cats – Debbie Young's Writing Life

Party Animals

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Debbie Young

In my Young By Name column in the May 2021 edition of the Tetbury Advertiser, I was anticipating my kittens’ post-lockdown lives

photo of two kittens on fleecy blanket — The perfect lockdown companions

Like all pets acquired in the pandemic, our two kittens, Bingo and Bertie, are starting to notice big changes in their little world. Until now they’ve led a very sheltered life. Born and raised in a Cats Protection League pen, the only humans they saw before they came to live with us were their foster parents.

Joining a household of three people – my husband, my daughter and I – more than doubled their human acquaintance.

They are used to seeing more cats than humans. When they first came to live with us a couple of days before first lockdown, our calico cat Dorothy was already in residence. Three neighbours’ cats, with wanton disregard for social distancing guidelines, treat our garden as their territory.

Open House

As far as Bingo and Bertie are concerned, cats rule our cottage.

We daily prove our subservience by leaping up from our armchairs to open the French doors whenever they want to go in or out of the garden. (And yes, they do have a catflap.) We spend more hours observing their antics than watching television.

Their friends sneak into our house for a snack when they think we’re not around. Often, when we are in another room with Dorothy, Bertie and Bingo, we hear crunching noises in the kitchen, followed by the rattle of the catflap.

Up to Tricks

kittens curled up asleep in base of plant pot — In their early days, the kittens moved so fast it was hard to get a photo that was not blurred – until they were asleep.

We’re wondering what they’ll get up to when, post lockdown, they have the house to themselves. It seems Bingo is already planning ahead for a more independent life. The brains of the trio, he has for some time been paying a great deal of attention to the bolt at the bottom of the French doors that give onto the patio. If his paws had opposable thumbs, he’d have flung the doors open by now.

He’s also been practising his party tricks. The other day, startled by Dorothy jumping out of the wardrobe, he executed a perfect back flip. If my daughter hadn’t been with me as witness, I wouldn’t have believed my eyes. He landed so neatly on all four paws that I wanted to hold up cards saying “10.0”, like the judges used to do for ice-skaters. I have never seen a cat turn 360 degrees from a standing start. The only animal I’ve seen perform that trick was battery-powered, a toy dog my grandfather bought from a street trader.

Bertie is equally athletic, easily jumping four or five feet into the air when pursuing an airborne insect. In relation to his height, this is about the equivalent to me leaping from the doorstep onto our cottage roof.

Of course, like all good pet owners, we’re conscious that animals acquired during lockdown may suffer separation anxiety as normal life returns. But part of me can’t help wondering whether for our cats the first day they have the house to themselves, the party will just be starting.

Like to read the whole of the Tetbury Advertiser for free online? Click here.

In Other News

Sneak preview of the paperback cover for my new novel, out on 23rd May

While we’re on the subject of cats, fans of Sophie Sayers’ black kitten, Blossom, will be pleased to know that she puts in an appearance in Murder Lost and Found, the new Sophie Sayers Village Mystery which launches on Sunday 23rd May.

cover of The Clutch of Eggs — Blossom plays a pivotal role in this little novelette

Since Sophie adopted Blossom in Springtime for Murder (in which the main storyline revolves around cats), any new story I write about Wendlebury Barrow would not feel complete without Blossom. She plays a critical part in my novelette, The Clutch of Eggs, too.

All of my fiction books have seasonal themes, and I’m glad to be launching a summery book at this time of year. It doesn’t always work out so neatly – I had to launch the Christmassy Stranger at St Bride’s in midsummer, because that was when it was ready! And during the coming summer I will be writing the wintry Scandal at St Bride’s, the third in the St Bride’s School series, which begins in January. Sometimes I feel so out of synch with the seasons that I might as well be working in the fashion industry.

Pre-order the ebook of Murder Lost and Found to have it land on your ereading device on launch day (23rd May).
Order the paperback from Amazon from launch day onwards (link not yet available), or ask your local bookshop to order it in for you, quoting ISBN 9781911223719. Within the next couple of weeks, they should be able to order it from their usual stockist – if not, they are welcome to contact me and I’ll be happy to supply them direct.

Personal life, Writing

The Comfort of Blankets

Posted on March 3, 2021March 3, 2021 by Debbie Young

It’s good to welcome back the trusty Tetbury Advertiser for its first issue of 2021. Its February issue was cancelled due to lockdown, so as there is always a double issue for December/January, my March column was the first I’d written for them since November. Normal service has now been resumed – hurrah!

The Tetbury Advertiser springs back into action

Although I don’t remember having a comfort blanket as a child, the older I get, the more I appreciate the concept. During this strange last year, when any source of comfort has been welcome, three kinds of blanket have caught my attention.

The Weighted Blanket

Ever since secondary school, I’ve enjoyed knitting and crocheting blankets. From the age of 11, we were bribed by house points into knitting six-inch squares. Our squares were made up into blankets, and sixth form volunteers took them to the local care home. We made so many blankets that we imagined the residents swamped under their weight.

Bertie’s blanket is scaled down to suit him, as is his little bed

But I need not have worried: these days, weighted blankets are all the rage. They incorporate tiny bits of ballast to achieve the same heft as a cat on your lap. (That’s my chosen measure, not the designers’ – it sounds more appealing than saying 5kg.)

Originally developed to calm people with autism or anxiety, weighted blankets are scientifically proven to reduce blood pressure and heart rate.

According to the promotional blurb of the one I’ve just bought, they also “stimulate deep-touch pressure to release feel-good endorphins typically obtained from a long embrace”.

In the no-hug zone of Covid lockdown, no wonder weighted blanket sales have surged. (We bought ours from kudd.ly.)

Bertie tests our new weighted blanket and is asleep within seconds

The Temperature Blanket

Dorothy finds brushed-cotton duvet covers equally satisfactory

Another recent discovery for me is the temperature blanket, created through the course of a calendar year. At the start of January, you choose a time and place to record the daily temperature and a colour palette to reflect each thermometer reading. Knitting a couple of rows a day in the right colour for that day’s temperature provides a dramatic visual record of the seasons.

If where you live the climate barely changes all year – the Canaries or Costa Rica, perhaps – choose a smaller scale to avoid a monochrome result, eg a different colour for each degree rather than for every five.

Not a problem that will trouble the knitters of Tetbury.

A fleece blanket also goes down well with Bingo and Bertie

The Lockdown Blanket

The lockdown blanket (not to be confused with the blanket lockdown) is the cousin of the temperature blanket. Again, working a few rows each day provides an oasis of meditative calm, as well as a record of a specific timeframe. Make from oddments you have in the house or choose a colour scheme that will lift your spirits.

For my lockdown blanket, I channelled the Scottish Highlands. Every time I picked up my needles and yarn the colour of mountains and glens, I was transported hundreds of miles north without leaving the safety of my home.

Because sometimes there isn’t a cat around when you need one. This is my Scottish panda, bought at Edinburgh Zoo. Beneath my lockdown blanket, he’s wearing a kilt in the official panda tartan!

As we flip the calendar over to March, and with my first dose of vaccine in my arm, I’m looking forward to using a different kind of blanket altogether, once we’re all allowed out to play again: the picnic blanket. But in the meantime, I’m ordering another two weighted blankets to stop the family fighting over the first one.

So much for its powers of stress relief!

Click here to read the whole of the Tetbury Advertiser online for free.

Bertie is fond of symmetry

In Other News

Another cover image by my talented father

cover of Young by Name — The first volume covered 2010-2015.

In the absence of a February edition of the Tetbury Advertiser, I took time out to collate all my columns from the previous five years into book form. Still Young By Name is the sequel to the first volume, Young By Name, which was published five years ago (no surprises there!)

Reading through my archive of columns, it struck me what an extraordinary five years we’ve just lived through, including the rise and fall of President Donald Trump, what seemed like the interminable process of Brexit, and of course the arrival of Covid-19.

I was slightly spooked when I discovered I’d written the first column in this new collection as I was recovering from flu.

The cover of the new book features another slice from my father’s rural watercolour painting that I used on the first book in this series. I do love the composition and calm mood of this painting.

I did wonder fleetingly whether it was wise to have a picture of a cow’s bottom beside the title, but it made me smile, and If it makes others laugh too, that’s fine by me!

The launch date for the ebook is 21st March (my parents’ 68th wedding anniversary, which seemed a good omen), and the paperback should be out shortly too. In the meantime, if you’re in the UK and it’s a Kindle ebook you’re after, just click here to pre-order. Other buying links to follow in my next post.

Personal life, Writing

Kitten Therapy

Posted on July 22, 2020July 27, 2020 by Debbie Young

During the early part of lockdown, the Tetbury Advertiser furloughed itself for a couple of issues (May and June). With content that is events-led, reporting on recent events and anticipating imminent ones, it seemed a sensible step. However, it’s good to see it return for its summer issue (a joint July/August edition, for which I wrote this piece about our new kittens, acquired just before we began to self-isolate. As ever, you can read the whole issue online – here’s the link for the July/August edition.

(I also wrote about kittens for the June issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News, and I posted that article on my blog here last month- so apologies if this sounds familiar!)

There’s nothing like the acquisition of kittens to lift the spirits, and ours couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

We arranged in February with the Stroud Cats’ Protection League to adopt a pair of boys as soon as they were old enough to leave their mother. This took us to Saturday 21^st March, a pleasingly auspicious date on two counts: the first day of spring and my parents’ anniversary (67 years and counting).

Silver Linings

Back in February, little did we know that collecting the kittens from the kindly foster-carer would be our last family outing before lockdown. Ever the optimist, I soon realised that enforced confinement at home would give us the best chance of bonding with our new arrivals, especially for our daughter, who would otherwise have been at school all day.

photo of Bertie with his head in a mug of tea — The kittens share many of our simple domestic pleasures. Bertie is especially enjoys fishing for teabags.

Once home, inspecting the adoption papers revealed another good omen: the kittens had been born on my birthday. This happened also to be the date our senior cat, Dorothy, a former stray, adopted us seven years ago. We called her Dorothy after the character in the Wizard of Oz who finds herself unexpectedly far from home. We named Bertie and Bingo, both boys, after the skittish, privileged and generally irresponsible young men in PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories.

Dorothy, my personal assistant at my writing desk – where the kittens are not allowed, for fear of the ensuing chaos

Bertie and Bingo, after spending the first nine weeks of their lives in a pen (albeit an ample one), were initially content to keep to one room in our house. Since my husband built his room a couple of years ago, we had, with a singular lack of imagination, referred to it simply as “the extension”. Now I think of it as The Drones’ Club, which is where Bertie Wooster and chums take their meals in the Jeeves novels, often leaving chaos in their wake.

Advised to keep the kittens indoors for a couple of weeks, we eventually let them into our enclosed garden. We kept them on tiny harnesses to slow them down until they’d got their bearings. Bertie and Bingo do everything at high speed, unlike our senior cat, Dorothy, who lopes around languidly like the Pink Panther.

Off the Leash

After a few days we allowed them to roam at will, gradually expanding their territory and surprising us with their feats of athleticism. They share a talent for scaling vertical walls with the power and grace of Spiderman. Bingo has proven a dab paw at swingball, which he sees as a scaled-up version of their scratching post, which happens to be topped by a ball on a string. Bertie prefers the trampoline, climbing to the top of the netting surround with ease.

photo of kitten in tree — Bingo and Bertie both love to climb the fruit trees in our cottage garden

It’s only when one of the kittens tries to squeeze into the cardboard box that used to be big enough for both of them that we realise how much they have grown. I haven’t yet dared step on the bathroom scales to see whether lockdown has had the same effect on me.

(The next issue of the Tetbury Advertiser will be out in September, as they also publish a double issue for July/August.)

Cats and Kittens in my Stories…

cover of Stranger at St Bride's — Spot the cat! McPhee appears on the cover of both my St Bride’s novels

As a cat lover, it’s perhaps inevitable that cats and kittens feature in my novels, often serving to move the plot along and adding new dimensions to the characters.

In Springtime for Murder, the fifth Sophie Sayers Village Mystery, Sophie acquires a kitten, while investigating the strange goings-on at the Manor House, where Bunny Carter, a sparky elderly lady, lives with a houseful of cats and her cat-averse daughter.
(Buying links: buy the ebook online here, buy the paperback online here, or order from your local bookshop quoting ISBN 978-1911223344.)

In Stranger at St Bride’s, the first in my St Bride’s School series, McPhee, the headmistress’s cat and constant companion, joins forces with Gemma to try to drive away the unwelcome stranger, with comical results.
(Buying links: Buy the ebook online, buy the paperback online or order from your local bookshop quoting ISBN 979 19 11 223 597.)

(I’ve just realised that in both cases the cats are black – I suppose that’s what comes of writing mystery stories!)

Reading

Reading Tag #1: In Which Robinson Crusoe is “It”

Posted on October 18, 2019October 18, 2019 by Debbie Young

As a long-standing Desert Island Discs fan, I can’t help speculating Crusoe’s choice of music

If you’ve ever looked something up on Wikipedia, I bet you’ve found yourself clicking on a link in one article that takes you to another. Then in the second article, you find another that leads you to a third… and before you know it, an hour’s flown by.

It’s especially easy to play reading tag online like this, where hotlinks provide easy stepping stones. Playing the same game with physical books requires more planning and patience, but I still find it hard to resist.

The most recent bout for me took Daniel Defoe‘s novel Robinson Crusoe as its starting point. To mark its three hundredth birthday, we chose it earlier this year as our Book of the Month at the BBC Radio Gloucestershire Book Club, hosted by Dominic Cotter as part of his lunchtime show, with Caroline Sanderson and me as his regular panel.

This wonderful 1964 children’s television series is now available to buy as a DVD

I’d read Robinon Crusoe at university and really enjoyed it, as well as Defoe’s Moll Flanders, but that was long enough ago for me to have forgotten most of the content. To be honest, my most vivid memories of the story stemmed from the old French television series, dubbed into English, which made a strong impression on everyone of my vintage who saw it, with its stirring theme music (do click the link to listen!) and compelling narrative, mostly true to the original novel.

Robinson Crusoe…

For a three-hundred-year-old novel, it was surprisingly accessible. Written in the voice of Crusoe, the novel fooled many of its early readers into thinking it was a memoir. As well as the familiar story of his shipwreck and solitary status on the island for most of his stay, there is wrapped around it a substantial tale of how he came to go to sea in the first place, including an earlier adventure along the coast of Africa, and the saga of his journey home. Rereading it now, I found it compelling and intriguing, although as a twenty-first century reader, his condescending attitude to non-Europeans jars.

… and Other Castaways

Hearing the Book Club broadcast, my author friend Edward James recommeded a new non-fiction book to complement it: Crusoe Castaways and Shipwrecks in the Perilous Age of Sail by Mike Rendell. On request, the publisher, Pen and Sword, kindly sent me a review copy.

Tales of real-life castaways and shipwrecks

The book was a pleasure to hold as I read it – it felt like a luxury item. Here’s how I reviewed it on Amazon UK:

This is a beautifully presented book, the cover immediately getting you into the frame of mind for the era that it describes. I had it recommended to me after reading Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”, which is, as the title suggests, the jumping off point for this guide to the real Crusoe (and Defoe), other castaways of the era, and victims of shipwrecks, some famous, some infamous, some little known but worth knowing about.

It’s a very readable guide for the casual reader, as well as for serious historians, with a high level of detail about the various journeys. The author’s style is personal and personable, authoritative without ever being stuffy.

Having read it, I realise that Crusoe was not untypical of this dangerous age, and reading about the hazards of the journeys even when plain sailing (the nutrition, the piracy, the mutinies) made me wonder that anyone arrived at their destination intact at all.

This would be a good gift for anyone interested in Robinson Crusoe and Defoe in particular, or in historical sea voyages in general. My only criticism is that the captions on the very attractive colour plates, which added atmosphere to the narrative, were absurdly short. There is a list of image acceditation at the back, but I thought it would have made more sense to add this detail to each picture, rather than have the reader turning back and forth between the plates and the text. Otherwise, an engrossing read and aesthetically enjoyable too.

… including a Castaway Cat

At around the same time, by chance I cam across another Crusoe-inspired book, (and goodness knows, he’s inspired plenty of spin-offs over the years, from The Swiss Family Robinson to Lost in Space). Visiting the fabulous Old Station Pottery and Bookshop in Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, I spotted The Nine Lives of Island Mackenzie by Ursula Moray Williams, its cover featuring an Edward Ardizzone illustration referencing Robinson Crusoe.

A heartwarming castaway tale for all ages

Ardizzone’s evocative line drawings are scattered throughout Moray Williams’ gentle and witty text, intended as a chapter book for younger readers, but a delight to Crusoe fans of any age, especially if they also love cats! Not wishing to spoil the plot of this delightful read, suffice to say there are plenty of parallels to Defoe’s story, as well as a satisfying ending.

Over to You

So now I’m all Crusoed out – but feel free to share via the comments box news of your own reading tag adventures.

I wonder how many degrees of separation there are between books? I’d love to know!

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Personal life, Writing

She Stoops to Conkers*

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Debbie Young

This post first appeared in the November 2018 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News

(Photo of conkers by Dawid Zawila via Unsplash.com)

While I was growing up in a suburb where many roads were lined with horse chestnut trees, playing conkers was one of my favourite autumn games. I still can’t walk past a freshly fallen conker without picking it up and slipping it into my pocket. My grown-up excuse for collecting conkers and taking them home is that they’re an effective spider deterrent.

Nature’s timing is perfect, because the conker harvest coincides with the mass migration of spiders from our gardens into our homes. Escaping from the chill and damp outdoors is the arachnid equivalent of flying south for the winter.

However, I’ve just heard on the radio that ingesting conkers can be harmful to dogs. They contain a toxin called aesculin, also present in every other part of the horse chestnut tree, which can make dogs very ill and in rare cases prove fatal.

On his podcast, the radio presenter, Rhod Gilbert, wondered how to reconcile his arachnophobic wife who fills their house with conkers and a pet dog who perceives every conker to be a dog toy. How to keep both of them happy and safe?

My cat Dorothy suggests the answer. All summer she’s been snacking on flies and moths. Rhod just needs to follow her example and cut out the middleman (the conker).

If he trains his dog to eat spiders, his problem will be solved.

For more information about dogs and conkers, visit: www.bluecross.org.uk/pet-advice/conkers-and-dogs.

(photo of 1905 performance – public domain)

* With apologies to 18th century Irish playwright Oliver Goldsmith for repurposing the title of his excellent and very funny play, She Stoops to Conquer.