For Tosh cat (about 2005 to June 2019)

Toshack was – quite literally – born in a barn. More precisely, but not that precisely, he was born in a barn on a farm in Ontario, about 40 minutes west of London, Ont. How Tosh came to be living with us was accidental. Our little nephew Ethan, who was seven at the time, was visiting us from England with his mum Sue. To be honest, Western Ontario (or maybe London, Ontario) isn’t that great a place for kids to visit for a holiday. The Great Lakes are hours away, cottage country is hours and hours away and the hinterland of London is a flat, flat, flat boring scruffy landscape, criss-crossed by boring, flat straight roads. There is almost nothing of interest – at least to us and our tastes – ‘to see’. We know this because Nel and I used to – when we first arrived – pick a point on a map and head out for a drive to see what’s out and there you have to drive to go anywhere in Ontario. This technique had worked - in the past - over four cities and two continents in the sense that practically everywhere else we’d lived we’d come across unknown (at least to us) gems like Rutland Water in Leicestershire, the Musquadobit Trail in Nova Scotia and  abandoned railway lines and hidden corners in one of  Liverpool’s numerous parks. Even when our ‘stick a pin in a map’ technique meant that where we ended up was shit, it was interestingly shit – the ‘boondocks’ in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and Hornsea (now) in Yorkshire being examples. 

In Ontario, it  failed utterly. Everywhere was shit. This does’nt mean we did not have a great time in our five years because the people we met there were awesome – CCP, Jodie Culham, the Oxford Arms Scousers in Exile crew, my ‘cousin’ Maurice Sheenan (cousin by Irish rules), beautiful Ken and lovely Eric. We even had the requisite number of nemeses (at least I did) namely the Root family, Fatty Carpenter, the scag-head living down the hall in our apartment building and there were even fascists in the shape of an unhealthy number of Empire Loyalists who provided the necessary hidden enemy. So we ate, drank, talked and lived quite happily but really didn’t go anywhere. It was just not a good place for people to visit or for pootling about. This was especially the case when Ethan and Sue visited because Ontario is all about the money and because of this, ‘work’ means ‘work’, so employers took the hair-shirted ‘two week vacation’ rule very seriously and we could not get any time off. Because we had spent the whole two weeks visiting family in England the year when Ethan and Sue visited we were working so didn’t even have time to do a ‘quick’ 8 hour drive to somewhere interesting for an overnight stay. 

We managed to snatch a day out though, at the weekend probably, and this is how we met Tosh. We’d heard, from a friend, about a corn-maze ‘somewhere off the 401’ so one mid-morning, probably a Saturday and with a ‘how bad can it be’ attitude we pointed the car west. About forty minutes later we were at a corn maze. For a change, and for Ontario, it had promise. The sign at the gate was hand painted, a piece of 4’ x 4’ ply nailed wonkily to a post. There was no-one else there. There wasn’t a car-park, a shop, a rest room, safety instructions, flyers, information signage, guide books or any of the other paraphernalia which usually accompanies, and ruins, anywhere worth visiting. Instead, about ¼ mile down a track into some fields, there was a dilapidated house, a dilapidated-er barn and some corn fields. Outside the barn was a rickety table and nice young woman, who along with her partner, ran the farm. After a quick – to the point of visitor rudeness by Canadian standards – 15 minute chat and handing over of a few loonies (because me and Ethan were a bit anxious to get on with the maze) we plunged into a field of corn and wandered round for a while.  

I, of course, emerged victorious from the maze about ¾ hour later  having explored every single blind alley (and despite what anyone might say I definitely wasn’t utterly and hopelessly lost) and when I did emerge I saw my comrades – who all claimed to have solved the maze in fifteen minutes - near the rickety table. They were playing with, and looking at, about 26 kittens who were running and tumbling through hay, mud and through cubicles in the barn under the watchful eye of three dams. To this day I am unsure who - from encountering these kittens – then came up with a plan,  because in the half hour  the others - AKA the maze-slackers -  had been ‘waiting’ for me as I diligently mapped the whole maize maze, a  plan had been mooted, profferred, mulled, negotiated and agreed so that by the time I got to the barn we had adopted two kittens. My only role in the decision was actually a job which was  to stick my nose into some of the kittens to see if I experienced an extreme allergic reaction (I am generally severely allergic to cats) which was – according to the agreement that had been made in my absence – the deal clincher. Ever willing to experience acute breathlessness, conjunctivitis, skin rashes and flea bites in the interests of the greater good, I picked up one, stuck my face into its fur and took a long deep breath. As this was a scientific test (and as RHB is a scientist) the operation was repeated a number of times until the negotiating team were satisfied that a wide enough sample had been taken so that a severe allergic reaction would be inevitable if this variant of cat was the type I was allergic too. As I was more allergic than RHB it could be assumed that if I was hospitalized as a result of the field work, the kittens would not be suitable in which case no further trials were necessary, so after the test I was ordered to stand still for a few minutes so that the rest of the team could watch (they probably used the word ‘observe’) me from a slight distance while life threatening symptoms did, or did not, develop. 

The drive home that day was fun. I was alive and not in agony, two kittens had been selected for collection in a few weeks (when they had been weaned) and there was a good Tim Hortons en route. Also, sometime during the drive home, we hatched a plan for a wider scale kitten adoption programme because it transpired (during negotiations which I had not been party to on account of my maze-related heroism) that the farmers had admitted to having no need for 26 kittens, only for about 2 or 3. The farmer was trying to rehome the rest. Over the next few weeks we - mostly RHB – let friends and work mates know about the corn maze and the kittens and the farmer, and as far as we know, most of the kittens were eventually rehomed. That’s how we met Tosh..