Caturday felid trifecta: Icelandair’s commercials featuring the dreaded Yule Cat; cat missing for five years comes home for Christmas; LGBTQ writer gets a statue with her cat; and lagniappe

Well, at least we still have Caturday felids, as there is never any end to cats appearing on the Internet.  But the dearth of comments always makes me think about dispensing with this feature, too.

The last Caturday Felid post featured the legend of the murderous Icelandic Yule Cat, called the Jólakötturinn, described by Wikipedia as

. . . . . a huge and vicious cat from Icelandic folklore that is said to lurk in the snowy countryside during the Yule season and eat people who do not receive new clothing. In other versions of the story, the cat only eats the food of the people who had not received new clothing.

Here’s a short holiday ad for Icelandair featuring an interview with Jólakötturinn. He is not a crook! Sadly, Yule cat resents the lack of credit he gets for looming so large in the Icelandic psyche and for ensuring that many Icelandic children get new clothes.

. . . and one more, also from Icelandair. Here Yule cat, at first rejected by a family, is finally accepted—and allowed to go on a trip with them—after he gets cleaned up and has a shrimp dinner.

**********************

Here is a happy Christmas tail that appeared in the Torygraph on Christmas Day. I’ve linked the screenshot below to an archived site, so click below to read about the reappearing Bindi.

The story:

Bindi the cat has been reunited with its family for Christmas, five years after it went missing.

The black feline “vanished into thin air” from its home in Haddenham, Cambridgeshire in August 2020.

Jilly Fretwell, Bindi’s owner, had moved house since the disappearance but thanks to microchip technology, vets were able to pull off “a real Christmas miracle”.

Ms Fretwell, 29, said: “She used to go out for a couple of hours and then come straight back, so it was really odd for her to be missing for more than a day.”

Despite posting appeals on social media and searching local walking routes for several months, the software project manager was unable to find her pet.

She had become convinced Bindi would never come home until a phone call from vets on Dec 18 brought welcome news.

Ms Fretwell said there were “no clues” about where Bindi may have been over the last five years, but that she had clearly been “looked after by someone” as she was in “great shape”.

She described her cat as “the most cuddly”, adding that it will “put her paws on either of your shoulders to give you a real cuddle”

Ms Fretwell said: “I think she’s been looked after by someone, she looks in great shape.”

Describing the moment they got the phone call, she said: “We were just in complete disbelief. It wasn’t really until we saw her that we believed it was her.

“We’re just so glad we had her microchipped and that she was alive and well. I’ve never heard of anyone’s cat going missing for so long and turning up absolutely fine.”

Here’s Bindi in a FB post from the Manchester Evening News:

Some info added by The Daily Fail:

The cat, now 10, was in good health and had been ‘well looked after’ and ‘instantly’ recognised her family.

Jilly told the BBC: ‘She’s been missing for five years and we got a call on Thursday from the lovely vets in Witchford to say they had scanned her microchip and she was coming back home to us.

‘She had a couple of little scratches on her that the vet wanted to see to, but other than that, she looks great. She’s lovely and glossy, well-fed and has been looked after somewhere. But we have absolutely no idea where she has been the last five years.’

Bindi disappeared during the Covid pandemic and Jilly spent her daily walks searching for her, sharing appeals on social media and asking people across Haddenham to keep an eye out.

Despite being 10 years old and having spent so long away from her family, Bindi remains affectionate, happily cuddling up to Jilly and settling on her lap.

Other stories frequently use the word “miracle” to refer to Bindi’s reappearance. What tails she could tell, but nobody will ever know. (I suppose the vet could reveal who turned her in, but that may be unethical for vets.).  We send Bindi and her staff thoughts and prayers for the holiday season.

Be sure to get your cat chipped, even if it’s an indoor cat.

******************************

Finally, we have a story from the Guardian about Sylvia Townsend Warner (1973-1978), a lesbian writer described by Wikipedia as:

. . . .an English novelist, poet and musicologist, known for works such as Lolly Willowes, The Corner That Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin. She spent most of her adult life in partnership with the poet Valentine Ackland.

And here’s Valentine Ackland:

Warner was a bit of a polymath, and you can read about her accomplishments in several fields here, or in her biography at the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (with more pictures).

But today we’re featuring her role as an ailurophile, and of a new and wonderful statue of Warner—avec chatte—that has just been produced and unveiled.

Click headline to read:

An excerpt:

The thing all women hate is to be thought dull,” says the title character of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel, Lolly Willowes, an early feminist classic about a middle-aged woman who moves to the countryside, sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.

Although women’s lives are so limited by society, Lolly observes, they “know they are dynamite … know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are”.

Warner herself was anything but dull: a writer, translator, musicologist and political activist who wrote seven novels, extensive poetry and contributed more than 150 short stories to the New Yorker, more than any other female writer. She was also a communist who volunteered for the Red Cross during the Spanish civil war and an LGBTQ+ pioneer, living with the poet Valentine Ackland for decades in a quiet Dorset village, in a partnership they described as a marriage.

In the 1930s, Warner was described as “famous in two continents for numerous and brilliant contributions to literature”, but though many of her works remain in print, her name has faded from widespread recognition, even in the county where she lived.

The Guardian article was written on December 12. More about the statue, which is a big megillah. It was controversial because the cat was modeled on a local cat named Susie and people argued that the cat statue (see below) didn’t look much like Susie. Oy!

That is due to change this weekend, when a statue of Warner will be unveiled in Dorchester. The sculpture by Denise Dutton shows Warner sitting on a bench accompanied by a cat, in a nod to the creatures she loved and the witch’s companion in her best-known novel.

Anya Pearson, who led the campaign to erect the statue, said that by placing the lifesize figure in the town’s main shopping area, “we are saying very clearly that women’s stories and queer women’s stories belong in our public spaces”. “Sylvia pushed boundaries, wrote without fear and lived authentically. This statue finally allows us to celebrate her as her authentic self, proudly and openly, in the town she called home.”

Pearson is a veteran of this kind of thing, having previously been the force behind a statue of the Victorian fossil hunter and palaeontologist Mary Anning in nearby Lyme Regis. After that statue was unveiled to great local enthusiasm in 2022, Pearson set her sights on her home town of Dorchester, where statues commemorate the writers Thomas Hardy and William Barnes – but until now, no non-royal women.

The campaign, which asked for nominations of overlooked women, received more than 50 names that were shortlisted then put to a vote. Warner “won by a landslide”, says Pearson, who works at Arts University Bournemouth. The £60,000 cost was raised through crowdsourcing and a number of significant international donations.

Here’s a video of the appeal for funds for the statue, and gives more photos  (a couple with cats) and info about Townsend:

Warner apparently loved cats, and had several. Like many artists, she tended to favor Siamese cats (some day I’ll figure out this correlation), and you can see two photos of her with her felids at the gallery section of her society.

It was hard to find a good picture of the statue that doesn’t appear to be copyrighted, and here is one, from Discover Dorchester., which has no photographer attribution. It’s a great statue, with Townsend sitting on a bench with books at her feet and a cat rubbing against her leg:

********************

Lagniappe:  Four lion cubs and mom. It appears that there are more, but they are being taken care of by other lionesses in the pride (it’s not clear whether that mother had nine cubs, which would be a LOT for a single mother). This was shot at Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, adjacent to the Serengeti.

h/t: Robert, Ginger K.