I've always been around cats ever since I was a baby, in fact, my parents bought a small ginger and white kitten whom they named George when my elder brother was very small and added the half-Siamese 'Evil' Eric to the brood about a year later. Both cats lived into their teens and in addition to my grandfather's cat, Kipper, felines were always a constant presence in my life. George had to be put down after cancer ripped through his body during the nineties and Eric got old too.
As the years passed, another black cat, a juvenile, turned up on my dad's workshop roof during one cold winter - we couldn't locate his owner, so he joined us and was named Ernie. Ernie liked to hide in cupboards and scare me and also took to staring at me during meals - a bit like Frasier had to put up with his father's dog, Eddie.
I moved out of the parental home during the late nineties and didn't live anywhere which was suitable to keep a pet cat. I did, however, own a pair of pedigree(!) gerbils whom I named Jasmine and Juliet when we resided in south-west London. My brother and his then-girlfriend visited us one Saturday evening and, for a laugh, he decided to take one of my gerbs out of their tank to scare his girlfriend (who hated all things rodenty) As expected, this hugely backfired and she said "get that fing away from me or I'll kill it!" Personally, I'd rather have chosen to spend an evening with both gerbils instead of her, the vacuous personality drain that she was. They split up about a year later after he was unfaithful to her.
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