People do the strangest things, or so the saying goes.   Cats aren’t a whole lot different, as I hope to demonstrate to you.   This story is about our cat, Timbo.   He came from a litter of half-a-dozen, all of whom were given names out of story books: Tom Thumb, Cinderella, Black Beauty, Snow White, Prince Charming, and of course our little moggy, Tiny Tim.

At first the name seemed fitting for the tiny, striped bundle of fur.   But then at nine months of age he was spayed and like many spayed tomcats grew to enormous proportions.   Tiny Tim no longer seemed appropriate, so we expanded it out to Timothy, which was later shortened again to Timbo.

Timbo’s enormous size didn’t stop him from acting like a kitten, whenever the mood took him, however.   He engaged in all the more common kitty-antics, such as tugging at dressing gown cords as people went past, leaping onto balls of wool as they rolled along the floor when people were knitting, and rubbing round people’s legs, tripping them up, causing them to curse him loudly as they almost fell flat on their faces. 

But his all-time favourite game was taking a swipe at people’s hair with a paw, as they went past.

Inside the house, he would leap up onto the back of the couch to swipe at the back of his victim’s head as he sat down, or else would claw his way up the curtains to await his passing victims.   This latter was an effortless feat for Timbo with his oversized claws, but, of course, it was murder on the poor curtains.

Outside the game was very different.   The man who had owned the house before us was a carpenter, and in his spare time had made a great number of often bizarre alterations to the house.   These included building a louvred arcade out the back, which joined up with a dirt-floored workroom on one side of the yard, the garage on the other, and was connected to the house, so that the tiny back yard was completely enclosed.   This arcade, the garage, and the workroom, were what we called the inner-outer, as opposed to the outer-outer (right outside).

Mum had to walk through the inner-outer to hang the washing out on the clothesline, and Timbo would hide on the workroom roof, hang over the guttering and take a none-too-gentle swipe at the top of mum’s head as she went past.   After a while mum became wary and started to duck her head as she went out the doorway, forcing Timbo to lean further and further out over the guttering.   Until finally one day he leant out too far and came crashing down to earth.   Fortunately he was unhurt, so we all had a good laugh at his expense.   Particularly mum, since Timbo confined his head-swiping activities to the indoors from then on.