For the first six days, the only evidence that we owned a cat was a pair of eyes under the back bedroom bed and a bowl that emptied itself overnight. On Monday evening I checked with the head torch. She looked back at me with the calm of someone who had paid the deposit on the room.
Applying, and the home visit
We had wanted a cat for years, but the flat above the shop had a no-pets clause and neither of us is the sort to test a tenancy. So we waited until the house was properly ours, which in practice meant waiting for the boxes to be mostly unpacked, and in early April I filled in an application on a Sheffield cat rescue's website. It asked how many hours we would be out, whether the garden was enclosed (not entirely), what the road was like (steep, quiet, parked cars), and whether we owned or rented.
A volunteer came for the home visit on Tuesday 29 April, at six in the evening, with a clipboard. She walked round every room, went up the garden steps to the top and looked at the stone wall that holds the garden up above the gennel. She checked the window latches, asked whether the loft hatch stayed shut and whether the back bedroom had a quiet corner. She said the steps would be a proper gym and the hill was nothing a microchipped cat couldn't manage. Maureen watched the whole visit from her front window, then asked me on the pavement what the woman had wanted.
Meeting her and bringing her home
On Saturday 10 May we went to meet three cats. Two came to the front of their pens and told us all about it. The third, a black-and-white one at the back, looked at us the way a landlord looks at a flat. That was Pickle: about two years old, spayed, microchipped and already called Pickle by the people who had been looking after her. Matt, who had been calling every cat he met "Kettle" since the blog got its name, tried it on her. She ignored both names, which we took as a good sign about her character.
We collected her the following Saturday, 17 May. The fee was £95, which covered the spaying, the microchip, her first vaccination and a flea and worm treatment. She cried once in the carrier, on the steepest bit of our street, and not at all after that. We put the carrier on the floor of the back bedroom with its door open, shut her in with a bowl and a litter tray, and she went straight under the bed.
The rescue asked us to keep her indoors for four weeks so she learns that this is home. Then she can go out through the back door. That puts the first outing at about 14 June, if she agrees.
What we bought, and the policy question
The first shop came to £86:
- A litter tray (£9) and the first bag of litter (£8)
- A scratching post (£19)
- A bed (£14), which she ignores in favour of the box it came in
- Bowls (£6), a week of food (£26) and a feather toy on a stick (£4)
Pet insurance came to £11.40 a month, which I set up on the Sunday. Then I did the thing I always do and read our home contents policy to see what it said about pets. The answer was one line: damage caused by pets isn't covered (that is ours, and the wording on yours may differ). So the sofa and the curtains are on their own, and the pet policy deals with the vet and not with her opinions about wallpaper.
On the seventh evening, Friday, she came out. She walked downstairs one step at a time, sat on the front-room windowsill for an hour watching the hill go by and ate her dinner in the kitchen as if nothing had happened. This morning at six she was on the bed, a warm weight on Matt's feet. "Kettle?" he said. She didn't look up. I think we have all agreed to leave it.
