Tinker, aka Tinkerbell, joined us shortly after Mowgli, partly as a friend for him whilst we were at work and partly because I'd got the kitten bug again.

She was just a "cat" cat - didn't have any real idiosyncrasies, but was very sweet and cuddly. She loved snuggling up at night under the bedclothes - a real furry hot water bottle. Many were the nights when

I slept on six inches of the edge of the bed, because the rest was taken up by hubby, our two daughters and Tinkerbell. She loved sharing sandwiches with me....a gentle paw pulling my hand down so she could have a share of my snack. (It didn't matter to her what was in it!)

Her biggest adventure happened when there were builders working in the empty house next door to us and, over a Bank Holiday weekend, she disappeared. After two days of frantically rattling cat biscuits and calling her we were beginning to despair. Then I was coming back from the shops and I thought I heard a faint mew coming from somewhere. Surely she couldn't be in the empty house next door?? Oh, yes she was....so we broke in the back (as we knew the builders wouldn't be back for at least another two days) but couldn't find her. We finally realised that the sound was coming from under the floor upstairs in one of the bedrooms. We managed to lift a floorboard up and after a lot of coaxing we got her out, hungry, thirsty and frightened, but none the worse for her adventure.

The funny bit to this story was that after we took her home, where we had been doing some DIY of our own, my husband had replaced one of our floorboards just before we were getting ready to go out. "Where's Smudge?" I asked. Yes, you've got it...we'd shut Smudge under our floorboards!!.

She was a wonderful cat and we shared our lives for many years, until she became the victim of cat 'flu as an old lady and passed on to that big cattery in the sky.

 

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