Over 2 years into the blog, It's about time I wrote a post about my choice of Tortoiseshell label. Quite simply, one of my crazes as a young boy was cats. This coincided with my paper-round near Aberystwyth, where I used to observe and count the cats that I saw. My favourite was a tortoiseshell-and-white living on the high street of my village. It used to snooze on the window-sill of a small bungalow.
There are a few websites dedicated to the tortoiseshell "tortie" cat. Tortie love seems to be the main website for luvvy-dovey devotees. A more austere site is that of the Red, Cream and Tortoiseshell Cat Society in the UK. Explanations of the Tortoiseshell colour combination occur in this informative article, which is similar to another from the BBC which talks about the Tortie DNA. In the early days of this blog, I discovered that the calico cat (similar in colour to the Tortoiseshell, although strictly different), is one of the state symbols of Maryland.
The reason I was prompted to write this post today was this story about a "railway cat" in Japan. Some readers will know of Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical to TS Elliot's poetry - Cats. Skimbleshanks patrolled the "Northern Mail" (i.e. West Coast main line) from London to Glasgow:
Seems that one of his descendents is alive and well in Kishikawa.
