The Adventures of BOGOF

I am a retired male living in the UK. That is enough about me; let's get on with the more interesting subject of BOGOF the Supermarket Cat.

The idea of writing about a Supermarket cat came to me one day when I went to a local Supermarket for the weekly shop. It was a nice sunny morning and sitting outside the main doors was a cat. Many people, including myself, stroked and petted it. When I came out of the Supermarket the cat had gone, and I spent some of the drive home wondering why it had been there in the first place, where it lived, and what it was doing there etc.

The next week I returned to the same Supermarket but the cat was nowhere to be seen. Since then I have only seen it once more, and that was only a fleeting glimpse as it was hurrying round the back of the car park.

One evening a few weeks later, and with nothing better to do, I began to do some serious thinking about the "Supermarket cat", and within a couple of hours I had the makings of a story, complete with main characters, mapped out. A couple of hours more saw the first draft of "BOGOF the Supermarket Cat" completed. For people who are not familiar with the term "BOGOF", it is an acronym of the Supermarket term "Buy One Get One Free".

Beta readers did not rubbish my effort, and indeed were very helpful with suggestions and fault finding etc. This spurred me on to producing something of publication standard. But I felt that something was missing, it didn't take long for the penny to drop, my book needed some illustrations. A family friend, Hilda Philipse, with a long time yearning to be a children's book illustrator, came instantly to mind. I emailed her my story along with some illustrator notes, and the rest, as they say, is history.