The Pocket Panther and the Written Word

Fergus has been reading again. This time he pulled Rosamund McKitterick's The Carolingians and the Written Word down and left it in the hall near the cat door. He also got Simon Schama's Dead Certainties off the shelf, but didn't move it quite as far as The Carolingians. Apparently he's done with Augustine and has moved on to the problems of literacy and historiography. That's my boy.

The pocket panther made himself visible but superbly aloof on Saturday afternoon while the Burgundian dress workshop was going on. At the end, though, he went to his favourite 'mama, pick me up' spot (by the working carboy in the kitchen), so I scooped him up and let him snuggle on my shoulder while I was seeing people out the door. Once ensconced, he allowed Tatiana to pet his ears and and admire his fine coat and green eyes a while. She was a little startled at how deep his pigmentation is -- his whiskers, claws, skin, and even his scars are black -- and suggested that he might be a 'Swedish Black.' This is a cat variety I've never heard of, but since all my cats have been miscellaneous moggies rescued from various sources, I'm hardly an expert on obscure cat breeds.

A websearch for 'Swedish Black' got me a lot of hits for bands in a subgenre of industrial metal I'd also never heard of, and a disturbing number of sexually explicit websites. 'Swedish Black Cats' merely changed the ratio of porn to music sites, and not for the better. It was, I suppose, informative after a fashion, but didn't teach me much about Felis domesticus.

So, does anyone out there with more knowledge of cat breeds have anything on 'Swedish Blacks' or something similar to that? As far as I'm concerned, Fergus is a Maryland Mixed, but I'm now curious about this mysterious Nordic variety.

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