SI “Mr Ransome, thank you for agreeing to this interview.”

AR “Ms Ifors, you’re welcome. Can we drop this Mr / Ms stuff before it gets boring?”

SI “Sure. Andy?”

AR “That’ll do. Can we make this quick, we’ve got Sara’s lads visiting, and I want to take them to the football?”

SI “Yes, have you seen the list of questions?”

AR “Yeah, cheers for sending them, it saves time. OK, here goes. Interrupt if I say something vaguely interesting.

Q1) What did you think of Mark and John when you all first met? A1) I thought they were fascinating, genuine terraced house working class lads with a lot of talent. The first time I saw them, I thought ‘That’s my band, right there.’

SI “Interrupting … Your band?

AR “Yeah. My band, Mark’s Pack. That’s how it works. The Ransomed Hearts, you know? Mark got guitar, John got vocals, Xan didn’t want anything but percussion, and I got left with bass, so I made a point that it was my band. Nobody objected.” OK, Q2. Why was the band called the Ransomed Hearts? A2 I just answered that one. Q3 When did you realised that there was something different about the Preston boys? A3 The minute I first saw them, to be honest. What did you really mean Sangita?

SI “Umm, when did you suspect that they had a secret?

AR “Straight away, pretty much, but at first I reckoned they were fucking and too tightly wound to admit it. Then I realised they weren’t, but it was several years before me and Xan found out that they were werewolves.” Q4 Did finding out that Mark and John were shapeshifters change your relationship with them? A4 Are you fucking kidding me? What do you think?

SI “Bad question.”

AR “Very bad question, you can do a lot better than that, I know you can, I read your interview with Jon Bon Jovi, you had him eating out of your hand. This is just annoying me, to be honest. Look. You’ve got stuff from my mates, and I really want to be spending time with my wife and grandsons, come up with a great question or I’m leaving.

SI “Mr Ransome, why do you still do interviews?”

AR “OK, you got me. Because I love to show off. Still. Especially to pretty women with sexy accents. Oh, and it gives me a chance to tell people to buy everything Pluto’s Sisters put out, go see them tour, and get on their website and buy lots of glorious merch. Do it now, people, Ransome is right on this.

SI Another question?

AR Are we off piste now? Go on, keep me interested.

SI What feels better, killing someone or being on stage?

AR Fuck.

SI Sorry, I’ll delete that.

AR No. Depends on who I killed, depends on the stage. And I’m not being flippant. Some deaths made me sick, I had to do it to save my family. Some were satisfying, going up against someone with more experience than me, going up against a trained soldier, who had killed innocents … now that felt good, putting them out of everyone’s misery. Of course, that’s all in the past … those grandsons I mentioned, they’re also the grandsons of the man who sent his soldiers to kill me, time and again. The past is past, love conquers all, and all that crap. And some stages are horrible. V 2014 … look it up. Nightmare.

SI Do you mind if I use that?

AR No. I’m an old man, I don’t have secrets.

SI You’re smiling …

AR, I’m thinking … war, rock and roll, both get the blood going, but at my age there’s nothing quite like making a good business decision to get a spurt of adrenaline like nothing else. And that, my dear, is the end of my reputation.

SI I doubt it.

AR So do I, sadly. Donna won’t let you use most of that, you know?

SI I know. Andy, it’s been a pleasure.

AR “It has. Now, are you interested in an exclusive with Pluto’s Sisters …

13^th September 2035. By Sangita Ifors

SI – Thank you for agreeing to the interview.

JP – Hey, I love what you do. I think I’ve read all your books, and I subscribe to your blog. That piece you did about Springsteen’s legacy was amazing. How did you get access to his diaries?

SI – Oh, the family were very … hey, who’s doing this interview?

JP – laughs

SI – Before we start, is anything off limits?

JP – Seventh album, track 8. We don’t talk about it.

SI – I’m sorry?

JP – It was a mistake. We should never have tried disco. It didn’t suit us.

SI – Umm, Do you mean ‘Staked By Mistake?’ That’s not disco.

JP – You see, that’s exactly what I mean. We can’t do disco. We shouldn’t have tried.

SI – OK.

SI – But we can talk about anything else?

JP – Anything honey. Oh, Mary sends her regards. What’s going on there? She sounded a bit sarcastic, that’s not like her. Is there something up between you? I hope not, because Mary is one of my favourite daughters-in-law, and you’re a sweet girl too.

SI – I think she got the wrong end of the stick, about an interview I wanted to do with your son Bill.

JP – ‘slaps forehead’. Oh, now I remember. Yeah. Of course. Hmm, you were never going to get anywhere with Bill. Not without marrying him, anyway. He’s that type. Now, me … if I was younger, and wasn’t married to two scary, scary women …

SI – I’m flattered. Now, the interview?

JP – Yes? Where were we?

SI – Can we start with your childhood?

JP – Sure.

SI – You were raised by your mum?

JP – My mother, and my auntie Fran … Mark’s Mum.

SI – They were sisters?

JP – No, they were married to twins. There was a bit of a kerfuffle back when I was little, and my father and his brother had to disappear. My mum and Auntie Fran went into some kind of half assed hiding … they moved to Ulverston and cut off contact with their families. It was really traumatic for them, but they were great, they managed to keep me and Mark safe.

SI – Safe?

JP – From the White Pack … old news, all in the past … a group of werewolves who wanted to find and kill any shapeshifters who weren’t drinking their kool aid.

SI – I guess that’s all been well documented … how did it feel to grow up with no family but your mum, aunt and cousin?

JP – I didn’t know any different. We were all very, very close, which made things easier when my mother died. I was only fifteen. Most lads, that would have thrown them way off track, but I had Fran and Mark, and there was no question about me moving in with them. I already spent half my time there anyway, and the rest of the time Mark was at my house.

SI – So, you’re more brothers than cousins?

JP – Half brothers anyway, genetically. Our dads were identical twins.

SI – How did your mum’s death affect you?

JP – It kinda … this makes me sound like a bit of a shit, but the main thing was that it cramped my style a bit. Mum was cool about guitars and amps, and girls and beer. Auntie Fran wasn’t. Mark and I had to find somewhere else to practice loudly. Funny thing, Fran was fine about acoustic stuff, if we stayed up late, playing, she’d leave her bedroom door open and listen to us. She was a second mum to me, right from the start. I think that helped a lot, when my mother passed away. Not that I didn’t miss my mum, I loved her to bits, I still do, she was a huge influence on me. It’s just that she and Fran both knew that my mum was dying, and they arranged things between them.

SI – How did your mum influence you?

JP – Mum was a party girl, she loved men, she liked to dance, she loved music, she liked to get buzzed now and again, drink, dope, mostly, now and again a trank or some speed … she was also kind, generous, lots of fun, and very, very beautiful. I kinda worshipped her. She taught me to love women, but more importantly, to like women. Girls dig that.

SI – When did you find out what happened to your dad?

JP – When my uncle Anthony made contact for the first time, back when the White Pack attacked Whitby. That’s when I found out that my father was dead. That hurt more than I expected it to. Mark was in bits too. Diana held us together that day. That woman … she scares the shit out of me, but I don’t know where I’d be without her.

SI – Your relationship with Diana was public at the start, then she faded into the background for a long time …

JP – Her choice, not mine.

SI – And Donna? Your wife? You said, after the honeymoon, that you met her through Diana …

JP – Well, yes, that’s true, but not strictly speaking how we spun it at the time. Me and Donna, it was love at first sight. Same as me and Di, really, but Diana didn’t know about it for a year or two.

SI – Diana was in love with you but didn’t know?

JP – No, I’m not that much of a twat. She didn’t know that I was in love with her. Things were complicated. Lies, secrets, more lies. Anyway, that was long ago and far away. Well, Manchester. Not that far away.

SI – OK. How did the shapeshifter thing affect your music?

JP – How does the being female thing affect your writing? It’s a daft question, I’ve never known anything else, not really. Ummm, I guess I have more time than most musicians, to practise, to write … we don’t need much sleep, and we’re rarely ill. Then again … have you heard of Eric Ransome, my son-in-law? He did a list of shifter traits, years ago. He mentioned that we’re obsessive, but that we avoid addictive stuff. I think it’s an advantage, we never did drugs, other than booze. Not even tobacco. I tried it, but got bored pretty quickly, Mark always hated it. Anyway, maybe that affects us, as musicians, being straight, I mean.

SI – Straight?

JP – Drug wise. Oh? You’re fishing? No, my train doesn’t stop at that station, never really even slowed down for it. Got no big objection, morally, or anything … my two best mates shagged each other, which was a bit of a surprise at first, but you know, it’s not that big a deal. And my kids … they change sex, shape shifting, some of ‘em.

SI – Have you ever considered …?

JP – No. I’m male, I like being male. Besides, they’re a lot more talented than me, when it comes to changing how they look. I can be me, or a wolf. That’s it. I’m crap at it, to be honest.

SI – What’s it like, being a wolf?

JP – The biggest rush in the world. Really, I have to ration myself. If I do it for too long, I get drawn in. The world is so different, so exciting, so much simpler and then so much more complicated.

SI – Oh, our time is nearly up. Umm. If you could change anything about your life, what would it be?

JP – I’d go and find Diana and Donna a lot earlier. I begrudge every day I didn’t know them.

SI – And, what’s your advice for aspiring rock musicians?

JP – Never try disco, ever.

One of the three aims of Cats Protection is to educate and inform the public about cats, and at a Branch level, a good way of doing this is to give talks to groups.

Preston Branch has four volunteers who get involved in this side of things. Alan Needham is a retired schoolteacher with an impressive CV of public speaking. He is regularly engaged by community groups to speak about his work with Cats Protection, but even when he is asked to speak on other topics, he kindly donates his fee to our Branch. Shirley Chisnall is fantastic at putting larger groups of children at ease, is extremely knowledgeable about cats and CP, and knows just how to pitch the content at the right level for each age group. Val Chew, our neutering volunteer, is a retired primary school teacher, and she is in her element with the smaller children such as primary school classes, Rainbow Guides and Beaver Scouts. My contribution is to plan the talks and makes sure we have back up materials and promotional stuff to hand.

We don’t charge a fee to give the talks, but will happily accept one for Branch funds if one is offered. For younger groups, we often ask the children to bring a donation of cat food, which helps with awareness and makes them feel included in the rescue work that we do.

If variety is the spice of life, then being a Cats Protection volunteer is like diving into a vat of curry powder. Over the last couple of years, our ‘talks team’ has visited a Mothers Union that turned out (in the nicest way possible) to be more of a Grandmother’s Union, several lots of Brownies, a social group of lovely middle aged ladies who started meeting thirty years ago as a ‘Young Mums’ group, and a Reception class at a primary school. Our oldest audience member was in her eighties, the youngest was four. Future talks are booked at a local Air Cadets group and another Rainbow Guides group.

We tailor each talk to the audience. Children want to talk about their own cats, sometimes quite alarmingly, and it’s important to respond in the right way. “My cat has had thirty kittens!” is an interesting item of information, and we’ve found that it’s useful to have leaflets on hand about our free neutering scheme at every talk that we give.

With younger groups, we try to focus on the basics, emphasising that cats need love, food, access to water, shelter, safety, and veterinary care. We’ve found that with little children, it’s best to leave the topic of litter trays until the end of the talk, as they can get quite excitable at the prospect of telling us about where their pets choose to toilet.

With older groups, such as Brownies, we start to introduce the idea of volunteering, and the role of Cats Protection in the community. We talk about the importance of neutering, and about the responsibilities of pet ownership. ‘Goody Bags’ are very useful for this age group, they like to have something tangible to take away; CP branded bags, badges, pencils and bookmarks will be taken away by them to be used later, reminding them about the work we do, and introducing CP material and contact details into the family home,

For adult groups, we tend to assume a basic knowledge of cats, and although most talks do settle down into lovely chats about members’ own pets, past and present, we start off by talking about the charity, its aims and history, and what we do locally. If we have stories about cats rescued from, or rehomed to, that particular area, we try to include them. Again, we give out promotional material and gifts such as pens, and we also take our our own newsletters, membership forms, and the cute pyramidal cardboard collecting boxes. For most of these groups, ‘education’ isn’t the issue, but we do try to raise awareness of the charity, and hope that we will recruit new members, or even new volunteers.

We actively look for opportunities to give our talks, although we’re only addressing a small group of people, it’s a very personal and individual contact with each one, and can have more of an impact than a radio broadcast or a newspaper article. Our talks are mentioned in our newsletter, partly to let our members know that we’re spreading the word, but also in the hope that they’ll mention us to any groups that they are a part of. Members who are the parents of younger children might be involved with Scout or Guide groups, religious members can link us up with social groups connected to their faith.

Our most recent talk was to a reception class at a primary school. I’ve delivered postgraduate courses to science students, and made sales pitches to senior supermarket managers, but the thought of talking to twenty young children made me hesitate, and I was very grateful to have Val along. I was counting on her experience of primary school teaching to make the whole thing go well. On the way there, she asked what age group we’d be working with, and I told her that the children were four or five years old. She paled, and told me that she was used to older groups. She seemed more nervous than me at that point. We needn’t have worried, the teacher and her classroom assistant had the class very well organised, and the children behaved beautifully. We were asked to keep the talk to twenty minutes, as the little ones don’t have a long attention span, but they kept asking questions about cats, and telling us about their own pets, and before we knew it, the bell had gone and we’d been there for twice the planned length of time. We’d printed off ‘cue cards’ to guide the talk, focusing on the basic needs of cats and kittens, which led to interesting discussions on what to feed cats, when they should be allowed outside, where they sleep, when they need to see a vet, and where they get their water from. The biggest response came from talking about how cats need to be loved, and to interact with people through play. The children really did seem to respond well to both of those ideas. We left face masks and pictures for the children to colour in, and I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Sometimes, particularly with older groups, not everyone there is sympathetic, and it’s important to be prepared for the difficult questions, which we do get. The most common one is “How do I keep my neighbours’ cats out of my garden.” but we’ve also been in situations where we’ve had to explain why we can’t instantly take in stray cats when they’re reported to us, and even why we choose to volunteer for an animal charity when there are so many other problems in the world. Questions like that are welcome, as they give an opportunity for us to explain our situation, and also to involve the group in discussion.

One of the unexpected bonuses of giving talks locally is that we sometimes meet Branch members who we know of only by name, they may be elderly or disabled, and unable to come to our fund raising events, but they subscribe to the newsletter and are keenly interested in our work. With church groups in particular, these supporters get the chance to come to the talk because they have support within the group from friends who can offer transport to the talks.

Getting out and about, giving talks to people of all generations, takes CP into the community, we find out how we are seen by others, and get the opportunity to let others know about our rescue, rehoming and neutering work. We’ve met people who adopted cats from us in the past, and people who have given cats up to us. We’ve been told about fund raising opportunities, and been told about feral colonies before they got out of control. We would love to do more talks, so if you know anyone in the area covered by our branch (PR1 – PR7, PR25 and PR26 postcode areas) who is looking for a speaker, please get in touch. Our phone number is 0845 177 0708, our email address is prestoncatsprotection@gmail.com.

Goody bags, and ideas for talks, are readily available from the NCC, either through the CatNav system or by contacting the relevant department listed in News and Views.

There is no category name for aunts and uncles. Equally inconveniently, there is no distinction between an aunt who is the sister of a parent, and an aunt who is married to the brother of a parent. Similarly, there is no distinction between an uncle who is the brother of a parent, and an uncle who is married to the sister of a parent. This irks me. I want specificity. I want a word that makes clear that my ‘aunt’ is my mum’s sister, my dad’s sister, my dad’s brother’s wife, or my mum’s brother’s wife. I want words that specify, as well as words that embrace and include.

Right now, I have three nieces, and six nephews. So far, so specific, I can distinguish them by gender, but sometimes I would like to dip into the language and say how many of them are blood relatives, and how many are related to me by my marriage. Not because it matters, but because there could be a word, where there is none. I want that word.

I want to be able to talk about my sister-in-law in a way that precisely conveys that I am referring to my husband’s sister, and not my brother’s wife (or vice-versa). I would love to use a word that describes the relationship between a group of people who are married to siblings. Me, and the spouses of my husband’s two siblings. The three of us are a group, with a certain family tie, yet there is no title that recognises the relationship that we share. We have the same parents-in-law, the same nephews and nieces, but within the family there is no word that recognises our group self in relation to each other, rather than to someone else. It would be useful.

I have many cousins. I could tell you, with absolute precision, whether that cousin was a half-second cousin twice removed, or a double third cousin once removed. I love that I can do that, but would love it even more if there were different words for different cousinships. It would be satisfying to be able to indicate, with one word, whether a ‘removed’ cousin was from a generation before or after mine. I hate that I have to specify that the cousin is male or female. In French, you can just add an ‘e’ to the end of the word, to tell the whole tale.

And, of course, I haven’t even mentioned the glorious specificity we could get into by distinguishing between first and subsequent marriages, and the relationships that accrue from them. There is space in our wonderful language for lots of new words. Any ideas?

The Name Game – choosing character names

Writing for a charity – getting experience as a writer.

2609 cats and kittens neutered in 2010 by Preston Branch? That’s a stupendous figure by anyone’s standards, and we’ve been asked more than once how we do it.

There are four factors, and we couldn’t manage such a phenomenal success rate without each and every one of them. First of all, the HQ neutering voucher scheme pays for the operations. Our success is rewarded with an ample allocation of vouchers. Secondly, we have a handful of vet surgeries in the area that are committed enough to ‘the cause’ to accept the vouchers as full payment for neuterings, allowing us to run an effective permanent free neutering campaign. Thirdly, all our volunteers understand the prime importance of neutering for cat welfare and work closely with our neutering officer, Val Chew. Val is, all by herself, the fourth factor.

Val is decidedly unimpressed by the figure of 2609 cats and kittens neutered in one year on her patch. After 24 years of devotion to the cat neutering cause, she’s very disappointed that there are that many unneutered cats in the area. It’s not her fault, of course, people import kittens into the area from the surrounding districts, and they actively breed kittens in some areas in an attempt to make a few quid. She can’t do anything about that, but what she can and does do is pursue each and every case where someone wants to get their cat or kitten neutered and doesn’t have the financial resources to pay for the operation.

Val’s a retired teacher who used to spend her evenings and weekends issuing neutering vouchers, chasing up unused vouchers, and going out on trap / neuter / return feral jobs. Now that she’s retired, it’s a full time job. Actually, it’s more like two full time jobs, she’s at the vets every day they’re open.

Our telephone volunteers and some of the vet nurses at participating vets are Val’s front line shock troops. They don’t just follow up on requests from the public for vouchers, that’s too easy … every query from the public elicits the questions ‘Is the cat neutered?’ ‘Do you have any other cats and are they neutered?’ and ‘Where did you get your kitten from? Do you know if the kitten’s mum has been neutered yet? Do you know anyone else who got a kitten from that litter?’ We find them, and we offer to pay to neuter them when necessary. We have a supply of cheap printed leaflets advertising the neutering campaign, and a volunteer who distributes them for us. We try to be as high profile as possible, using posters, leaflets, our website and Twitter to advertise our neutering scheme. We are polite to our ‘clients’ and encourage them to spread the word about cat neutering to their friends and family.

Val herself asks the same questions, and she’ll follow up on an unused voucher for weeks if necessary. If she finds out that a voucher wasn’t used because the cat was pregnant, she’ll pursue the neutering of the original queen and all her kittens. It sounds like hard work, and it is. There are no easy short cuts to achieving such a high neutering rate, it’s down to sheer hard work, sleepless nights, and pure determination.

2609 cats. It’s not an impressive number, it’s a scary number. Every year we hope that our services will be needed less, but until that happens, we need all four of our strands to weave together a net to catch as many unneutered cats as possible.

For more information about the work of Cats Protection, visit http://www.cats.org.uk To find out more about what the volunteers at Preston Branch are doing, visit www.cats.org.uk/preston or follow the Twitter account @prestoncp