Comma: an introduction.

After Tanis joined the choir invisible, the behaviour of his old porch friend from next door, Galadriel, changed. She became moody and aggressive. We thought she was working through the stages of grief, but it turned out she was actually with child, or rather, with kitten. Unfortunately for us, it was not the work of Tanis. Would've been nice to have some sort of living legacy, some piece of Tanis to live on. But as Tanis had never been able to act upon those special feelings shared between two cats who love each other very much, we knew that the father was another.

In no time at all Galadriel had given birth to three kittens, named Prince, Mandrake and Willow. Adam, Galadriel's owner, found homes for Prince and Willow and decided to keep Mandrake himself. One day Adam and our other neighbour, Mel, came over carrying a little cat. The person who was going to have Willow had just found out that he was not allowed to have pets where he lived, so Willow was looking for a new home. They just popped in to say hi, they said, and certainly in no way brought the kitten along to try and emotionally blackmail us in any way at all, or anything. Certainly not.


Kate was on-board as soon as they asked. I wasn't so sure, but while we were talking little Willow was just sitting in my arms looking around. He was there for about ten minutes. Totally relaxed, totally at ease. I was totally won over.

Though we both liked the name Willow, we changed his name to Comma. You don't get to name things very often, especially after forms of punctuation, and I wasn't about to let this opportunity slide by. Besides, my primary association with 'Willow' was Willow from Buffy and the whole boy with girl's name thing would just get confusing. And Willow was, in my humble opinion, more often than not annoying and I didn't want to be reminded of the Season 3 finale every time I looked at my cat. Although, thinking now, maybe we should have kept Willow and just put 'Evil' in front of it! Evil Willow was never annoying! Oh well, all in the past now.


So in December 2004 Comma left home, and moved in next door. His Mum knew exactly where he'd gone and she'd sit by the back window miaowing and pawing the glass, demanding to see her offspring. At times they'd both be there, and it was like visiting time in some prison drama. They'd actually have their paws up on the window, separated by a few millimetres of unyielding glass, while they miaowed at each other. It was heart-wrenching, and hard not to anthropomorphize the whole thing but for Comma's sake the new territorial boundaries needed to be enforced.

So Comma was in his new home and many adventures lay ahead.