KIKA - the A-Z challenge

For the whole month of April roughly 2000 people are blogging daily with the letters of the alphabet as a guide, and I am one of them.

My chosen theme is Tenerife, where I have lived for 15 years, and today's letter K prompted me to write about a Canarian cat who chose to live with us soon after we arrived.

KIKA

We had only been in our apartment for a few months. It was the week before Christmas 2000 and we were expecting a dozen people for Sunday breakfast – our traditional way of starting the season. On the Saturday afternoon, while we were setting out the tables, we spotted a cat and four kittens hiding in a plant-pot on our neighbour’s terrace.

The neighbours were away so we fed the cat, and the next morning we found her on our terrace. It’s quite a jump up from the community garden so she must have carried each kitten in turn. We asked our guests to leave them in peace, and the breakfast party was a great success, helped in no small part by the five feline faces watching our every move..

Over the ensuing few weeks they practically took over the place, and friends would pop round to share a beer and watch the kittens.

Eventually we re-homed the kittens but the mother stayed. We called her Kika and she would follow us to the bar. When other customers arrived with dogs she waited on the pool wall for us to come home.

She became quite a local celebrity when she took exception to one small yappy dog and launched an attack from the bar steps. The dog ran away yelping and she returned to the bar victorious.

When she died last year we were heart-broken. I still come home sometimes expecting her to be here.

CAT HEAVEN

There’s a special garden

where cats go when they die,

with vine-wrapped trees for scratching,

soft grass for them to lie,

and holographic mice to chase

for healthy exercise,

and all the fish and cream they need

to live their thousand lives.

CAT - a poem for National Poetry Day

It is National Poetry Day = And here you can read my contribution to the event - posted in memory of Kika,

KIKA                                                       

Cat sprawled boneless

on the softest chair -

scarcely breathing warmth

in a heap of silken fur -

the merest twitch

of tail or whisker

betraying a mouse-filled dream.

Your caressing hand
creeps in to borrow

some of that contentment

and its body lengthens

yielding a wanton belly.

You can lose all the tensions of a day

in the purr of a sleeping cat.

KIKA

KIKA

Kika died yesterday. We're not sure how old she was, but she had lived with us for thirteen and a half years. When we moved into our apartment in June 2000 we hadn't planned on having a cat, but Kika had other ideas.

It was the Sunday before Christmas 2000 and we had invited about 16 people for a full English breakfast. This was a tradition we started in England, where the numbers had grown to over 30 and had to be fed in relays in our tiny cottage.
For our first party here in Tenerife we planned to eat on the terrace, but it would still be a logistical challenge.

At four in the morning we heard noises outside our bedroom window, and when we investigated we discovered this beautiful cat had moved her four kittens into one of our plant pots.
 There they stayed throughout the party - watching us while we watched them, but not moving. The mother cat graciously accepted smoked salmon, bacon and pieces of sausage - clearly she had been domesticated - but the kittens were wild and hissing. Even so, they were obviously not going to be deterred.

That afternoon - slightly merry - I made them a bed out of a washing basket and they moved in properly.
We knew we wanted to keep the mother and we called her Kika. She and her kittens all lived on the terrace, through rainstorms and the fireworks of New Year, and it took several weeks for Kika to persuade her brood to come indoors. She saw off an Alsation which thought it could attack her kittens, and came to us for help when she couldn't round them all up at once after a thunderstorm. We enjoyed their company for a month but then we caught and rehomed the kittens.



Kika stayed. She would wait on the wall of the pool for us to come home,
and then weave through the railing or turn somersaults on the path in front of us,

In her last few months she acquired considerable street cred by sitting on the steps of the local bar while we had a drink, and on one occasion she leapt onto the back of a passing dog, which fled in terror. 

She was a lovely cat, a favourite with the entire neighbourhood, and we will miss her badly. RIP Kika XX

CAT & SALES - (or cat for sale!)

Here she is - Kika the little madam - catching up on her sleep in the sunshine after another night on the tiles.
Lucky for her she can sleep through the loud Italian party on our neighbour's roof terrace.
I could do with a decent kip as well, after the damn cat woke me - yet again - by miaoing outside my window in the wee small hours.

This was the sight that greeted me yesterday morning - behind those telegraph poles should be our mountain, but someone had pinched it.

The sky was clear as a bell today when my daughter Mandy joined me on my walk. Not only that, but the pods of cyclists who rode past us all gave us plenty of walking room and actually smiled - it makes such a difference having a pretty blonde companion!

We are apparently going to have a heat wave later - it may even start tomorrow - so all cardigans and jackets can be washed and put away until autumn. Barbecues such as the one at which I took this photo have been banned to reduce the fire risk - we don't want a repeat of last year's disastrous forest fires.

                                                                   .


Down in Las Galletas the Rebajas - sales - have started, and will  last all through July.

These summer dresses are selling for around ten euros each, which is great if your knees are good enough, but we were drinking our coffee opposite a very posh and expensive ladies' dress shop that displayed this sign.






The OH and I obviously have similarly twisted minds because the same thought struck both of us - they chose an unfortunate way to chop up the word DISCOUNTS!

CLOSE-UP

I have been neglecting my blog lately but I have two good reasons - one is that the A-Z Challenge used up all my blogging energies for a while, and the other is that I am concentrating on finishing the re-write about which I told my readers during the April Blog Slog.

Anyway, just to keep it ticking over, here are a few photos I took this week.

The first one is of course an estrelizia - strelitzia in the UK or Bird of Paradise flower, This is the most perfect one I've seen blooming on my morning walks recently.


I have also been experimenting with close-ups - the first photo is of poinsettia flowers that have appeared on last Christmas's plant which is now bursting into new life.

Then there's one of the OH's cherished chilli plants - this one starts out purple and slowly ripens through yellow and orange to red. The plant can look stunning with all the colours and the white flowers at the same time, but at the moment it looks a bit pathetic. then there's rosemary, a pretty red leaved thing and a succulent - I love the squareish leaves on this one.

 and finally, guess who had to get in the picture?

A FELINE WELCOME

After a debauched two hours drinking and chatting with my daughter - if you can call two glasses of lime & soda debauched - Kika was waiting patiently for me on the swimming-pool wall. (She's in the centre of the photo above the hibiscus.)
Well, I say 'waiting patiently', though there was a definite 'Where have you been?' in her greeting and I think I detected a tapping of paw on the cement wall.




She proceeded to weave her slalom course through the railings - and then she heard the whirring of my camera.

What a poser she is!




Is this my best side?

....  or this?

...... or how about this?

Kika must be at least fourteen years old - she was a stray - but she's a real prima donna, isn't she?

KITCHEN 1900s-style & KIKA KAT.

KITCHEN – The heart of Albie’s home after his adoption in 1925 by George and Dot Smith was the kitchen. Meals were cooked and eaten there, baths taken in front of the range, clothes dried on a wooden airer raised and lowered from the ceiling on a pulley system.

Here is an excerpt from my novel Helter-Skelter that describes it through the eyes of a girl who is used to the many rooms of her own family’s farmhouse.

Bessie’s eyes refused to meet his – they were darting wildly round the small kitchen. Apart from the even smaller scullery beyond the other door, this was clearly the only living-room. With a table in front of the window, a range along one wall and a dresser against another, there was scarcely enough space for an ancient armchair and the rocker in which Missus Smith now sat, nervously pleating her apron. The whole house would fit into the scullery back home.

Dot Smith had an old range - the above picture I found online is very close to my mental image of her kitchen - but it is possible that Bessie’s well-off mother had one of the newer models, like this one advertised in a 100 year-old cookery book I bought at a jumble sale. Apparently “The Linings can be removed by any servant, cleaned and replaced without trouble”. I don't have a servant, and to clean my oven I have to get down on my knees - does anyone know where I can get one one of these?

KIKA KAT 

In December 2000, three days before Christmas, we woke up to find Kika and her four kittens on our terrace. I told the full story of their arrival in last year’s A-Z blog so I won’t repeat it here. (You can pop into my archives and have a look if you're interested). 

Suffice it to say that we re-homed the kittens but Kika stayed. The OH, who professes to hate cats, spoils her rotten. He says it’s because her eyes are blue like his – they also go red if they catch the light at night (no comment!)

Kika waits on the swimming-pool wall when we go out and welcomes us home with a spectacular display of somersaults.  She’s getting on a bit now – sometimes she misjudges a leap through the railing and bangs her head (we hear the clang). She’s knocked a tooth out doing it, so she’s not as pretty as she was, but it hasn't spoiled her appetite.

She feigns not to notice the birds that hop about the garden looking for the combings of her hair we throw out and with which they line their nests. I'm sure the birds know she can't be bothered to chase them.

But – she panics if the door is shut while she’s inside the apartment, she still has mad moments when she races from one end of the terrace to the other after a bougainvillea flower, and she refuses to drink clean water, preferring the mucky brown stuff in the bottom of the plant pots – there’s still a bit of wildness left in her.

CLEVER CAT

When the temperature's in the high 30s you have to take advantage of any patch of shade!
This is Kika under a potted ficus, and she fought off another cat to keep the spot. In Kika's opinion, there isn't enough room in the whole world for other cats, let alone in such a small space as this.

FELINE OLYMPICS

This is Kika.
She is at least thirteen years old - she turned up on our terrace one night in 2000 with four kittens.
The OH, who professes to hate cats, approves of her because she was a very good mother, and because her eyes are pale blue like his.
They also shine red at night. No comment.
Because of her colouring and markings, and because her eyes reflect red rather than white or yellow like other cats, our vetinary friend says she has a lot of Burmese in her genes.

Wherever she came from, she is spoiled rotten, and now she's an old lady she spends even more of her time sleeping, except when something happens. Like today, when one whole trunk of a palm tree fell onto our footpath.
She got so excited about this that she had to do her somersault act, which involves putting the crown of her head on the ground and throwing the rest of her body backwards.





She used to be able to do this in the middle of the path, which she demonstrated every time we came home. This was quite spectacular and caused endless amusement to our neighbours, but now she needs the help of a wall.

Step one - head on the ground and flop sideways.
Step two - push off from the wall with all four legs and roll onto your back.
Step three - land on the other side and then sit up and try to look smug and dignified at the same time.

Should I enter her for the Feline Olympics?

POOR PUSSY

Bit of a panic here this morning.
I open the terrace door and Kika creeps in looking sorry for herself. Normally she shoots through to the kitchen to consume crunchies as if she has been starved for a week. Today she doesn't even go in there, but just jumps onto the back of the sofa for me to make a fuss of her - she has worked out that bending down to stroke her is difficult for me so she gets up where I can reach her.
"What's your problem?" I ask, feeling her chest to see if she's got a temperature. No reply - not even her usual miew (that's more feeble than a miaow). Could it be that she's missing the OH? She's been wandering round like a lost soul for the past two days looking for him.
Then I go outside and there's a patch of blood on her cushion. She's done it again - come through the railing too fast and banged her face.

The triangular spaces are quite big enough for her to get through but if she does it at speed there can be a clang!
A few months ago she actually knocked a tooth out doing this. I managed to persuade her to let me syringe water into the side of her mouth - dehydration can come on rapidly in this climate - and then I cooked a chicken breast and made a paste which also went in via syringe. Three days later she worked out how to eat sideways and all was well again.

On my morning constitutional I have a think - where the hell did I put that syringe? - but when I get back she meets me on the path, saying, "Where have you been? I'm starving." And the crunchies vanish in minutes. The little madam's been putting it on because the OH has abandoned her to my care. Now I think about it, she was two hours late demanding her tea yesterday - her food doesn't taste right if I put it down.