Today we mourn the sad loss of one of our brethren, an urban cat who led a good life and met an untimely end. He lived with Nick Green and his family.
Tonight we will sing songs to the claw moon to guide his spirit safely to cat heaven, where the mice are swift and juicy and birds are surprised by cats with wings.
An obituary for Red.
The grasshoppers of Hertford are missing a playmate today. Red (aka Red-cat or dig-dat by the youngest member of his family) was hit by a car mere yards from his front door, and was buried in his beloved garden, under a claw
moon, on 21 February by his heartbroken best friend.
Red‚s early life was marred by struggle. Sentenced to time in Battersea not once but twice for antisocial behaviour, his good side was finally allowed to shine when he was granted the patience, love and garden that he most sorely needed. Branded independent and standoffish, he dropped this pretence as soon as there was no more danger of being mistaken for a dog.
The arrival of a baby in the house showed him up for the prodigy he was; no volume of screaming, no pulling of whiskers, no board-book bombardment could provoke this cat to scratch his Little Friend ˆ this cat who would take chunks from any adult‚s hand as soon as look at them. Now at last given the room to spread himself, he did, over every visible surface. He regularly sold his soul for lemon sole, only to refuse payment, and developed a passion for paper ˆ his lifelong ambition, sadly unrealised, was for his own ream of A4.
The sadness of Red‚s loss is tempered by the knowledge that, for a precious three years in his turbulent life, he was home. In the post of housecat he will one day be succeeded, but he will never be replaced.
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