Phoebe

Well the time has come to tell you about big sister Phoebe. Phoebs ..what can you say? If she's not hiding behind the sofa, she's ducking behind a curtain; if she's not under the verandah, she's crouching below a line of washing my Mum's left out. She brings new depths of meaning to the phrase 'scaredy-cat" . My mum says it's because of her deprived kittenhood; she didn't get the necessary sibling socialisation when she was tiny; that's the way my mum talks sometimes.... Yawwnn ... hey though she's great fun to chase!

Her name - Phoebe. Yeah you guessed it. Our Mum is a Friends' fan! Nothing more complicated than that. But she could have been Michelle, Angel or Molly. Why? Because my mum was thinking of naming her after the place where she was found as a tiny tiny scrap of life - in a zipped up bag in a tunnel of the metro Michel-Ange Molitor. A zipped up bag, you ask, in Wildian accents. Yes that's right; we will never know how she spent the first month of her life; but one evening in 1996, one homeward commuter traipsing through the metro tunnel in that quiet area of Paris's 16th arrondissement, her ears no doubt assailed by the usual array of noises common to any metro station; was surprised to have them assailed by quiet different tones: a tiny kitten's desparate mews. The commuter was one Doris Schomb, a kindly German woman who was amazed to find, when tentatively approaching and eventually unzipping the mewing bag, a tiny ball of fur crawling out and clinging to her with its desparate kitten claws .

She came into my mum's life the following morning when looking through her work's private ads, she saw Doris's Abandoned Kitten Ad and, as she tells it, her heart melted and she knew it was the right moment to put both hers and the kitten's life to rights, by adopting her. My mum found herself the proud owner o the tiny furball later that evening. The tiny creature still had her milky blue eyes - or rather one of them was obviously so; the other she rarely opened fully. Whether it was paining her or merely gummed up was difficult to tell....

More soon