Bubsy & Bundle: the real cats behind my website
If you've scrolled all the way through the front page of this site — past the stars, past the hills, right into the ceremony itself — you might have noticed two wee cats tucked into the scene, fiddling away at the side of the "wedding." That's not a stock illustration or a random flourish. That's Bubsy and Bundle. My cats. The two of them turn up in an awful lot of my life, so it felt only right that they turned up here too.
Who they actually are
Bubsy and Bundle are Australian Mists — a breed most people in Scotland have never heard of, which I understand, because I hadn't either until I met them. They're a relatively young breed, developed in Australia in the 1970s, bred as much for temperament as for looks: soft, marbled or spotted coats, and a reputation for being sociable, chatty and thoroughly unbothered by being picked up, cuddled, or generally involved in whatever you're doing. That last part tracks. Mine have never once respected the idea of "personal space" or "working from home means I am working."
Why they ended up on the homepage
When I sat down to build the scroll-through version of this site — the version where you scroll and the whole day unfolds around you, stars to first dance — I wanted it to feel like me, not like a template with my name typed into it. Bubsy and Bundle are a genuine, daily part of what "me" looks like: under my feet while I write ceremonies, in my lap while I'm on couple calls, occasionally walking across the keyboard mid-sentence in a way that has, more than once, made it into a first draft before I caught it. Giving them a tiny cameo — fiddling away at night, with a moon overhead — felt like the most honest thing I could put on a homepage about honesty. It's also, if you know your nursery rhymes, a wee "Hey Diddle Diddle" in disguise: the cat and the fiddle, the moon looking on. No cow jumping over it just yet, but I wouldn't rule it out.
We love them so much
I won't pretend this is a deep one. I just love them. They're daft, they're warm, they're always exactly where I need to put my laptop down, and they've been part of the furniture — often literally — for every ceremony I've written since they arrived. If you ever spot them on the homepage and wonder whether they're real, now you know: they are, and they'd very much like you to know they were here first. They've even got their own Instagram — @bubsybundle — if you'd like more of them than one blog post can reasonably hold.
Want to see where they turn up? Scroll through the homepage and look for the two wee fiddlers partway through the day — or follow the real ones @bubsybundle.
Meet them on the homepage