Stray Cat cafe

The stray cat cafe opened at Ednovean Farm this summer - a quiet affair with just a few selective customers or should I say clients, discreetly adopting the secluded, sheltered lawns of the Italian garden and making them their own. Daily they have dined well on freshly caught organic rabbit, mouse and bird selecting their own ingredients purrfectly prepared for "Fine Dining" in intimate silence before slipping silently away to other exclusive location know only to the "in" crowd of the stray cat cafe.

We noticed at first a slight decrease in the the number of bobbing bunny tails and an improvement in some rabbit gourmet selection plants - leaves in fact .......and just occasionally we'd see a silent shadow slipping away from the tail of our eye. Slowly slowly the ephemeral forms took shape - a beautiful, tabby tom with his short, dense, beige coat spotted in narrow stripes almost like a Bengal, a slinking shiny black tom with the powerful shoulders of a prize fighter; both disdainful of our human company, strangely tolerated by our house tom cat Olley. Olley, our RSPCA ginger rescue cat that had been thrust hissing into Charles's arms from a cage bearing the slogan "Not to be rehomed with another Cat"Olley who had not tolerated another Cat in a hundred yard radius had grown portly over the years and now adopted a worldy weary expression as he hovered watchfully near to the new comers.

The tabby was dubbed Wilbur for no particular reason and the black may be Tribble of a few years back, who knows. As Summer turned to Autumn, Olley could be spotted late at night or early in the morning sitting affably side by side with Wilbur, until the smallest rattle of the front door would make Wilbur magically fade away into the shadows of the bordering shrubs. With the onset of one of the coldest winters here for twenty years, I started to leave a little food in a saucer in the open garden room and each day it would vanish and Wilbur when glimpsed appeared plumper. Will we seduce this gorgeous cat to live permanently at Ednovean Farm? Who knows but for the moment there is the ever open stray cat cafe!

Olley in his favourite seat in the flagstone hall at Ednovean Farm