We were impelled to remain loyal for a while to the memory of Penny. It was a form of the old fashioned custom of going into mourning. It is not a question of going around with a long face. It is just a question of having a pause between the old and the new. No haste to find a substitute for the one who has given you love for years. Wait, and let fate provide the answer.

A cat has to be in a very bad mood if a human cannot coax him to purr.

How do you summon up courage to dismiss a cat who is paying you a compliment of sitting on your lap?

His markings, month by month, became more beautiful, lines of autumn bracken colours with shapes which reminded me of currents on a quiet sea. True that at times his head, because of his youth, looked scraggy, even his body sometimes looked scraggy, but suddenly for some reason like the change of light, or of mood, he looked his potential. This was going to be a champion cat.

The pleasure and sadness of youth is that the speed of its passing is never thought about; and so you say that you will do this or that in a year, in five years, only to wake up one morning to realize that what you thought was infinitely prolonged has ended.

The art of a news reporter is to learn how to lull a victim, because all good reporters are confidence tricksters in embryo.

I do not mind having imaginary conversations with animals who are part of my life. The comfort of talking to one at a time of personal distress is so soothing because one has the ease of knowing that one's secrets will not be repeated to anyone. Yet there are those who are horrified that an animal can be a more reliable part of one's world than that of the human world.