On the relationship between Pushkin and Titus, the older female queen.

It is early spring and in the time since Pushkin as a young kitten - he is now just over two years old - swelled the feline ranks to three within Moon Cottage there has been an alliance of sorts but it is not always comfortable. The two sisters, Fannie and Titus - they will be four years old at the end of April - are very close and spend much time engaged in allogrooming, which never includes Pushkin.

On the other hand Pushkin is clearly enchanted by Titus, whom he appears to infuriate by his constant shadowing of her every movement. If she wants to eat, then so does he. If she wants to laze on the sofa in the sitting room, then again so does he. If she wants to lie in the tiny rectangular patch of sunlight on the bathroom carpet then, by golly, so does he.

Titus, when Pushkin follows her, could never be said to actively encourage his behaviour. When she is eating and he muscles in, which he routinely does, she sighs; sometimes she clocks him one, gently but crossly, with her front leg and she has recently developed the habit of filling her mouth with the Hill?s dried food [which is all she will eat, rabbit being the preferred flavour] and dropping it a few inches away from the bowl over which Pushkin will now be lording it, so she may eat in peace.

Pushkin appears serenely indifferent to the irritation he is causing his beloved and the fact that Titus gets any space of her own at all is due to the fact that Pushkin, sleek, muscled and panther-like though he may appear to be, is also exceptionally slumberous and this trait of his calls to mind the dormouse at the tea-party in Alice-in-Wonderland, as he spends at least an equal amount of time as that fabled rodent did fast asleep.

So at the point when Pushkin naps then, and only then, is Titus free to wander on her own or to schmooze with her sister. Pushkin's fondness for Titus appears to be constant and strong, which is not the case between him and her sister Fannie.