Ah, I seem to have taken fresh inspiration from this thread! Have even started re-reading it (though only so far as SO'P's reminiscences of "liquid Germolene" served with Big Mac's, as yet).

Earlier today me and Mr.Crow went hunting (unsuccessfully, though I've seen it before) for a local pub called "The Cats", which after failed local putterings in our wee banger I eventually hunted down on t'internet here: Scroll down to sixth 'cat' pub listed.

Now I'm not normally a fan of modern revised pub names (like "Frog and Ferrit" or "Slug and Pumpkin", but this one is so genuinely eccentric and charming (an extraordinarily large black cat figure sitting amidst the marigolds and dhalias out front, plus another more quietly perched on the roof) that it earns all due respect.

What's more I'd like to import it into the re-Iv, if no-body minds, and use it to house my late batty and also somewhat wayward, though highly hospitable (as is the Irish way) mother. She was the classic cat lady, always a battered roll-up hanging out the corner of her mouth, a hot cuppa tea dangerously dribbling streams of hot liquid onto the floor as she relentlessly chattered away. And she eternally housed local waifs and strays and general good-fer-nuthings - including psychotic cats that no-one else would dare touch with a barge pole. We all said she'd come into her prime at 80, but she died just over a year ago at fifty four (outliving both her parents by seven years.)

In the re-Iv however, Busy Lizzy (as she was known) will do what she always wanted to do, and will (almost) run The Cats as a mixture of B&B (where waifs and stray's will inevitably still take advantage of her hospitable nature - as she serves them bacon & eggs, and lamb & leek stew everyday for breakfast and tea) and cat rescue centre - where otherwise impossible creatures will be homed and successfully theraped by her own intuitive form of white witchery - however much they piss on the beds, scratch the furniture, shit in the vegetable patch, slaughter the neighbours prize carrier pigeons and generally terrorise the locals - and that's just the humans..

It was of course Busy Lizzy that gave the re-Iv Round Table their idea to hold an Official Illegal Rave, after regaling them with tales of the classic and celebrated Weeley Rock Festival of 1971 (not long before I was born).