🐱Cauliflowers Through The Catflap: A Covid #Memoir by Cassandra Campbell-Kemp. Reviewed by @GeorgiaRoseBook, for Rosie’s #BookReview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Georgia.

She blogs here https://www.georgiarosebooks.com

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Georgia has been reading Cauliflowers Through the Catflap: and Other Tales From a Solitary Lockdown
by Cassandra Campbell-Kemp

Cauliflowers Through The Catflap by Cassandra Campbell-Kemp

I took Cauliflowers Through the Catflap on holiday with me and read it in one day. Cassandra Campbell-Kemp is a 65-year-old single woman who has mobility issues and was definitely in the high-risk category health wise when C-19 struck. Campbell-Kemp is also fiercely independent, unconventional, delightfully eccentric and clairvoyant. Being so meant she had two prescient nightmares at the end of 2019 and when their content stuck with her, she realised she had ‘foreseen’ something of what was coming.

And so, she began to prepare.

I found all the detail about her research and subsequent purchases fascinating as she became, to me anyway, the ultimate prepper. The amount of stuff she bought was amazing.

I liked Cassandra, a lot. She is clearly popular as she connects with others online and has huge support from her wonderful friend, Andy. I think we’d get on as she reminds me of my step-grandmother who is similar in nature, although just turned 90.

I found myself slightly envious of the opportunity Cassandra was afforded by lockdown when I was frantically preparing what I could while still working and dealing with the grim task of writing resilience and contingency plans for all my clients in the event of my death. At the time I envied those furloughed and with nothing else to do but work out to Joe Wickes, make banana bread and watch endless box sets.

Cassandra did have one companion throughout, her super cat, Felix. And what a wonderful friend he was, and is, to her. She is also a woman to be much admired. And not just for her ability to speak several languages. Her can-do attitude, adventurous nature and problem-solving abilities have meant that she has done a terrific job of protecting herself and staying alive, mostly because she couldn’t bear for Felix to be frightened and alone if she died. A woman after my own heart indeed.

Cassandra also happens to be eloquent in her writing. This book is an engaging read about one woman’s life through the lockdowns and her discoveries about herself and those around her. Highly recommended.

Book description

In November 2019 Cassandra had a terrifying nightmare about a small Chinese demon spewing a deadly poison. In early January 2020 she had a subsequent and similarly disturbing dream in which she found herself in an empty and deserted Italian castle, furnished solely with a single ventilator tent. Forewarned by these dreams and feeling that something really bad was going to happen, she threw herself into a frenzy of logistical planning, laboriously turning her spare bedroom into a store cupboard stuffed to the rafters with many (rigorously disinfected) containers full of sensible, nutritious, long-life and probably disgusting dehydrated foods, ready to face whatever The Fates had in store.
On the 3rd March 2020, notwithstanding the dithering of the British Government, Cassandra unequivocally shut herself away, refusing to open the door to anyone and using a newly-acquired pink megaphone with which to communicate with the outside world. Almost a year later she is still locked away! This is the story of a solitary Lockdown – a story of bloody-minded self-preservation replete with moments of anxiety, resignation and sadness but also with joy, hilarity and above all dogged determination. Cassandra – a single and somewhat immobile woman in her mid 60’s – struggles with myriad new challenges as she watches the world change from within her self-imposed fortress.

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