Late one night during the first Covid lockdown in 2020, my partner, Louisa, and I were watching TV in the sitting room when a tabby cat appeared in the darkness outside the patio door. He stared in through the glass, sat down and miaowed loudly.
Next morning he was still there, still miaowing. By the evening, since he hadn’t moved or even slept, we decided we had to give him some water. The next morning, we fed him. The evening after that we let him in and made him a bed out of an old fleece jacket. Because he was an explorer who’d been marooned, we called him Shackleton.
