This is a hard time of the year. Three years ago today I found out Mr Boo had cancer and we had maybe days. I’m not going to lie, it has taken a long time to deal with the guilt of failing him on top of other expected elements of grief.

Counseling really isn’t something people think of for a pet, but I now wish I had asked for some as it was so much worse than I had ever experienced.
I’m trying to do justice to his life as he really was an amazing cat.

He was abandoned as a kitten. And he was abandoned at a very early age, he was certainly not of an age kittens are adopted at.

He was also deaf. So I had to learn along with him how to signal to each other, I also had to teach him to purr, how to knead, and just in general our bond of trust was pretty profound.

And I also had to come up with a name for him, he was never going to hear it so his name actually was a very specific head waggle, a series of stomps on the ground on occasion, and then his legal name was Bolero.

Not after the Ravel version, from Moulin Rouge. It was on TV in the first few days he was with me and it seemed very apropo for the tiny little bundle of very determined little scrapper who had a very set idea of what he was going to do.

Here he is warming himself on some clay I had cleaned by heating and straining and left to cool on the kitchen floor in greaseproof paper.

While sewing silk.

Certain that the plastic bag held secrets.

Finally accepting baby Mordin was not actually a monster.

And my last project with him was Elsa while he was recovering from surgery for skin cancer. So yes Elsa has a lot of emotion for me.