Cat ballet from The Luxury Cat

I. Am. So. Gorgeous. Don't you wish your cat was gorgeous like me?

A toast for England

No it's not a call for some patriotic glass-raising. It's the first in an occasional series that I am calling "Funny shaped food".

No. 1 - Premonition or freak of toasting? 

Is my breakfast trying to tell me something about Scotland's bid for independence?

The Passion Flower and the Bee

This little guy filled his pollen-laden boots on the passiflora which climbs the walls of my house. He could barely fly off.

Conception

Picture the scene. It’s February 1998. The nation is still recovering slowly from the shock of the aftermath of the shock of the death of Princess Di. The Spice Girls are at the top of their game (four of them anyway). All Saints are not quite as good but trying their best. Sex and the City is making fans of flat shoes, a pint of cider and an early night everywhere feel inadequate. By the end of the year, an animated chef singing about his “Chocolate salty balls” will be riding high, hitting the top spot in the charts. The must-have item is a Furby.

A reasonably fresh-faced (though slightly hungover) 25-year-old young woman is ascending the steps of Bank station in London, England. She stops suddenly; her companion, confused, asks her what’s wrong.

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh my God I’ve just conceived!” shrieks the young woman.

No it’s not the sordid climax to a misjudged night on the tiles that she will come to regret. Her companion is not an unnamed young buck high on snakebite and opportunity. It’s daylight, she’s just come out of a client meeting, her companion is a female workmate (who will become a dear friend), and the conception is the belated colliding of a sperm and an egg, the result of a spontaneous coupling with her boyfriend a couple of nights ago in which the recall of basic sex education and how to avoid getting pregnant fell by the wayside.

Fast forward five and a half years (it took that long to get over the first birth), and the same thing has happened again. You’d think at 31 she’d have got the hang of contraception. But the Pill made her moody and a bitch to live with, the wellies had run out and the Catholic method seemed the only option...

If you haven’t guessed already, that young woman was me. This is the story of my life with two young animals boys (well one is now a teenager and the other is 8 going on 45), their father and my life partner of choice (LPOC), and our two cats. My life partner of choice hates those cats, but I don’t, so they’re staying. The kids can stay too.