An important rule about cats

From the time I was born, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents at their beautiful cliff-side house up island. They had an orange cat named Timoshenko (no, I never found out why they named a perfectly ordinary long-haired ginger cat after a famous Russian general, but grandpa was a bit of a leftie), with whom I was immediately enamoured. By the time I had learned to walk, I would go into a kind of ecstasy and chase Timmo around the house yelling "pussypussypussypussy..."

No matter how many times Grandma would say the cat didn't like it, I simply could not stop myself. Timmo never scratched me though, that I can recall.

But that cat didn't die until I was in my early 20s and it never, ever came near me.