Cat Garden Updated - moved on.

Previously I told you about the Cat Garden.  Since then the cat that featured in those photos has moved down the road to live under our building.  Eftychia (who lives upstairs) feeds him - along with 'Mrs Calico' and 'The Worried Cat'.  F refers to them by those names, and calls this particular cat 'The Left-Handed Cat'.  He swipes with his left hand - she says.  Efy runs a twice daily charity soup-kitchen for cats: drop-ins welcome. She tells us that sometimes she has 10 diners. The 3 cats with 'names' are part of that moving community of opportunistic felines, but they have adopted the space where our cars park as their own full-time space.  They camp on Efy's car, absorbing the warmth from the bonnet when she returns from outings to exercise her dogs.  So they are often right outside our door when F & I go out for our constitutionals.

Sometimes we have seen Mrs Calico walking with Efy and her dogs if they take a short turn down to the beach.  The dogs don't look best comfortable with the arrangement.  They just sit all stiff-like while Mrs Calico rubs herself around them. 

That's bold.  I have to admire a cat with that kind of chutzpa.  Not my style at all.  Dogs are best avoided (extra long social distancing) in my view.

I think F has a soft-spot for that left-handed cat; she feeds him my leftovers in addition Efy's morning and evening catering.  Sometimes we look at him from the balcony - he sleeps on the street between the parked cars. 

Not Dead - Just Sleeping 

He's still big (for cats around here, really big), but that fluffy fullness to his face and tail has gone and his fur looks a bit thinned out too.  

Last summer the council clean-up team dug out that dead tree the left-handed cat was photographed perched in.  All that loosened soil simply encouraged the feral versions of my species to turn the garden into the cats' open sewer.  Well you would have read that if you saw the earlier...

F put on her 'I'll-try-to-pretend-I-don't-care-what-people-think-if-I-dig-about-in-cat-poo-in-public' armour, loosened some soil, scattered some seeds, applied a bucket of our balcony compost every week, planted a rosemary, watched the small Gia-Gia from Crete poke in (round the edges) a mixed bag of pickings gathered on her daily walks, added a tiny Bay tree, and got serially discouraged as cats continued to rearrange the seedlings.......but.....