Our new adoptees are one-year-old British shorthairs, and they are menaces.
Just a quick update in general, I am currently in the midst of an agonising flare-up of my Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. I don’t know if I’ve caught a virus or something or if it’s just a case of chronic fatigue after such an acutely stressful period, but either way, I’m currently sleeping twelve to sixteen hours a day and struggling to do much more than go between bed, bathroom, and meal table most days, which is why writing and updates are so thin on the ground. I’m sorting out some assistive devices and aids in the flat with the council, and these things will help as well.
In more positive news, I am going to be part of Light Paths, a fantasy romance duo of novelettes coming out in December 2025, published by A Coup of Owls press.
I’ve sorted out the paperback and hardback formatting for An Uncommon Betrothal, which will release on 16th November. The launch will be going ahead at Wharf Chambers in Leeds on the 16th November, for which you can grab tickets for here on Eventbrite. There’ll be books for sale, wine and cheese, readings from me, and so forth.
I have now made all of my eBooks available on my shop, including a starter pack of ten of my most popular novels and novellas for £12, and a bundle of all 45 of my 99p shorts for £25. In September, I’m going to be proofing the paperback and hardback copies, and then I’ll make a limited number available for signed pre-order here on the website. I’ll weigh the books after we’ve finished the proofs, and I’ll be able to put in a calculator for postage through Royal Mail, depending on where you want orders dispatched to.
I’m obviously not sure what pricing is going to look at in the US because of the insane tariff situation, but certainly for shipping to everywhere else – the UK, Ireland, Australia, Aotearoa, Germany, Canada, et cetera – it should be easy enough to arrange.
From then, as well as the roll-out of An Uncommon Betrothal, I’ll start making blocks of particular signed paperbacks available to order on the website, as well as producing some signed bookplates that can be inserted into copies of books you might already own. It’s dependent on sale volume, but I almost certainly won’t be making these available all-year-round as I wouldn’t be able to keep on top of continuous shipping health-wise, so please don’t be worried if a block of books sells out, the plan is to make availability limited but consistent, even if on an irregular schedule.
Onto the Cats
Grieving TomTom was the toughest in the first few days, but it was particularly difficult just because there were no other beasts in the house – part of the importance of having cats in the house is because they help so much with routine and motivation on days where pain and energy are so difficult for me, as well as keeping me company and keeping the flat alive when I’m housebound and can’t go out.
Lorenzo and I talked about the sort of cats we wanted to keep an eye out for after losing TomTom, and because it was upsetting to lose him so quickly, we wanted to bring home some younger cats rather than going right into adopting another senior. TomTom was quite satisfied and content being an only cat and chilling on his own when we were out, and especially because he was so old, he obviously slept quite a lot of the time anyway.
We wanted to make sure this time that we had cats who could spend time together when me and Lorenzo were out, and especially given the flare-up I’m currently trapped in, so they could entertain each other if I’m being boring.
Initially, I saw a bonded pair of cats called Thor and Odin who are three years old and whose dad unfortunately passed away, but they’re used to being outdoor cats and live much closer to the countryside. We live in a flat in the city, and we’ve no space for any sort of outdoor enclosure. When I inquired about the two of them, though, the rescue suggested another bonded pair, who didn’t have names for the time being. The foster looking after them had to keep them in one room to keep them separate from his other cats, and advised they were love bugs.
We brought them home on August 11th – they were unfortunately not yet spayed at the time, but we have since got them spayed.
As soon as we began discussing taking in the boy-girl pair, Lorenzo and I talked about what names we might like for them.
LORENZO: Hm… What’s like, a really transgender name for a female cat?
ME: … Myrtle.
LORENZO, delighted: MYRTLE! Yes. And what name goes with Myrtle? [thinks for a moment] Bertie!
ME: Bertram…
LORENZO: BERTRAM! Myrtle and Bertram!
And thus, the creatures were named.
We obviously have no way to be absolutely certain, but as far as we know, these two are littermates. They’re both British shorthairs – probably (hopefully!) not pure breeds, but we don’t know more than that – and they’re about a year old.
Bertram has a massive head and a huge set of shoulders, a big rib cage, and powerful back legs – his coat is a gorgeous smoky blue colour and it’s very thick and silky. He has bright pumpkin yellow eyes, which, I am informed, are classic of the breed, and as well as having the Cheshire Cat smile which I learned on the Wiki for British shorthairs comes from this breed, his canines stick slightly out from his upper lip on each side, and it’s the cutest thing in the world.
Myrtle is half her brother’s size, and she has gorgeous ginger-white marbling through her own mostly blue coat. Her eyes are a pale green, although they can appear blue in the right light, and she’s got a lovely split of colour down her chin, pale ginger on one side and blue on the other. Her coat is much thinner and less dense than her brother’s, and she has a shorter tail in proportion to her body that has a permanent curl up toward her little head. She also has a Cheshire smile, though it’s not as pronounced as on Bertie.
As of their vet weigh-ins for their respective neuters, Bertie is 4.3kg and Myrtle is 2.2kg, which is an absurd size difference, but apparently British shorthairs are infamous for differences between males and females. Upon receiving pictures of them, our friend GG said, “I didn’t want to assume the gender of your cats, but they have Pixar-level gender dimorphism going on,” and I hate to say it, but she really is right about that.
In terms of personality, they are very different beasts.
Myrtle, within an hour or two of being released into the flat, was confident and inquisitive and genuinely quite cheerful about her new circumstances. She has a tendency, when she’s surprised or curious about a noise, to stand up on her hind legs and meerkat at the source of it, and the first few times we ran the dishwasher and washing machine, she was meerkatting. She’s patient enough about being picked up, but she doesn’t care to be rocked or cuddled, and she for some reason gets spooked when you lean in to kiss her. She’s absolutely a lap cat, though, and is often happy to jump up and get pats and strokes and wobbles, and she’s happiest when she’s lying on somebody’s chest.
She has a purr like a little motor engine, with a bit of a trill to it, and she purrs very easily, loves to have her chest rubbed and her chin and cheeks scratched and played with.
Bertie is a much shyer boy. He’s definitely warmed up the longer he’s been here, and since his castration he has absolutely seemed a lot more mellow. He’s curious about things, but he feels more confident when one of us is with him or when Myrtle is right behind him – the extent to which he relies on Myrtle for emotional comfort and physical back-up is really quite funny, given that he’s literally twice her size. Both are very food-motivated, but Bertie is especially interested in new sniffs and foodstuffs, and he’s a lot more interested in occasionally being picked up and rocked and smooched. He’s less confident for now about being in your lap or up against your side, but I think that’s still from being nervous about us being bigger than him, as he is slowly beginning to hop up into bed and sleep or cuddle with us – the places he most likes to ask for and receive affection are actually the landing or the bathroom floor, where he’ll collapse at your feet and curl around your foot or ankle and roll over and over as you pet and scratch his belly and under his chin.
His purr is less common, but it’s incredibly resonant and comes from deep in his big barrel chest – it lacks the trill that Myrtle’s has, and is just really rich and really loud and has a lot of palpable vibration to it.
Myrtle rarely miaows, and when she does, it’s the tiniest little squeak you can imagine – she normally only does it when she REALLY really wants something and you’ve taken ages to give it to her. Bertie vocalizes constantly. He does this pigeon brrrr noise whenever he can’t find Myrtle – and he’s not great at fucking looking for her on top of being a little thick, so this is very often – and whenever he’s bored, or lonely, or he doesn’t know where we are, or there’s a noise he doesn’t trust, or anything else that stresses him out, he wails and screams and whines and moans, and again, because of his big barrel chest, he can produce such incredibly loud noises. He initially wailed every night, because he was in a new house and it was dark and he didn’t know what was going on, but to be fair, so did TomTom!
As the days and weeks have passed, his vocalisations of distress have become far less constant, and mostly we just hear his pigeon noises when he and Myrtle are chasing one another about or playing hide and seek and he doesn’t know where she is.
When Bertie initially came into the flat he was hiding in a lot of corners and secreting himself about the place, and especially given that the two of them were unspayed when we brought them home, boy was he pissing.
I will say about our new son is that even when he still had his balls, he produced piss with a relatively low stink level compared to many tomcats, but it was still piss. I think for him there was a lot of scary things in the flat – not just the new noises and smells and sights, but also the fact that he could smell TomTom even with us having cleaned up and hoovered and such. With the two of them having been confined in a small room together with lots of other cats just beyond the door as well as outside, I think it was rather overwhelming to be in a much bigger space and to not be certain where any other cats were.
I also think that part of the reason they were so calm and snuggly with their foster when confined to one bedroom was because they didn’t actually have much space to zoom around, and they were obviously comforting one another with the stress, and suddenly they had lots and lots of space, and carpet and tile and laminate, and stairs, and a ladder up the wall, and a big big window, and and and!
As the days went by, he did keep pissing about the place, mostly on the rug in the hallway, and on the places where TomTom’s and our smells were strongest – the sofa, the bed, and then TomTom’s scratching ball toy thing – but did get a little bit more confident and stopped flinching and running and hiding over everything.
He did, unfortunately, proceed to keep grabbing Myrtle and pinning her down and trying to fuck her, as far as we could make out. We were originally going to have them spayed a week after getting them on the same day, but I was worried about her getting pregnant or potentially being pregnant already, so I moved her spay up to the Monday rather than the Thursday.
In retrospect, I would make different choices.
When I got Myrtle home the first day, I was on my own and was already struggling with the flare-up I’m currently trapped in, and within seconds of getting her into the flat she had sprinted across the room, ripped her Elizabethan collar off, and had hopped up onto the nearest wall shelf.
These are two young cats, and they don’t have the large body of built-up knowledge and experience that TomTom had, but they do know that I’m disabled and that I can’t chase them around or reach up to get them from high spaces – or crawl under low spaces – the way that Lorenzo can, and they absolutely take advantage of this. The above is how she looked at me once she got out of her collar, and then I had to make a sock to contain her instead until we got her a proper body sock.
She adjusted remarkably well to the two make-shift body socks I made for her, but she struggled a lot with the full babygro, I think because it compressed her back hair and especially the bit of her spine above her tail too much. Once we were satisfied she wasn’t trying to rip it off, we took her front arms out of it so that she could wear it as the awful little pink brief she’s posing in like a lingerie model, and she was quite happy then.
Bertie, unfortunately, was not, and was leaping on top of her at every available opportunity, meaning we had to try to keep them separate.
Taking her to get spayed on her own – because they didn’t have time to take both of them in on the Monday – meant that Bertram didn’t recognise her scent and smell once we brought her back, and we then had to deal with the mounting behaviour ramping up significantly because we had non-recognition aggression thrown into the mix. He was also incredibly freaked out by the body sock we put her in to stop her getting at her wound site.
I was literally in tears after initially bringing her home and she managed to get away from me, because it was so hard to keep the two of them apart. My flat is two floors with the bedroom and living room/kitchen all contained in one room that share a mezzanine balcony, and on the wall were a series of scratching posts and shelves for cats to climb; there’s then the hallway, which has a spiral staircase, and the bathroom.
Myrtle is a cat, and cannot be told that she shouldn’t run or jump or LEAP FROM THE MEZZANINE BALCONY TWELVE FEET ONTO THE GROUND because she is recovering from surgery. I tried a dozen different ways to block off the stair shelves, but either Bertie or Myrtle or both would keep trying to get down them. Because of his rough mounting behaviour, I had to keep the two idiots separate, but they both have extreme FOMO and neither of them like to be alone, so wherever I was, they wanted to be, and that made it so hard to keep them separate.
When Lorenzo came home, he undrilled the shelves and scratchers off the wall for a few days until after he’d been spayed and we’d gone through about a week of keeping them separate and slowly reintroducing them to one another whilst redirecting him whenever he attempted mounting behaviour.
We’re now mostly able to let them play together with limited supervision. What’s unfortunate about these two morons is that they like to play together extremely roughly. He is very much one of those insecure cats that likes to bully so that he feels better, but it’s not just him – she also likes to play rough and will tackle him really quite hard, it’s just that she’s half his size and weight, so it doesn’t make as much of an impact. I really don’t think Bertie, in contrast, is cognizant of just how big he is compared to her, and how much it hurts when he fucking stands on her head or knocks her for six.
Myrtle, when she’s had enough, will generally scurry away and go get in a crevice or hide somewhere or go upstairs, and especially when she’s just been hissing at him because he’s hurting her, it’s easy to go, oh no, he’s being so mean… And then seconds later she’ll not just seek him out again, but leap on top of him from a height and knock his skull into the ground.
And genuinely, watching their body language, I am confident that except for when he’s hurting her a bit too much, they are having fun together, they do want to be together, they do want to play. It’s not them fighting or fearful of each other, they’re not being aggressive, they are having fun.
Bertie in the first few weeks was resource guarding a lot, especially guarding their litter boxes, the main walkways, water, food, et cetera, and he’s eased off a lot in doing this as he’s been in the space for longer, and especially after being made our household eunuch. Because she’s so incredibly confident no matter what and he’s a nervous little weirdo, he does have a tendency to try to dominate her, but that is different to the two of them playing together.
We obviously don’t know what sort of household they were in before they were with the foster we adopted them from, but I just don’t think they’re used to being able to run around and play together like this, and at least for a month or two before coming to us, they weren’t able to do this sort of thing, possibly for longer than that. I think the two of them are unfortunately just working out their boundaries with one another and figuring out how hard is too hard to hit each other now that they’ve got space and freedom to work up speed, and it’s going to take a while for them to settle on an appropriate middle ground. In the meantime, it’s feline WWE in this bitch.
Myrtle’s favourite things are:
- drugs. oh, she fucking loves drugs. she loves catnip. she loves silver vine.
- watching birds on the TV, and birds out of the window
- shadows and reflections of light – she loves to zero-in on reflections from our phones or the fridge and scurry after them
- fireworks – I closed the blinds the other day because one of our neighbours was setting off fireworks basically right outside our window, and she gave me a dirty look before getting onto the windowsill to watch them
- purring on top of my chest
Bertram’s favourite things are:
- wrapping all four of his paws around someone’s foot whilst they’re in the bathroom and then rolling over and over again and getting pets in the bathroom
- this £1.49 fish kick toy I bought from the Yorkshire cat rescue
- standing up and peering into the toilet to look at our piss, which is awful. even now he’s no longer pissing everywhere himself, he remains a passionate pissfiend
- a mouse toy on a string which he is so so obsessed with
- watching us do DIY – he likes to just sit and watch with interest whatever we’re doing, like loading the dishwasher or when Lorenzo was taking down the shelves
Despite being frightened of various random things, neither of them are remotely frightened of the vacuum cleaner, the drill, Lorenzo’s coffee grinder, or similar loud noises. Bertie isn’t keen on fireworks, but neither of them is really that frightened of the big bangs and noises. They understandably hate our neighbour’s children that scream and shout in the corridors and next door, but so did TomTom, and honestly, we don’t love that shit either.
They both have a tendency after they’ve caught the mouse toy to waddle off with it, dragging the handle behind them, and it’s so incredibly cute, especially when Bertie does it.
They both love the bathroom – Bertie likes to hang out in the sink and in the bath, and he will occasionally come see us and we’ll discover that he’s damp, because he sat down in the bath or sink after one of us showered or washed our hands. Despite being scared of his own shadow, he also is happy enough to be in the room whilst one of us is showering, and isn’t scared of the water or the noise of it.
They both also like to be brushed, which I’m thankful for, because good God, do these kids produce some mad fucking hair. I just kissed Bertie on the cheek a bunch of times while he purred and purred, and unfortunately so much of his fucking hair floated up and into my mouth, so he’s just had brushies, which led to more purring.
Despite being very food-motivated, neither of them is very good at their dry food puzzles just yet, although they both quite like the lickmat, so I’m going to get some more of those. They also both like to be tall, although Bertie is not an especially adept climber, so we’re going to put some more shelves and ladders and tall scratchers around the place, which I think will absolutely help with his anxiety problems.
We also definitely want to get some more automatic toys and bigger toys that Bertie especially can grab and bunny kick to his heart’s desire, as well as puzzles that will really grip Myrtle and get her focused.
They obviously enjoy most of all to run around and zoom, and once they’re done zooming, they love to be cuddled.
We love them very much, and we’re very happy to have them home with us, and I’m excited to share updates on their misbehaviours and silly activities just the same way I did with TomTom.
Thank you again to everyone who helped with the vet bills for TomTom’s euthanasia, it helped immensely, and thank you for your patience whilst I’m ill, too. I’m hoping to work on some new projects soon!
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