Pusskin and the Missing Poo: The naughtiest cat in Didcot (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781068755606)

I began telling stories to pupils in my class in my final teaching practice in a Year 2 class in a primary school in the Cardiff docks area in the summer of 1989. I was doing my PGCE in Cardiff and spent a year training to be a primary teacher. I can't remember how I came to have a glove puppet of a black and white cow, but I named him George and started to make up stories. The children loved this character that I had created and loved to talk to him.

I became a teacher in September 1989 in Paget primary school in Birmingham and I began making up more complex stories about my mother's cat, Clyde, and later on my own cat, Gizmo. I taught there for 7 years and I enjoyed making up stories about cats and other animals to my class for story time at the end of the day. I created personas for my cats but the ones the pupils liked best were the naughty cats and their escapades. Eventually, my stories became popular with successive years of pupils in both the infant and the junior department, and I created a whole new world of adventures with talking cats.

I created different voices for different cats and added Mogwai and Pusskin to my repertoire when we got 2 kittens for the Oxfordshire Animal Sanctuary. By then I was married and living in South Oxfordshire and I was working in a special school. To my surprise, my pupils at Bishopswood Special School loved the stories that I made up and they especially liked to hear what Pusskin had got up to. They were especially keen to listen to stories of him being naughty and they appreciated toilet humour too. They liked to ask Pusskin questions, and they thought it was hilarious when he was rude and naughty. They pretended that they would tell me what he had been up to, and he would tell them secrets. Many conversations were had between my class and my naughty cat, Pusskin. He was far naughtier than Gizmo or Mogwai.

So, I decided to try and transpose the oral stories into written form. My first attempt was during lockdown due to Covid. I wrote a story that I had already told my current class and my friend, Uma Mahadeva, created the illustrations. I videoed myself telling the story and also put the written version online for my pupils to read at home.

The story was about my cat, Pusskin, being very naughty while his mummy had no idea what he was up to. Pusskin was very proud to be called "the naughtiest cat in Didcot", which is where we live. As my pupils loved toilet humour, I added plenty of lavatorial descriptions. This may not be to everyone's taste, but my class absolutely loved it.