The first and last time you'll hear me get soppy about cats

Seven degrees at 8am. Squally. Yes, that's right, squally. Like Yarmouth Whitsun 1967. Don't ask.

The Mama cat seems to have done her disappearing act once again, and may well be holed up somewhere having dropped her 2009 litter. Bad timing, what with the sudden drop of temperature, the rain and all.

Carmine's semi-wild cats are an integral part of life in Carmine. Move into a house here, even for a week, and you'll be conned by a cat into thinking she's your friend before the second day dawns. Stay for a couple of years, be consistent with the Brekkies and the Friday fish-heads, and the Mama cat will be shoving her two-monthers in the small of the back towards your door, whispering, "Believe me, there's this big white thing in her house that's warm as toast - go settle your tush on it for the winter - it's better than a baita". Why she never invites herself in as well I'll never know, but I guess her standoffishness is what's made her such a successful breeder.

I like this kind of cat - the kind who come and go. Who were raised not in a house and sold on to a stranger, brainwashed into believing that the world ends at the apartment picture window and that the oft-absent owner is god. No offence. But I like these cats, the ones who grew up in the woods, who come because they want to and stay because there's something about you that they like (even if it's just the Friday fish-heads and Mathilda).

I like a wild rambler. One who disappears one day and reappears, thinner, three months later when given up for dead, when you're done crying over him and the last thing you expect is to be mugged one misty autumn morning by an ecstatic ball of prodigal-returned tabby joy.

I like our daily escort of three or four felines, the younger pair gamboling and skitting in the long grass, snapping at butterflies, pouncing on lizards, and the older two prowling along sedately with their tails held high, bickering all the way down. And I like it when we trudge back up to find them waiting in the undergrowth to meet us and greet us and guide us (or perhaps cadge a lift home).

I like counting the years of our presence here in Carmine by the successive litters of cats. The twin black cats, one now missing an eye, the other recently 'disappeared'. This Mama cat's first son (she was so proud). Her second litter, which was decimated by the marten. She cried for them for a week, and all of Carmine's mothers cried with her... I like telling the litters as someone from another culture might tell a list of ancestors. I'm hoping it will keep my memory intact, like Ezio's, into old age.

And I love to curl up somewhere warm with a half-wild cat cuddled against my belly. To fall asleep to the rhythm of his purrs and wake up with him stroking my face so exquisitely gently you'd think he was a lover.

Does all this make me the Cat Lady of Carmine?