Crazy Cat Lady Part 8: My Fred

It’s hard to explain quite why I love Fred so much.


No. Wait. It isn’t.

I love Fred so much because he is a great big softhead. (My Mum calls him a Dopehead by which she means the same thing but I don’t have the energy to go into why it’s not appropriate to call him that.)

Fred is scared of new people and doesn’t give his affection away easily (unlike his sister, who can only be described as a hussy and a floozy). He shies away at first but will eventually come and see you to give you the obligatory sniff, especially if he thinks he’s going to get food off you.

But if he does love you, my goodness do you know about it. He will come and sit on your knee and demand your undivided attention. If you don’t give it to him, he will sit up, facing you and stretch out his paw and place it ever so gently on your chin. If, after several goes of this your response is unacceptable he will start to wail pitifully at you.

His favourite thing in the world is his little pink brush. He’s obsessed with being brushed, he loves it so much that he will come and stare at me when I’m brushing my own hair, wanting to have his turn.

You see what I mean? Softhead.

I always think that he’s a pretty small cat. But I think that might have been because the very first cat I knew was a giant black and white slug called Smudge. I guess that really he’s just average-sized. The other week when I was round at my Mum’s, Fred took up residence on knee, except there isn’t really room for him on my lap anymore so I put my legs up on the sofa and he got himself comfy. When I got up to go to the kitchen he just expanded to fit the space, so he looked a little something like this...

Can you spy with your little eye a certain blanket that I made at Christmas?

I then took approximately 50 gazillion photos of him because he’s a softhead and will let me. Lily would never let me do this, she’d have lunged at the camera after the first couple of goes or she would move too much and the pictures would come out all blurry. But Fred, because he’s a softhead, just lies there.

In fact I would even swear sometimes that he’s posing for me.

(Don’t think I don’t love Lily. I do. She’ll get her own post in time.)