I love cats and have done since I was little. When I was about 13-14, school dinner ladies were on strike and I used to take a packed lunch to my friend’s house as she lived really close to school and I didn’t. One summer’s day, as we approached a countryside lane end, we heard mewing and found four kittens abandoned in a cardboard box in the undergrowth. They were so close to a main road, it could have ended in tragedy for them all. We took two each and carried them back to her house. They were so tiny and fluffy, although one of them peed down my school shirt which wasn’t ideal. I was a tad fragrant that afternoon!
I begged my dad to let me keep one but he can’t bear cats so that was never going to happen. Fortunately, my friend’s mum found them all a home and I swore one day I’d have cats of my own.
A couple of decades ago, my husband and I adopted two gorgeous RSPCA rescue cats, siblings Felix and Pixie. Sadly they’ve both crossed the rainbow bridge now but I’ve immortalised them as Angie’s cats in The Starfish Café series.
When you don’t have or can’t have cats but love them, the next best thing is being able to visit a cat café. I’ve had a hankering to write a book set in a cat café for many years and it was by pure coincidence that one opened on Scarborough’s Bar Street – partial inspiration for Whitsborough Bay’s Castle Street. The café was called Steampuss Cat Lounge and was run by a couple called Chloe and Matthew. I say ‘was’ because it sadly ceased trading last month. They’d opened not that long before the world shut down with the pandemic and then, like so many small businesses struggling to get over that, the cost of living crisis dealt another cruel blow and they had no choice but to close.
I visited Steampuss with my daughter on three occasions including during their final week and am very grateful to Chloe for giving me lots of insights into life running a cat café. Steampuss was quite a bit smaller than the café I wanted to create on Castle Street so, by contrast, my daughter and I have twice visited Kitty Café in Leeds. This is a chain with further cafés in Nottingham, Birmingham and Leicester.
It was really good to compare the two very different set-ups and take what I considered to be the best of both worlds into Castle Street Cat Café as well as adding an enormous dose of my imagination. I really hope that readers visiting the café in Christmas at the Cat Café can picture the setting and the cats as vividly as I can.
There’s a cat café in York – my nearest city – which I’m really eager to visit. I don’t get to York very often but hopefully I can squeeze it in.
Wishing you a purr-fect day.
Big hugs
Jessica xx