The cats do like to follow me to the quarry when I go for walks along its chalky pathways. I was alone with Backwards, Coco, and Sortemis yesterday.....and it was a three ringed circus!!!! For a start the chalk paths are deeply claggy just now, so that a slowly perambulating cat would sink leaving only nose and whiskers showing. But a cat running at full speed was safe from such trouble, and this is what they did: whirligigging about the hacky-mucky chalk paste like wind-up racehorses.

Backwards made straight for the Pyramid. The Copkits, Little Grey and Matalike, lived wild and free in the quarry for months but never bothered to paw up the steep sides of the Pyramid: Backwards was straight up there!!!

There was no chance of a mouse on the bare surface of corrugated plates, whose only life is lichen roundels. But up he went, his serious face well pinned on. I think he kept going up because it was hard to come down: he was looking for an easier down. This led him to pussyfoot on one of the flat-topped doorways, 15m up. Finding no easy way down he climbed a bit higher, then hunkered down his large rear end and slip-slid on his splayed claws. I saw no sparks.

Backwards has great claws, second only to César's (who he may surpass claw-wise when full grown).....he demonstrates their excellence to me by sticking one in my finger when I open cans of mash so that he can pull the can his way to get first bite. But this slip-sliding act was more impressive, and less painful for me. He rolled into my hands and I carried him as he rested from his exertions around the Pyramid's base to its great open door, then we used only my boots to step inside the great crepuscular nuministic vault of the Pyramid. Coco was there, 15m up, padding along the wooden skeleton of the building. Seeing her, Backwards flipped out of my arms and up-skied a beam. In a few seconds he was beside his lighter more agile sister, weaving between the beams. I was way below, surrounded by a scrum of my own shadows, waiting to catch them if they fell. Sortemis came up beside me, tail up, purring. A year older than the others she let it be known she was too sensible for such pusspranks.