The domestic nature of the male

Baxter and Possum are looking gaunt and fragile this year, which grieves me. They are sixteen this year. They were magnificent playful creatures in their day.

The white specks on the driveway are locust blossoms.

On to the quote

He forked some duck-and-turkey Whiskas into a bowl for Randy, who rubbed himself briefly against Cooper’s legs. Though they had met each other only a few months before, the cat was very much a part of the scenery in Cooper’s new life—which went to prove that you didn’t need to work at a relationship for years and years, didn’t it?

“Where’s your friend, Randy?”

He called the other cat Mrs. Macavity, because she came and went so mysteriously. In fact, Cooper wasn’t sure where she really lived. Apart from a couple of months she spent in his conservatory, caring for the five rather scruffy black-and-white kittens she’d produced in her basket one morning, her presence was unpredictable. He thought she might have an entire list of homes she called on when she felt like it. A meal here today, next door tomorrow.

Once a new home had been found for all the kittens among her family, Mrs. Macavity had returned to her old ways. She was much more a free spirit than Randy, who didn’t wander far from his warm basket next to the boiler in the conservatory. He used the cat flap to do whatever he needed to do in the garden, weighed up the weather, and either lay for a while in the sun or came straight back to his basket. He was an animal with a fixed routine and firm ideas of what was his territory and what wasn’t. Cooper liked that. He thought there was something in that attitude that enabled a person to establish a home. [pp 173-174]

—Stephen Booth, Blind to the Bones (Random House, 2003)