Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But sometimes it can also be a burden.

Writing posts at or around the time things happen is quite different from looking back and writing in hindsight. For instance, looking through The Cat’s photos now, you can see the progression in her expressions as she became more accustomed to the humans and then finally (after three long years) allowed us to touch her. But at the time, photos were just photos without anything special meaning.

The Cat didn’t ‘need’ us; if we had not moved to the house where she was already living in the garden and fields, she would have continued to do OK, but having us there certainly made her life much easier (especially once she had trained us!).

So today, six photos which weren’t posed or picked out as particularly photogenic, which just show The Cat doing her own thing, living her own independent life – in short, just doing all the things any feral cat does.

One – coming over the wall to the drive from the field for some water. In the early days, The Cat spent a lot of her time in the fields, and the drive was where she and her son Ana were fed (before we started using the garden at the back of the property).

Two – drinking from a water bowl in the garden. There was now food and water available in the garden and The Cat had discovered that it was a safer alternative environment for weaning her kittens.

Three – hunting (there were rats living inside the walls). By now, there were free feeding bowls in the garden and food was available 24/7. This did not stop the cats from hunting; rodent control was supposedly the reason that The Cat had been brought to the property, and none of the cats ever lost their instinctive desire to hunt.

Four – washing in the afternoon sun on the wall between the drive and the path after supper. By this time we had realised that leaving gaps for the cats between the stones was a necessity so they could jump up from the fields onto a flat surface. Any pot plants placed in these gaps were promptly despatched onto the tiles or into the field.

Five – on a mission in the garden. There is no one more busy than a cat on a mission.

Six – napping in the drive. Planting the cats’ favourite troughs was pointless, so we left them to be occupied by happy felines. However awkward and uncomfortable this looked, they loved them.