Now that Gilbert has been described, the same is owed to George. He is, if anything, the easier brief: a great deal of white, with ginger arranged on top of it as though by a careful hand.
Pattern
Underneath the ginger, George is a mackerel tabby — narrow vertical stripes that run perpendicular to the spine, rather than the wide swirled blotches of a classic tabby. The stripes are easiest to see on the back of the head and along the cap in good light, where the ginger reads almost orange and the tabby ticking shows through. All red cats are tabby (the colour is sex-linked and always patterns itself), so the question is which sort of tabby. George is mackerel.
Colour
Red, in the cat-fancy sense — what everyone else calls ginger. The nose leather is pink, the paw pads are pink, and in strong sun the ginger reads almost peach across the cap. There are no other base colours mixed in: no torbie patches, no smoke, no silver. A clean red, applied in patches over a white ground.
White markings
And here is where George diverges most clearly from Gilbert. Where Gilbert wears white as trim — face V, chest, socks — George wears ginger as trim. The body is predominantly white; the colour is confined to a cap over the head, a patch or two on the back and shoulder, and a ringed ginger tail. In cat-fancy terms this is a high-grade bicolour, sometimes called a van pattern when the colour is restricted to head and tail only. George is just shy of true van: he has a couple of shoulder patches.
What George does
The catalogue, abbreviated. He sleeps with his eyes very firmly closed, in the manner of a cat who has decided to have nothing further to do with the day. He keeps watch at the door, with the unbothered patience of a hall porter. He plays on his back, white belly up, paws in the air, the picture of dignity laid aside. He visits a lap in the garden, briefly, on his own terms. And when there is too much being looked at, he puts his paws over his face.
The verdict
Red mackerel tabby and white — high-grade bicolour, very nearly van. Not a solid ginger (no such thing in cats, strictly speaking — the red gene always patterns itself). Not a torbie or a tortoiseshell-with-white; no other base colour is in the coat. A clean, photographable cat who has spent a decade demonstrating the wisdom of being mostly white.