In works of fiction household pets usually have names like Fluffy, or Spot, or Rover, or Fido.   In real life, however, apart from Graham Kennedy’s near legendary golden Labrador, Rover, no one EVER gave names like those to their pets.   In real life dogs and cats have names such as Susie, or Sally, or Charley Barley, or Fred.   Even Garfield is a more likely name for a household cat than Spotty or Fluffy.

This story is about an enormous orange and black tabby tomcat named Timothy.   Although usually we shortened it to Timbo.

Before Timbo was born, we baby-sat (or should that be cat-sat?) his mother, Lizbeth, when she was pregnant, while her owners were interstate on holiday.

Poor Lizbeth was a timid little thing, who never adjusted to being with strangers and never could find out how to use the cat door to get outside.   On the other hand, after being given to us at six months of age as reward for cat-sitting his mum, Timbo took all of two days to learn how to turn his head

to one side, give the vinyl flap a nudge with his head, then ease out through the cat door.   It then took him another ten days to train his humans to perform this service for him.   Timbo would prop a few centimetres away from the door, then yowl at the top of his lungs until one of his pet humans got up and went across to nudge the flap open with the toe of a shoe.

Sometimes people got fed-up with Timbo’s laziness, however, then the shoe was just as likely to go under his tail.   In which case Timbo would disappear headfirst through the cat flap, a lot faster than he had anticipated.

Then Timbo would glare back in through the cat door with his bright yellow-green eyes, giving the offender a look that seemed to say, “How dare you do that to the King of the Household?”

Although in truth Timbo considered himself to be nothing less than king of the entire neighbourhood.   It is common enough for tomcats to declare their yard to be out of bounds to other cats and noisily chase trespassing moggies away.   Often waking up the whole household by chasing the interloper across the corrugated-iron roof of the house in the small hours of the night.   However, Timbo went one better by going into other properties and chasing poor cats out of their own yards.