Meet the family

So, If you've come this far on my website, you know I'm a South African - to be exact, something you won't often get from me, a Capetonian who has absconded to the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. I enjoy mucking about with paint and whatever left-overs I can find lying around and I'm horribly close to becoming That Scary Cat Lady...

What you may not yet have realised is that my Christian faith is a very strong, golden thread that holds my life and work and play together. It is the reason I am whole and resilient and able to laugh and cry and hold both my own and the pain of others as we face the long, at times rocky, road through life. My art is the medium through which I have tackled most of my stuff and I am so blessed to have found the door to it again after close to twenty years of it being locked; the contents inaccessible to me. I love to walk beside others perhaps a step or two behind on the road and help them to join me in creative adventures.

Right, That Scary Cat Lady... I suppose The Kits are the children I am blessed with in my childlessness. Pilchard and Deuteronomy joined me in Cape Town in October 2010. They are strangely brothers (think mom may have been a bit of a skank as they look so different!) and they came home with me as 8 week olds after a visit to the SPCA in search of a single silver-tabby Maine Coone... Pilchard brought the (non silver) tabby, Deuteronomy the Main Coone... both brought oodles of personality and a misunderstanding of the way cats should behave: be aloof and unfriendly and don't, whatever happens, let your human-slave know you miss her! Our family was complete. Until Tuggy...

TumTugger (yes, I am a "Cats Musical" and T.S Elliot "Old Possom's Book of Practical Cats" groupie) is not a true domestic cat at all but an African Black-Footed Cat (African Spotted Cat) with a smidge of other. She's beyond quirky indeed!

Tuggy was found abandoned and mildly broken on a dirt road at midnight in the Midlands, while she hates heights - being picked up, climbing trees, jumping - she is the friendliest little soul I have met and suckles up blankets to tractor-purrs... and eats anything she can catch as long as it is a mini: mini-rat, mini-snake, mini-kibble (while tiny themselves, African Spotted Cats are ferocious hunters and eat roughly a fifth of their body weight a day!) Where she was supposed to be a foster child given to me to hand-rear alongside Gellicat and Mistoffelees (two precious little beasties who now live around the corner from us) until she was old enough to find a forever-home elsewhere, she is most definitely now a firm family member a year later... the thought of her not being around would be a missing limb!