About nine hours ago, I was sitting with a dear friend, soaking up the late afternoon sun and sipping G&T's while watching a neighbours cat that had made a second home of her many roomed house.

We talked of plants and birds, and how everything seemed to know that spring was coming.

We watched 'Tigger'  the cat as he played hide and seek with us, disappearing through one window, then coming out of another to sit by us in the sun, and enjoy our conversation.

He's not the only cat in the village that treats people as friends, to be dropped into for a bit of company from time to time, sometimes staying for a day, other times going off to visit somebody else.

I have written before about the cat I called Mr. Pushkin who shared my life on and off for a year or so. However, the mind has a strange way of drawing together threads from times past, and weaving them into a little dreamlike tapestry that, if it is not captured, will vanish like the morning dew.

Of all the cats that have enriched my life, and those of my children and grandchild, there is one that, during the short time we were best friends, had the most profound and lasting effect on my life.

I think I may have fallen in love.

Again.

This time the face is not unlined, pretty and smiling.

It is old. Very old. It greets me each morning with a strange murmer that I do not quite understand, and probably never will.

Every day it is the same face, yet somehow different. As if the more I look at it, the more it's beauty etches into my eyes.

Last night, it happened again. in the small hours, just before the first light of dawn - that time when history tells us rebels attacked soldiers as they slept in the field.

Puppies, Kids and ‘Katz' It’s hard to work out why I write. If I ever submitted myself to a psychoanalyst we could together, with very little effort and some revealing light hypnosis, arrive at the happy conclusion that I was born to write. 'You have a deep Freudian need to express yourself Tom, an undiscovered brilliance and well, something something something something about a desire for creative cathartic expression.’ he’d say.  I would of course sit there modestly, slowly shaking my head and holding up my palms in faux embarrassment. ‘I guess so doc’ I’d say bashfullly ’That must be it. It's in my soul’  I’d leave his office to cheers from an adoring public and immediately order a taxi to Hay on Wye.

A few days ago, quite by accident, I came across a 5 peso note. Because foreigners only use CUC we get used to thinking in dollars (USD that is – the same rate – less the exchange rate) so it was a new experience for me to have in my hand currency in which Cuban Nationals are paid, and which is probably illegal for me to use.

I was hungry. No, I felt like eating something, hunger is when you have nothing to eat.

My parents had a strange relationship with books. I never knew either of them to go out and buy one, or indeed have a library ticket.

Somebody gave me a copy of Hubert the Hare when I was very young. I didn't like it. I thought the illustrations were grotesque, and the story was preposterous.

I was also given an illustrated book of fairy stories, which disappeared as soon as I learn to read.

The only books I had access to were my mother's art books (which I absolutely loved, especially the nudes) and a set of encyclopedias, which were very old.

There's not much of a problem with drugs in our village – unless you count heart, arthritis, and cholesterol pills. I'm mostly free from aches and pains, and the environment is really good for mental health.

Early this morning my daughter phoned me, and solved a puzzle that had given me a disquieting day and a sleepless night.

The cause of this mental turmoil was the discovery of a flash drive containing 32 chapters of a story that I have no recollection of writing.

One of the kindest things that a friend can do after a bereavement is to share a memory of the loved one.