Cat Rescuing, Sunderland: THURSDAY: SWIMMING, A SIAMESE CAT, AND THE WORLD'S CUTEST KITTENS

Friday, 21 January 2011

THURSDAY: SWIMMING, A SIAMESE CAT, AND THE WORLD'S CUTEST KITTENS

My GP's been on at me to lose weight so, apart from including salads in my diet, this week I've been putting more effort into my morning swim. This Thursday (yesterday), I managed 20 lengths in 28 minutes which is slow by most standards but a considerable improvement by mine -I normally manage that in 36mins on a good day. I was so pleased that I swam another 10 and then went home and slept for an hour.

After that I got my act together and sorted out the cat food and receipts and wrote them up for AK's treasurer who'd been nagging me for ages. And quite right too. I'm the great procrastinator: never do today that which you can put off to another day in the hopes that it will go away. Of course it doesn't but what was once a tiny psychological pebble grows into a huge boulder which gets harder and harder to get round to shifting.

That done, it was off to the shop to pick up a heavy cabinet for delivery. I was helped by Michael, a young lad who's with us for a few weeks. We dropped it off at a house three miles away, called in at sheltered accomodation to pick up some donated stuff and took it back to the shop. Then I went to Asda to collect a bin full of donated cat and dog food. With that sorted and stored in our garage, I sat down to a cup of coffee, secure in the knowledge that I had the rest of the afternoon free.

Then the phone rang.

I did finish my coffee, then it was back to the shop to pick up Andrea to take her home to pick up a microchip scanner and then on to Cairo Street in Hendon (part of our patch where we are quite well known) to see a lady who had found a bleeding Siamese cat on her doorstep that morning. It appeared to have a damaged back paw. We scanned it but to no result. After popping it in a cat carrier, I dropped Andrea off at the shop and headed for Roker Park Vets (I'd made an appointment before seeing the cat) on the north side of the river.

Here she is on the vet's table.

She was a very placid and quiet cat, never uttering a sound or attempting to struggle while she was being examined, happy too to be held and stroked. She's also old with very few teeth and seemed traumatised, to me, by her recent experiences. Her paw had been damaged and the vet was able to pull one nail completely off. He gave her a couple of injections and that was that. I also picked up a male which we've taken over after the RSPCA dropped it off there and we paid for the neutering. I took both of them to the rescue, as pre-arranged. (Sometimes I'm quite well organised, just not often enough.)

(Update: the owner rang C late last night and is collecting the cat this morning. Apparently they -an elderly male and female pair, possibly used for breeding- were given to her after being advertised in the Sunderland Echo as 'free to a good home'. They'd been kept as house cats but had gotten out and ran off. The male was found dead shortly after. So, a happy end but but a sad story.)

I was able to take some final photographs of the world's cutest kittens before they go to their new homes today. Their lovely friendly mother, however, will be available after she's been neutered.