Nostalgia

All that talk about my Mancunian origins the other day ("Eeee, etc." Wednesday 4th October) has brought me out all wistful and nostalgic. So I'm including a picture of my favourite Manchester band, The Smiths. Morrissey came from Stretford, not far from where I was born in a cupboard under the stairs in Chorlton-cum-Hardy in 1989.

When I was born, one of four kittens in my Mum's first (and I believe only) litter, I was blind and very small, but I was easily distiginguishable from my siblings, as I was the ginger one. The others were my sister Chutney, who as you know is a dark tortoishell tabby, another girl who was a lovely matt grey finish and who was later given the name of Spook and moved to some godforsaken small town in Lancashire, and poor old black-and-white Bastard, who didn't really have much in the way of social skills (or any other skills) and got run over early in life.

I'd already been picked out before conception! You see Mart said to Fionulla (who owned our Mum, Zukie) that if her cat had kittens, he wanted "the ginger one". So I was all right. He chose Chutney to go with me because when we were little, we got on very well. How times have changed...

So six weeks or so after we were born, we went to live in Martin's house (which didn't have any furniture in it, but that's another story). We were so little then that we used to sit on M's feet, and when he walked around the house, we'd cling on for dear life. It was a classic Manchester two-up-two down, and I still remember the triumphant moment when I managed to climb the stairs for the first time.

We were only there for a month or so when he lost his job and got another one in Glasgow. We went to stay at M's sister Judy's house in Chester while he went living it up in Paris for a bit, then he came home, put us in a transit van with all his furniture, and moved us up to a rented tenement flat in Shawlands.

I just about remember my Mum, and I recall that she looked like Chutney, though not as fat. Before I was born, she used to stay at Martin's house when her humans were on holiday, and she did her best to destroy his yucca plant. Then when we came into the world and started to live with him, we finished the job! As for my Dad, I think he was a Jack Russel terrier called Zack. We used to scratch his face and bite his ears, but he was never cross with us, so I think he must have loved us, even if he wasn't our proper father.