Dudley

We first met Dudley about a year ago. He was hanging around our block of flats, making friends with everyone he saw and inviting himself to their homes to drink water (straight from the tap) and sleep.  Dudley had a certain charm to him, despite being ginger, and he was persistent; if Dudley decides he’s coming in, he is coming in!

After several months of Dudley (Dudders, Dudmeister, His Dudesty) coming to the flat at every available opportunity, the neighbours in the block got talking about him. “Where does he come from?” “Is he homeless?” “Should we call the relevant authorities?”

We were inclined to suggest that he live with us, but we decided to do the responsible thing and find out the real story about Dudley before taking such a bold step. At first he was reluctant to go, but in the end we got him into the car and we were on our way over to West Oxford to uncover the truth.

The truth is that Dudley is an incredibly fluffy cat called ‘Ginger’ who belongs to a celebrity chef and cookery writer called Sophie, who lives nearby. Sophie said that Dudley likes to have lots of friends to visit and kindly allowed us to keep having him over to visit but ‘please don’t feed him’.

So nowadays we see him more as a friend who comes over and struts around the flat, desperately longing to be taken seriously but generally failing on account of his being inexplicably fluffy.

Here’s my picture of Dudley which I did using a lot of orange pastels.