About a week ago I got a notification from PayPal that a reader had sent a donation for a secondhand sale of Samurai. I was, as always, extremely touched and wrote back to say thank you. He then mentioned that he had named his cat Helen and hoped this was all right.  I said, Well, my ex-husband named his dog Ludo, so it must be all right.

Today I got another email; the NGO from which he had adopted the first cat wanted a home for its sister and thought they should stay together.  So he now has two cats, Helen and Sibylla.  They are five months old.  Sibylla is the aloof, unfriendly one at the back: