Who was Kiwi the Cat?

We’ve been out and about promoting our services as motel minders and from that we have our first posting, minding at a motel in Christchurch for the month of April. Sorry to all those who were thinking of using our services during this month – we’re busy!

As we were pounding the pavements we had a number of questions and one of the more interesting ones was, “What is Kiwi the Cat?” Kiwi the Cat was Kiwi the Cat, our cat whose name was Kiwi. He was named that because we had already named our goldfish “fish” and “chips.”

Why all these Kiwiana references you ask? Living in Japan is the answer. When we lived in Japan we filled our lives with Kiwi Kulcha where we could and pet names was a good example of that.

Kiwi was our first cat and we found him on a supermarket notice board when he was knee high to a grasshopper. He was a full member of our family and would have made the trip back from Japan with us if he could have. Sadly that was not to be the case due to illness and so we immortalised him in the name of the company we set up when we purchased a motel in Christchurch. He stays with us now as we move into motel minding in name and in silhouette!

As an aside, we did have one operator ask if we looked after dogs as well as cats but that’s a story for another day. The picture show our kiwiana pets in Japan. Kiwi’s favourite place to sit in the winter was on top of the fish tank where it was always warm! Oddly, Fish ‘n Chips never really interested him.