The Amazing Life of Cats by Candida Baker

get more serious. First it was one night away, then, a few weeks later, two nights. I reverted to locking her in again, but she literally broke the window in her efforts to get out, and so I resigned myself to the fact that she must be free to come and go, whatever it might mean.
    What it meant was that one day she went, and did not come back.
    We called into houses in the area, put up notices, put an ad in the paper, all to no avail. But then a week or two after Ghia’s disappearance Anna and her dad were driving down the road towards his house when Anna saw Ghia shoot across the road. She rang and told me and I hightailed it up to the house nearest to the spot. The people there told me they had been away for a few days and she may have taken shelter there as they had seen her when they got home; but they were back, and they had dogs, so although I asked them if they would ring if they saw her again, I was pretty sure she would not show up.
    And that was the case. My lovely Ghia had disappeared from our lives and the best that I could hope was that she had shown her loving self to another family and been adopted, and not been taken by a predator, or bitten by a snake, or left too long to fend for herself.
    A few weeks after her disappearance a neighbour told me that some local people had found a ginger cat and thought it might be mine. In my optimism I decided they didn’t know their tortoiseshell from their ginger and grabbed one of the very smart cat carriers I had bought for Ghia and Tiny. But when I got to the house what I found was a very large, very domesticated male ginger cat. The people whose holiday house he had ended up at were back off to the city later that day, and had no idea what to do with this large gentleman who had walked up their driveway and sat down.
    Since I had the carrier I said I would take him to the vet and see if he was microchipped; if not, I would advertise him and put notices up—at least I might be able to reunite Ginger (as he was, of course, immediately named) with his family as I had not been reunited with Ghia.
    Unfortunately he was not microchipped, and even more unfortunately I discovered that in Ginger I had another problem child on my hands. Number one, he didn’t take to Tiny, and despite her friendliness he made it perfectly clear to her and us that he expected that she should vacate her family home in favour of him. He was also a cuddle bully. If you were sitting on the sofa, he would leap on top of you, pin you down with a giant paw on each shoulder, and proceed to lick your chin. If you registered a protest, he swiped you with his paw! In addition, he loved to spring surprise attacks on anyone who seemed vulnerable, latching himself ferociously onto your legs, particularly when you were walking back from the shower to the bedroom.
    He was also the most fearsome killer I had encountered since the Siamese cats of my childhood, and I was soon reminded why I hadn’t wanted another cat in my life. Attaching a bell to his collar made no difference at all, and I frequently opened my bedroom door in the morning to be greeted by small corpses, mostly (thank goodness) headless rats rather than anything more environmentally sensitive, but enough of them to make a person quite queasy.
    What was I to do? The first ad I placed produced no calls. Tiny had meanwhile been sent down the road to live with my ex and the children when they were there; although I missed her being with me, she seemed to have settled in well, but it was not a permanent solution. It was Ginger that needed to go.
    The first thing was to teach him manners, and he was such a large cat—more lion than cat in some respects—that I set about it in a rather more abrupt and brutal way than I would normally use: I began to establish clear boundaries. He leapt, I threw him. He scratched, I threw him. If he sat on my lap and swiped, I hit him and threw him. Within about two weeks I had the world’s best behaved cat on my