Bad fur days. Doesn’t everyone has them?

Among the cats, they happened for a number of reasons.

The first photo is Ana Half-Tail, The Cat’s Number One Son, who would strut his stuff in the neighbourhood at the weekend, partying with the field cats, and rolling in on Sunday morning for breakfast looking as though he had been concreted (sometimes with the addition of some green or blue paint in his fur, and what look very like a dab of engine oil behind each ear). Obviously this all made him even more irresistible to the local ladies, who loved nothing more than a ginger tom with tyre-marks on his back.

Even The Cat had the occasional bad fur day (although no one was brave enough to point it out to her). Usually it was because she had walked through the long grass in the fields, collecting burrs, seeds and dried grasses. This photo was taken not long after she first allowed us to touch her, so running up the drive after her to pull all the bits of field out of her fur would probably have destroyed the little bit of trust she had put in us. So, off she went, au naturel, as it were.

The Cat’s son Greyfur and Visiting Cat Phantom had both chosen to make their homes in the fields opposite, so coming to eat during bad weather entailed walking through muddy fields and wet crops, arriving with the top layer of their fur saturated. But their undercoats were warm and dry, and they seemed oblivious to their dripping outer coats.

Tumbleweed was the first kitten to grow up with a longer coat. He was grey from nose to tail, and his coat was thick and shaggy. The damp weather played havoc with his fur and it would part into tufts, giving him a ragged appearance. We have no idea how he came to have such a fluffy coat; his mother, Storm, was completely grey but with a short coat, so his luxurious fur must have been inherited from his father.

And Cracker, who presumably spent a lot of time in dark and dusty corners, was known to adopt a Gothic appearance, draped with cobwebs and a variety of dusty strands. She seemed oblivious to it all, although her son Mr T looked a little perplexed .

It seemed that the cats’ fur was not something to be vain about, it did its job, and that was that.