This is not a complete list of all the cats I have shared my household with, since there are a couple we don't have pictures of, and a few who only lived with us for a short while on their way to somewhere else.
This is Ceridwen Cat. She was a Himalyan (sort of like a Persian with Siamese markings), and we got her from a cat shelter. Her previous owner had been an old woman who had moved into a nursing home and couldn't take Cerry-cat with her. Cerry-cat was as thick as two short planks, and the most placid and genial cat I've ever lived with. We often called her "the Splonge", due to her dopey demeanour and amoeboid amiability. She lived with us for a couple of years, but unfortunately was fatally run over by a car in the communal car park that adjoined the unit we lived in.
And this is Sarge. An ex-stray, also from a cat shelter, he was a real "personality". When he first joined us he had the air of a battered survivor, with his ragged ears, robust manner and "don't mess with me" attitude. But it didn't take long to discover that Sarge had some dark secret in his background that led to a phobia of loud noises. Ironing boards were the worst. Put up or put down an ironing board in Sarge's presence and you wouldn't see him for dust! He'd be under the bed until the evil noise source was well and truly gone. Sarge was a lovely cat, and we were absolutely bereft when he contracted feline immunovirus and had to be euthanased before he died of kidney failure.
Zeno was a Burmese, and in his prime he would probably have been a very impressive specimen. However, when we got him he was sufficiently ancient that the cat shelter staff who had rescued him from stray-hood hesitated to guess his age (but thought that over fifteen was highly likely). He had four teeth (his canines; all the others had rotted years before) and the most truly putrid breath I've ever encountered from an animal. Zeno's home-grown breath weapon would stop intruders at fifty paces. He had the charming habit of waking me up in the morning by standing on my chest while I slept, affectionately nibbling my chin until I started to wake, then yawning directly in my face. I suspect that Zeno's little "good morning" would wake a corpse. Zeno lived with us for a very contented year or so, and then finally expired of old age, to nobody's particular surprise.
Meet Jerry. Everybody else did! He was the original wanderer-cat. Another ex-shelter cat, he stayed with us for about three years, until he finally wandered off one day and failed to return. He was rambunctious, extraverted and somewhat prone to whapping other cats on the head to assert his dominance. This picture shows a rather characteristic Jerry-activity, that of supervising our library. He would spend many an hour strolling across the tops of bookshelves and ensuring that every book was in its place. The rest of his time was spent either prowling around the neighbourhood or curling up in the bottom of my wardrobe and watching the rest of the household go about our business.
Here we have Ash, Flame's sister. These two were the offspring of a cat belonging to friends. When we acquired them they were pretty much feral, since said friends had not handled them at all, and they had been raised in a disused shed at the bottom of the garden. It took us many months to tame these wild kittens. Flame succumbed first to our blandishments, and has become legendary in his sociability; however his sister Ash always stayed somewhat wild. She would come and sit beside me, snuggling up when she chose; but woe betide anyone who tried to pick her up! A canny and interesting creature, she finally died when a neighbour ran over her in his car while she snoozed on his driveway. I memorialised her by embroidering a portrait of her on the denim waistcoat that I was decorating at the time.
Captain Midnight was a lovely cat to be around if you were human, but not at all nice to spend time with if you were another cat. Assertive and aggressively affectionate to "his people", he was a domineering bully to any other cats around. He lived with us for a year, striking fear and terror into the other cats of the household. It finally seemed obvious that he had no intention of settling down and treating the other cats with civility, and so rather than have the other cats reduced to nervous-wreckhood we passed the Captain on to an acquaintance of Mark's who had taken a fancy to him. Last we heard, the Captain had settled in just fine into his new home and was getting on beautifully with all and sundry.
We found Tribby under a bush in a park during a picnic one day. This cat was so close to starvation that it had lost most of its fur, and was so weak that when we tried to pick the poor beast up it just stood and shook because it lacked the strength to run away. Tribby came with three week-old kittens; we had assumed that Trib was the mother. When we took them all down to the vet, she thought this was quite hilarious since Tribby was male. However, in my defence, I must point out that when I found him, he was so shrunken from starvation that even his balls had shrivelled to invisibility; there really wasn't very much of him at all.
Over the next year or so, I nursed Tribby back to the closest he was going to come to good health. Eventually it became clear that he was a very sweet tempered little creature who sadly had suffered some sort of brain damage from his deprivation. He was very odd in quite a few ways, and often behaved in ways completely unfeline. Unfortunately nothing bar nothing would stop him sneezing copiously on everyone and everything, and Tribby became famous among our friends for his projectile-snot generation. However, he never really attained anything resembling good health, and finally the vet suggested a blood test. It turned out that Tribby had feline immunovirus, and since he was definitely declining in health (not to mention presenting a risk to our other cats), he was euthanased. I was surprised to find out how attached I had become to this strangle little cat with his poor health and his odd behaviour: I cried for days afterward. But it was good to know that we had given Tribby a good life, if a short one.
Meet Ember, also known as The Sleazoid Tart or the Sleazle Weasel. The first photo was taken the week that she moved in with us. Note the phrasing - Ember's joining our household was entirely her idea. She turned up on the doorstep one day, a tiny orange kitten noisily requesting ingress in the middle of a rainstorm. I opened the door and in she trotted. And stayed.
I think the main lesson that Ember learned in her kittenhood was that all one needs to get one's way is to be cute and appealing. Thereafter, "getting her way" generally involved migrating in a slinky and rather liquid fashion up her intended victim's legs onto their lap, then slowly and imperceptibly from their lap onto their face. Not surprisingly, she often met with failure in her attempts to carry out her Secret Master Plan, but she didn't let that stop her - she would try again. And again. And again. We used to advise guests to avoid returning her gaze when she was rolling around trying to look appealing (the second photo), or she'd take that as in invitation and they'd be suffocating in orange fur before they could say "my god, what is that cat doing?"
She disappeared mysteriously one day after some wet and stormy weather - possibly appropriate, given that she arrived in our household during similar conditions. We searched high and low but failed to find her. Mark's theory was that she had been exploring roadside storm drains when a storm hit, and gotten washed away. All very sad.