Jump.

I don’t know anything about this cat – except that he is a he, and he lives in France. He is a mystery, an enigma. He wandered into my life one day, and with a textile doppelgänger, wandered out again. [hmmm, doppelgänger, I may be flattering myself.]

He is also called Jump, which makes him relatively handy for poetry, but with lump, bump, and hump being the first to spring to mind, I think it’s more a limerick he’d end up in, than T.S Eliot.

But isn’t he beautiful! – as I wrote in my best schoolgirl French to his owner: “comme il/elle est beau/belle”. In reply, il/elle, I found out, was an il, and then, having used up most of my store of the schoolroom, I reverted to what we lazy thinkers call the modern universal language – aka English, aka mine. A couple more emails flew across the Channel and back about how handsome he is, and I then got down to work.

And off we go:

Hunting for the right green, for the eyes, or turquoise? or yellow? or orange? How many colours can one cat’s eye have – there’s one enigma I never quite settled with Jump here.

I think I gave up hunting down the exact shade at this point and reached out for the black.and everything starts falling into place…All he needed now was a background, which proved a little tricky as he suited them all, but we plumped for this one – it brought out some of the shades in his eyes (some of them)

There once was a chat known as Jump,

Who, not being a camel, had no hump…

Answers on a postcard please