What is she on about now?

The Trouble with Black Cats..........

The trouble with black cats is that they are quite difficult to tell apart and that I seem to suffer from an occasional overload of the buggers. I'm sure if I had half a dozen tabbies or gingers it would be the same, although when I had three gingers and four tabbies they managed not only to have different faces but were varying shades of ginger and patterns of stripey, which did help telling them apart. I will admit to a fairly unimaginative naming regime, for example the gingers were Ginger, Sandy and Marmalade. But I digress, so back to the black ones.

I call your attention to my previous tales of how Judy and I moved into a shared house with the 11 or 12 cats for whom I'd managed to become responsible in my little cortijo on the outskirts of Nerja, and how we found ourselves confronted by a malevolent looking black cat with various relations and a clear bit of interbreeding I might add, and when she made it clear she intended to live in our garden and have us feed her, we christened her Sooty (and complied). The problem multiplied (literally) when she presented us with 5 hissing spitting hungry kittens, four jet black and one grey. I did explain how a grey one and one with a short bent tail as identification still left us with 3 almost identical who became Kitten, Other Kitten and Other Other KItten and only distinguishable during the time one had an injured leg and became temporarily Peg-leg, one acquired cat flu and became Snotty Kitten for the duration of it's illness, and then one died in the field next door which shortened the odds even though we didn't know which one it was and we simply dropped Other Other Kitten and maintained Kitten (the bigger of the two, and Other Kitten). Kitten became Nelson when he finally joined the official crew, leaving Other Kitten to be renamed Tiny, who to my lasting anguish was left behind at that awful place near La Herradura. But I am digressing again, and so to the present situation and more black cats.

Thanks to accidents, one disappearance, one unexplained death and some bloody awful dogs, I was (not so long ago either) down to seven and that includes Mischief, the small grey pest who moved in just short of a year ago, and good old Nelson my one remaining black cat. Easy. But not any more. Patch, my regular stray, is brindle and for a good while resembled poor old Titch at first sight (but then Titch was found dead) and she's clearly too small and differently marked than Fudge. Last year she introduced her offspring to the feeding programme here, cute little rascals of whom two were varying assortments of black and white and easily related to the dad, Butch, the formerly battered looking large black and white  (who visited for food at times, alternating with meals with my elderly neighbour who has since died so he eats here now. Sigh. She also bequeathed me her two boys, but I'm getting ahead of myself a tad). The other was tiny and black. I dithered a bit as I don't like re-using names really, but they became Sooty, Sweep and Smudge (on off centre Hitler moustache). Our previous Sooty was one of the victims of that blasted place where I lost 5 cats and had to leave Tiny behind so this didn't cause any name problems in theory. Only then my neighbour died and so did her old mother cat, leaving Ginger and Sooty orphaned by human and feline mothers all in one go and homeless to boot as nobody wanted to take them in. So they learned that I fed them now and in time someone else with ANOTHER CAT (shock horror) lives in their house, poor boys, and Big Sooty and Ginger joined my crew while Little Sooty ran a mile if I so much as looked at him/her while Sweep got proper cheeky and Smudge trailed in his wake. Fine, we can cope with two called Sooty, they are different sizes and clearly different faces.........

But then I went away for the summer, as normal, leaving in charge an older couple who took their cat-sitting duties very seriously and who did an exemplary job with a feeding regime and making inroads into socialising the outdoor semi feral mob. Only when I came back, there was this black cat with slightly longer fur making himself at home, and named (Hungry) Horace. Who's he? I asked. We thought he was one of yours, they replied, a tad confused. My insistence I'd never seen the bugger before rather spoiled their idea that he must be Small Sooty who had grown a bit, but they did admit that apart from Nelson (easy) and Big Sooty (also easy) there did appear to be, at times, a selection of black cats who might or might not be a Sooty. Hmmm. 

So we watched and the following day, lo and behold, one Big Sooty, one Horace - and a small black Little Sooty. But wait, what size should Little Sooty now? He/she is the sibling of Sweep and Smudge, who are all a year old give or take a couple of days and rightly a bit bigger than their younger siblings born this year, Cheeky and Sparky. Cheeky is twice the size of Sparky, in the same way that Sweep and Smudge were compared to Sooty  (before the need to add "Little"). So this small black cat, matching by size, is he/she really last year's Sooty or possibly a this year's Sooty look-alike nobody realised existed........ Oh heck. 

But the plot thickens. Some of the cats have allowed my diligent house/cat sitters to actually stroke their backs while they have their heads immersed in their bowls at meal times, But the small black one was ever shy and ran a mile, and still does, so the question is WHOSE back did I stroke without protest the other evening because it wasn't Nelson, not Horace, pretty sure Big Sooty was sitting a few feet away looking reproachful as he does, and come to think of it, it was a bit big for the small one, whichever of the two is the original Little Sooty. Oh heck indeed. 

Short of a full identity parade and whisker to whisker comparisons, I don't know how the heck I can tell for sure whether there is one more than I thought even after Horace joined the ranks. (He got away with it because it's hard to sort out who's who with a mob of black cats, and he made a move as soon as I was gone too, the sneaky so-and-so, and he counted on the house sitters being uncertain and giving him the benefit of the doubt.)   And even more to the point I have no idea which one is the original Little Sooty, let alone who the other one is, assuming I am not imagining it all. You see my problem..............they sneak in on the basis that I won't know any better, and at times they are right..............meanwhile assuming I am, what do I do - Big Sooty is not about to change his name for one thing, nor should he. Horace is easy to tell apart from the rest (including his name) but what then, should we have Little Sooty and Medium Sooty? Little Sooty 1 and Little Sooty 2? Little Sooty and Even Smaller Sooty, or will we go with Little Sooty and Other Little Sooty..........what troubles me yet is that the housesitters mentioned that a big black cat occasionally joined the queue for dinner, and since they had not turned him away, I can reasonably assume that at some point he will be back. I'm seeing black cats everywhere...............and if you ask me how many I've got, the answer has to be : LOTS.