Puss in boots - and other fabulous felines

Now that I have my pro account with Flickr!, I really must do something about my tragic collection of photo albums. Most of them date back to the early 70s and were the then-innovative, original plastic sheets (and no-glue) technology. Sadly about ten years ago, most of the pages have oxidised badly - and many pages have either lost their self-adhesion, or refuse to give up the photos now seemingly bonded to the pages.

Here are three favourite cat photos!




Tiger-striped Dugil (left) was born in late 1978, and moved with me from the family home in Kingsgrove to my new Lakemba flat in late 1984. He lived a much longer life than his alley cat siblings, whom I'd tried to catch first, mainly because he was a dead ringer to my first cat, Meggsie. Named for the newspaper of the Guild Teachers College ("Dugil" is an anagram of "Guild"), Dugil loved playing "Puss in Boots", or sitting on any important sheets of paper!

Meggsie (right) was Dugil's older brother from an earlier litter. Meggsie ended up in my care in 1976 as a two-day old kitten, and was a traditional ginger tabby whom I raised on an eyedropper (during the crucial Higher School Certificate examinations). He survived our family's move from Rockdale to the new house in Kingsgrove, but lasted only three months before being skittled on Stoney Creek Road at age fourteen months. He's seven weeks old in that photo.

The black and white photo (below) illustrates a familiar Winter scenario, which we always called "frying your eyeballs". My younger brother would stretch out on the floor in front of the heater, preventing the rest of us on the couches from most of the benefits of the radiated heat. Mac, our German Shepherd/Boxer cross, would sneak between Brian and the heater to "fry his eyeballs". And then Meggsie would slide into place in front of Mac, to "fry his eyeballs".