One Year

It is a year ago tonight since Freddy the Gorgeous Boy, known on this page as Cat, died. Now, as then, I’m preparing for bed. Next Sunday, I am going to ask you to join me in the evening by putting lighted candles in your windows to remember all the pets we have loved and who have enriched our lives.
Last year I asked the same, both here, by email, phone and face to face. The word spread to more people than I could have ever imagined. Friends here and in foreign countries passed the idea on and I got messages telling me of people who I have never met in the real or virtual world lighting candles. People told me stories of their pets. I heard of much loved dogs, of guinea pigs, cats and rabbits. There were memories of ponies, horses, donkeys and pet goats. It felt like people had kept these stories bottled up, and there was joy in the telling. Everyone’s pet was the best, which is just as it should be.
So dig out your candles, chill that bottle of good wine, and on Sunday night, let’s remember all the great times we have had with our pets, and how much we have loved them.
Tonight, I’m going to have a single candle, a glass of wine, and repost one of my favourite pictures of Freddy taken eleven months to the day before he died.
Cheers!

Perfect Happiness

Full of the Joys

If Not Cat does not sleep soundly tonight I shall worry.
He has been on the go since lunchtime. I can see that if I want to enjoy his companion animal services in the warmer months, I may have to put a tent up in the garden. This is his first spring with me.

Playing With the Sensor

Unbelievably, it is nearly a year since Cat died. A year since Mother hovered between life and death, and, as I now know, the beginning of her move into the nursing home.
Not Cat has eased some of the pain of Cat’s death. He, like Cat, has unknowingly provided support through some of the darker days of Mother’s decline. He has given us pleasure, and somehow, hope.

Cat Last December

A year ago today I took this photo of Cat in the garden.
It’s a bit out of focus, but gosh, he was such a handsome boy!

Cat 17th December 2010

11th November, Armistice Day

Remembering the people behind the poppies.

Social Networks Cat Style

Cat never had careers advice, but it didn’t take a professional to see he had people skills in abundance. Had he been human, Alex Polizzi would have snapped him up for a front of house role in one of her smarter hotels, meeting and greeting the guests. I often thought he would have loved living in a children’s or old people’s home and excelled in the role, a thought that was confirmed in the last weeks of his life when we had an extended stay at the scheme where Mother lived.

Reflective Cat

He kept me waiting at the door when he saw old acquaintances coming along the street, or spied someone he liked the look of. He knew every old lady with a shopping trolley, every mother and toddler. They were his key street audience, but it also included everyone else from lorry drivers to school children.

Remembering Dad

24th October 1920 – 17th April 1991

The Gorgeous Boy

It’s six months today since Cat died.
Here’s a picture of him I’ve not posted before. What a gorgeous boy in every way he was.

Ridiculously Handsome Boy

Olga

When Mother’s cousin Olga fell last year, she gave her name and address to the paramedics, but was silent when they asked her date of birth.

Thinking she was perhaps hard of hearing, they asked again.

“I always understood,” she said with dignity, “that a lady should not be asked her age.”

Good on her.

Twentieth Anniversary

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of my father’s death.

One way and another, mortality has been pretty high in my mind for several weeks.

My father died very suddenly. One moment he was turning out his bedside light, the next he was unconscious. An hour later he was dead. I was in London, and received a phone call to say he would probably not survive. I did not have the option of racing to his bedside, but instead sat beside the ‘phone drinking camomile tea and hoping he would not survive if this meant a further reduction in his quality of life.

A Leg At Each Corner

I hadn’t had a pet for quite a while. And I’d never had a cat. My great grandmother was a cat lover, and that seems to have turned my father off completely. He disliked her thoroughly. He would tell us how he had to kiss her through her veil. Her house number, 51, remained a symbol of bad luck to him all his life, though I can’t remember him being superstitious in any other regard. Cats became part and parcel of the antipathy he felt about everything connected with her.

So, we never had cats, though others in the family did. In some way, I believe I thought them rather inferior creatures, though likeable enough.

Consequently, when Cat strolled, or marched, into my life, I was unprepared for his personality. As far I was concerned, he was an attractive furry thing with a leg at each corner; a pleasant but not terribly significant animal. I didn’t expect him to have his own agenda.

But he did, and he wrong footed me from the start.

He had definite ideas about how our time together should be spent, and was not shy about making his feelings known. I’d be miaowed at; pawed; my papers would be scattered; he’d smash his food bowls together to get my attention or express his disdain for their contents; pull books from the shelf; shred newspaper.

He ate my flowers. If anyone gave me carnations he’d be straight at them. When I asked the vet if this was normal behaviour, she looked at me as though I were quite mad. He learned that a sure way to get my attention was to leap onto the chest of drawers and start rocking the vase of flowers there. If I’d had a naughty step, he’d have been on it quite a bit.

The friend-who-gave-him-the biscuits was probably the most obvious cat lover I knew. Ungrateful for her rôle in getting me to feed him, he would treat her to his most brattish behaviour when she visited. He’d huff when she arrived. If she sat beside him on the sofa, he’d get off it. If she tried to stroke him, he’d glare and move away. He would deliberately turn his back on her, and if I cooked for us, it was the only time he would leap onto the table during a meal. Had he been a child, I’d have hauled him into another room for a hissed telling off. She became inured to his surliness, and then one day when she came, he greeted her like a long lost friend, rolling over onto his back and purring at her, and that was that.