R.I.P. Stiletto, and the unfinished portrait, 26th May

Stiletto was a hard cat to draw: in her last year she had become very thin and I took to feeding her up on what she liked: the most basic of Sainsbury’s cat food. If she saw me looking in her direction she would come up and demand tins of cheap cat food (as opposed the the expensive healthy biscuits she had had all her life). It was like an elderly lady who discovered, in her eighties, the existence of cream buns.

She put on weight again for a while, which was good, but I hardly ever got a good sketch of her because she wasn’t content to sit still if she saw me looking at her.

So this is an unfinished sketch of a cat who, as you will have guessed from the tone of this post, is no longer with us. From unpromising beginnings (being found with her sister dumped on a rubbish tip), she has been the survivor. We took those two cats in, along with a black and white boy as well. That was in London, and they were house-cats then as it was never safe there, outside. We moved to Somerset 12 years ago or more, and this most timid of creatures took to the outside world the first of the three, ate up all the moles in next door’s garden (earning herself some quantity of tuna from a grateful neighbour in the process), and never looked back.

But I never made a satisfactory drawing of her, so this one will have to suffice: Stiletto, unfinished…. She was 17. She had a good life and I like to think she passed on tales of the world she had known to the Ginger Boys, who will remember her.