Shortly after moving to Aberdeen (we had a bungalow out in the countryside) I noticed a black cat trying to eat the old bread off my bird table. Being me, I quickly filled up a bowl of cat biscuits and left them outside, then watched and waited. The black cat came back and ate every last one of them.

This started a twice daily routing where I would put out food and water for the cat. But it was too scared to come close, it would wait in the bushes. Eventually I led the food down towards the back garage door, where I tricked my other half to put a cat flap in!!! Eventually my black cat would go through the flap and eat from the garage. This went on for 6 months.
Eventually, in February, we had a vicious winter spell. It snowed and snowed! We must have had a good 12 inches of snow in the garden.
I was out with the children playing in the snow, when I heard a cat crying in the hedges. It was my black cat, and I think desperation due to the weather, made 'it' brave. It came out of the bushes and let me stroke it!!! And then kept following me. But it would not come in the house.
But by the evening, temperatures were dropping and somehow I managed to encourage it to come in through the utility room door, where I quietly closed it. The cat came into the family room. Razzle and Truffles were our 2 Siamese then, and obviously we had to get them out of the equation! So they were put in another part of the house.

We kept him in at night times and in the daytime he would go outside through our cat flap. We took him to the vets. We were told that he was a neutered male, and had obviously lived a domestic life before. He had no microchip. But there was evidence of a collar having been worn. It was not unusual to find abandoned animals where we lived, as we were on the borders of the city. But we will never know. We called him Percy (after Percy in Thomas The Tank Engine!!)

Percy is still with us now. Percy is now living with us in the south of England, he has been here for 6 months now, and has settled in really well. He seems to love the warm summers, and all the radiators in our new house!. He is a gorgeous, huge black neutered male. In the photo he is laying in front of the log-burning stove with Razzle.