Cattapilla Dreaming

Cat with A Sore Tummy!

Hercules is a small black and white cat.  I found him down the lane 4 years ago,  howling with hunger.  He joined the household of Rosie the tabby cat and Horace the Welsh collie and has since become the boss.    He is fearless and shameless.  He strolls along the lane, tail held high, in front of occasional cars, having no idea that he could be flattened in seconds.  He swaggers through fields of sheep and cows, stopping for an emergency wash now and then before continuing on his way.  But his greatest talent is for stealing food.  I’ve had dogs before now who knock over dustbins and put themselves in danger just to get a bacon rind, but I have never seen a cat return home with food all over it’s face having just licked clean a tin of tomatoes.   He is never allowed in the house on his own but every now and then he manages to sneak into the kitchen, open the bread bin and escape into the garden with whatever loaf he can carry.  But this week he has excelled himself.

Our near neighbours, on their annual summer visit, like to bake whilest on holiday.  A few days ago they went for a walk and foolishly left a window open.  Hercules has never been shy and as far as he’s concerned, anyone who speaks to him is his friend and likewise, any house is open house to him.  when Don and Anne returned from their walk they found a very fat, listless Hercules, unable to climb up and out of the window.  He had eaten THREE scones and half a loaf of soda bread!

He didn’t visit them the next day, instead crawled from shade to shade, dragging his enormous fat tummy, looking very sorry for himself.  But by the next day, he had digested all that food and was again screaming for breakfast.  Luckily Don and Anne like animals.  Perhaps they’d like to take him home?!

At last, welcome to my blog  ’Cattapilla Dreaming’.  It’s been a while getting this far and I still need to do some tweeking  but I felt I needed to get started.

Twelve months ago I was just beginning to get my head around setting up a website for Cattapilla Designs and now here I am writing my own blog!  Who’d have thought it? 

I think I have to say a big thank you to the great computer wizard in town who, as they say, has taught me everything I know about setting up and managing a website. Many were the days when I’d sit and stare at the screen and not have any ideas how to make anything work.  He guided me through all the jargon that I pretended to know about but in fact didn’t have a clue, and patiently waited for my brain to engage with the concepts of tags, meta words, backends, key words and other mysteries.  You know who you are, thank you. 

So what is this blog to be about?  I would like it to be an entertaining and informative  record of my life here  on Bere Island.  There are many aspects of  my island life so it won’t just be news of fabrics, cushions and sewing!   Be prepared for plenty of news on gardening and growing,  moans about wind and rain – we get a lot of both here – as well as the latest deeds of the naughtiest cat on the island and the progress of the new additions to our swallow family.

I’ve been working on this whole blog site for most of today so now need to do something different.  I hope  to write more very soon.

Keep reading!

Harriet.