Nursery Rhymes for Cats
Nursery Rhymes for Cats was conceived on the living room floor of Julie’s sister’s house in Bowness-on-Windermere in October 1997. We had arrived in England having had the idea of the book accepted by Bantam and been contracted to ‘generate’ a certain number of Nursery Rhymes. So while I spent the days searching for a employment as an electronics engineer, and our cats sat resentfully in quarantine, Julie was fruitfully engaged making up nursery rhymes. We would refine these rhymes together during the cold, dark and wet evenings, often while esconsed in a cheerful pub called Hole In’t Wall which at that time served an excellent pheasant.
It soon became clear that Julie had a natural talent for verse and she took to calling herself Pote Lorry-it. The Pote took about three weeks to write Nursery Rhymes for Cats, which was published in 1998. The publisher decided to employ the same format as on the previous book, with Sue Hellard as illustrator, and Pote Lorry-it was once again disappointed.