Popular Culture Review 29.2
sumption of responsibility . But I was also lonely . Living in a strange town where I knew no one at all , comforted by the gentle purring , their demands for food , arriving after work to a house where things lived and which started being home instead of my flat because of it . I worked abroad and gave custody of my three cats Pandora , Tabbitha and Houdini to my parents , then didn ’ t have the heart to take them back again . Pandora , a jet black stray I had taken from a shelter when no one else would because she was aloof and no longer a kitten , would not let my father out of her sight . Her independence was extinguished by love for him . She had never so much as sat on my lap , but she slept on my dad ’ s bed , curled up on him when he was reading .
I married and found out I could not have children not long afterwards . Both inveterate cat lovers , my husband and I decided to adopt a cat . But we didn ’ t have a proper garden and we were turned down by every rescue shelter we approached . Through Facebook we met a woman who rescued unwanted , imperfect pedigree cats . There was something close to serendipity in our meeting . I felt defective myself , unfit for purpose , a sterile useless thing , and I took the Bengal cat to my heart , because , although he looked more physically striking than any cat I had ever owned , he too had been declared not up to the task he had been bred for .
Ivanhoe was shocking in his beauty , ceaselessly demanding , vocal and interactive , he attached himself to our slightly ramshackle lives and when we moved to the Middle East came with us in a Sherpa bag without complaint .
Ivanhoe ’ s presence seemed to act as an unspoken signal . Within days we were haunted by street cats . A heavily pregnant tortoiseshell we named Gypsy , a ginger boy we called Brutus , a scruffy white stray I fancifully called Launcelot ,
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