Princess Flora meets the snow

I have to be out and about today, acting as back-up aka literary wife while the Babe Magnet meets one of his editors and discusses new projects, particularly one he's excited about, so I'm dashing in here while the kettle boils. (And hopefully while it does boil and not, as the old kettle did, fuses the whole house!) The details of the Christmas Stocking Contest will - I hope - be completed later today and up on my web site very soon.

Yesterday while I was writing my blog I didn't notice the weather outside. So it was only when I looked up and saw that the houses opposite suddenly had white roofs that I realised it had been snowing.

This was the first time that Flora had encountered any real snow. There was a bit the other weekend, when we had visitors, but there was too much excitement and attention in the house for her to really notice it then. So this time she went out when the snow was still actually falling - and she found the whole experience very disconcerting.

She approached this strange white stuff with hesitation and suspicion, shaking her paws in indignation every time they got wet as she prowled around the garden investigating. And then she looked up at me in protest, as if to demand that I take this nasty wet, c

old stuff away as it was ruining her lovely jungle play area.


These pictures show how much she's grown and filled out recently, now that she's a year old. She is the biggest cat in the house - much to the indignation of the two gentlemen Sid and Dylan. And she is, as the Magnet describes her, a fully fledged brigand. If the treats aren't put away in the highest cupboard, she will get up on to the worktops to find them, knocking the plastic container on to the floor so that it falls upside down, lid first. Then she holds on to the lid with one paw and with the claws of the other paw - and a little help from her sharp teeth - rips the box open and steals the treats.

She will play pounce and chew with him, ripping his hands to pieces in the process, but when with our visitors we had a not quite two year old in the house, she immediately understood that he was too small to fully know what he was doing and was remarkably patient under the pr

ovocation of being chased round the house by a small person shouting 'Catcatcat!' at the top of his voice.


This picture of her on my desk shows how different she looks from the beginning of the year when she sat in front of the computer screen too - but you could see a lot more of the screen then than now!




She still likes to watch the televsion a lot - much more than either of the other two. And she particularly loves horse-racing. If we don't watch her, she will get up to that screen and try to chase the nice little horses she finds there.



Which might have been OK when she was, as here, just 10 weeks old. But now that she's 13 months, it's a very different matter.

She just walked past the screen again and took a lot of interest in the movement of the cursor - having to be dissuaded from chasing it and batting it with her paws. I don't know if she realised that all these photos of her but I have no doubt that she would have approved. 'It's all about me!' is very definitely this fully fledged brigand's attitude to life.