cat, even a blind cat.

We’re getting used to being just the two of us again. We get the conservatory back and there are no litter trays to empty – good. But there’s no Pusskin playing with his catnip mice, or keeling over asking to be stroked, or climbing aboard our knees in the evenings, or lying on the sofa snoring gently – which is not so good.

We’ve been sorting through all our photos of him (don’t ask how many) and they remind us how quickly he changed from being nervous about coming into the house at all into a proper indoorsy cat, spending his evenings seeing if he could stretch out far enough to occupy an entire sofa (he could!).

He must have many tales to tell of his 8½ lives so far, and it’s a pity he couldn’t tell us some of them.

We started off complete cat-novices and we certainly learnt a lot in our time with Pusskin. Mostly we learnt that things worked very smoothly once we’d figured out how Pusskin would like them to be organised. We guess that he learnt a lot from us too, about how to train a new set of humans. We were putty in his little white paws, and Emma and Matt don’t stand a chance!