Name: My name is Ginge, in honour of my lovely orange fur, although the small humans tried to call me Malteser. What!?
Where do you live and how long have you lived there? I live in Cleveland and have lived here for 22 years after being found when I was five weeks old, according to the vet.
What’s your favourite activity? My favourite activity is sleeping and my favourite sleeping place is tucked in under the neck of my favourite cream labrador, Rami, in her trampoline bed. The other labrador, a black one named Gemma, doesn’t like it so much. (Actually, she hates it but is very tolerant.)
Your most treasured toy? I don’t have any toys, just two dogs to keep in line.
Your favourite food? My favourite food is spaghetti bolognaise and I often stand on my back legs in the kitchen servery in front of one of my humans to make sure it is being made correctly, and that I get my share or more. When our meal is given to us each day, I have trained my dogs to wait until I have checked it out. A swift swipe of my paw to their nose works wonders!
What’s your worst habit? I have been letting my humans know over my 22 years that I AM AN INDOOR CAT, but they won’t listen to me, so I have to sneak indoors when they are not looking.
Your favourite place? My favourite places to sleep are on a small brick wall in the front garden or snuggling up with my dogs when it’s cold.
Your best friend? Now that all the kittens have grown and left home, my very best friend is the female human who feeds me all the things I like, and when the “Big Fella” is out of an evening, she lets me sleep on the end of the bed. As soon as he comes home, he opens the door and, with great dignity, I deign to go out and sleep with the dogs.
Do you have any funny or embarrassing stories? When I was about 16, the vet was checking me out and said I had a tumour in my head but as I had no pain he would not do anything about it. The embarrassing thing about this tumour is that it causes me to faint. I fell down the stairs a few times and wondered how I got there and another time I fell into the dogs’ drinking water, which is a huge plastic tub. Labradors do drink a lot of water. My humans couldn’t work out why I looked like I had been swimming.
They lost me once after I had had a short stay at a cat motel, and we were on our way home in the car. They stopped to talk to someone at the football club so I decided to get out a go for a walk and they couldn’t find me. Our house is about half a mile from the club, and it took me three days to find it. The family were very happy.
What do people love most about you? What do they love most about me? I don’t know, after 22 years I am part of the furniture. One of the humans keeps saying to me: “When you go, cat, that’s it, no more cats”, so I’m not going.
