A cat.
Reading through last weeks answers reminded me of a recent finding made by my grandmother.

She’s a major dog person. Schnauzers, especially. Over the course of my lifetime she’s had four of them. She treats her dogs better than she treated my mother in her youth. She was always adamant that cats were evil and as such should be killed, going so far as to throw things at them when they entered her yard; the dogs didn’t care less.

One day, she found a cat sitting on her back veranda, in a rather comfortable chair I remember sitting on as a child. It’s a rather large grey tabby. It came free from collar or that angry temperament that seemingly all stray cats bring into all aspects of their being. For some reason that nobody has been able to ascertain, she decided to feed it.

Finding it to be a less excitable/blind companion than the last of her dogs, she let it into the house. Eventually she grew so attached to it that she bought it a collar, gave it a name and considered it her own.

Now, this is not all that exciting. Quite a lot of people adopt cats that they begin feeding. The part that was worrying was that she neglected to tell anyone. Including her husband.

One day my sister and I visited for dinner. We’re waiting for the roast to finish cooking when a grey fuzzy thing comes sauntering in from the kitchen. “Erm…Nan, there’s a cat in your house.”

We later found out that it used to be a neighbour’s. The neighbour decided one day to move to France. Just took off without the cat. Stupid bastards.
( Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Tue 11 Nov 2008, 9:14, Reply)