When my partner and I lived in Scotland our very good friends who lived next door owned a cat, Spiral. She often used to come into our house in order to have a fight with her own reflection in our mirror wardrobes and I actively encouraged this by feeding her Philadelphia cheese spread which she loved.

One day our friends announced that Spiral was expecting kittens. I didn’t consider for one moment offering to take one off their hands. In fact, when Spiral, close to giving birth by this time, wandered into our house one day and made herself comfortable under our bed I panicked a little. I dashed next door to find only my friend’s teenage son at home. I explained that their cat was under our bed, we were afraid she was about to give birth and we weren’t sure what to do. He casually told me to just to put some old blankets under the bed and leave her to it. I reported back to my partner, Mike. He decided to handle things a little differently and headed next door where he met the teenage son coming over to our house carrying a pile of old blankets (he’d phoned his mum and taken her instructions). Mike was having none of it and told the young man in no uncertain terms to “get your effing cat out of our house”! Luckily Spiral decided to leave of her own accord and didn’t give birth for about another week.

The kittens were born in my friend’s wardrobe. There were four of them, three of which were pretty enough to be featured on the front of birthday cards and one of which looked like she had been cobbled together from spare parts of random cat. She had been nicknamed Frankie (short for Frankenstein). Two of the kittens (Trogdor, who was all black and another whose name I can’t remember) were very quickly found homes for. The lady who ran the village post office had been round to sex them all so I guess she must have spread the word (we lived in a small village and the post office did so much more than sell stamps)! That just left Frankie and one other; again, I can’t remember this one’s name, what I can remember is that everyone agreed she had a very strange personality.

We moved house very shortly after the kittens were born and of course my friend from the village used to come over and see me regularly. It was during one of these visits that she (with the help of a bottle or two of Rioja) persuaded me to have one of the remaining kittens. I chose Frankie. That just left one kitten - the odd one. Nobody could actually put their finger on exactly what was wrong with her but something definitely seemed to be.

Anyway, Frankie was delivered to us and I decided that under no circumstances should she keep her awful name. Of course Frankie in itself is fine but it was the association with Frankenstein that I didn’t like. I decided she should either be called something associated with beauty or something Scottish. I was thinking about Belle but Mike wasn’t too keen. In the end he came up with Bonnie which we both agreed was absolutely perfect. She has grown into her looks and is now a beautiful cat with a big personality (bit of a spoilt diva actually, but we love her). Now that we had changed Frankie’s name to Bonnie my friend decided to call the kitten she had kept Frankie – she really liked the name (my friend that is, the cat couldn’t have cared less, obviously).

Eventually Frankie was taken to the vet in order to get “done”. It was when my friend referred to the cat as “she” and the vet laughed that all became clear. “She” was actually a “he”. Suddenly the personality made perfect sense and, luckily, the name still worked.