She doesn't have the international fame and acclaim of Ceiling Cat. She doesn't have the attention of the small, power-clique cognoscenti that Mojo el Jefe does. But she does have a nice little internet presence that manifests itself once in a while to Diane and me and lets us know that she's okay.
I refer, of course, to the Bothy Cat.
Eleven months ago, we heard from a Canadian-Irish knitter that Ms. Kitty was doing fine (click here go to that part of the SherWords archive.) Today, we received this e-mail from "Margaret," who, we presume from her aol address, is an American planning a trip to Ireland next year:
Mr. Harrington,
I just wanted to say that I very much enjoyed stumbling upon your photos
of your Ireland trip. We have rented the Bothy cottage for a week next
June and I was looking online for some commentary from others about the
place. Actually the Bothy cat page was the first one I found online.
What a marvelous surprise and extra bonus to find the cat in residence.
In emailing Lady Rosse to secure the reservation, I asked if the cat was
still there (at my 12 year old's insistence) and I am pleased to report
that it is. I'm betting that of all the things we doing in Ireland, the
cat will be what she remembers most when she's older!
Your pleasure with the time you spent there is evident in your
descriptions and photos, which made me feel better about reserving the
cottage "sight unseen" so to speak. Thank you for posting your
photographs online.
Regards,
Margaret
This is so cool.
I know from the server log that the Ireland, 2006, part of Diane's and my photo album website has received tens of thousands of hits courtesy of search engines, but a vanishingly-small fraction of those actually contact us with questions or thanks or whatever. And three-quarters of the ones who do contact us mention the Bothy Cat.
We will go back again, and, when we do, I hope she's still around to ignore us for the first week. Thanks to Margaret's e-mail, I know that right now she is, and that's good enough for this instant.
3 comments:
This is so cool! The internet connects us in ways we could not have ever fathomed just a generation ago... I feel very fortunate to be alive now. So many good things and people have been introduced into my life that I would have been bereft of if I had been born some years earlier...
I just clicked to comment and.......saw that Ronnie said eggsackly what I was gonna say. So...... what she said.
Adam-
You know what, ronnie? If you type "bothy cat" (with or without the quotes) into the Google search box, the first hit is your blog! Such is the clout of the ronniecat combined with the bothycat.
And, of course, you (and Adam) are right about the extraordinary connections that the internet makes possible in too many ways to count. Just off the top of my head, people who have made my life richer and whom I never would have known without the magic of TCP/IP include the Deacon, Brian Fies, Lady Rosse, Ruth NFTP, "Minarge" (a Ukrainian woman who takes lovely photographs), Veronica Peterson, and one ronniecat. One of the many remarkable things about that list is that, while they're important to me, I don't even know the real names for almost half of them -- and, until right now, that hadn't even occurred to me.
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