Kitty Cat

Lulu (actually called Lucy), our ginger/marmalade pussy has come home, albeit just for a few days.

We got Lucy about 5 years ago. J picked up two gorgeous little kittens from the same litter one day in response to Kitty’s requests for a cat and delighted that she had two rather than one, she christened them Lucy and Camille. Poor Guy, who ‘adopted’ Lucy had no say in the naming of his cat – it was Lucy and that was that.

A few months later, the feline sisters were packed off to the vet to be ‘done’ so that we wouldn’t have hordes of kittens running all over the  house – big mistake. The vet made a mess of one of the ops and poor Camille was found a few days later, as stiff as a board, in the cellar. When Kitty returned from school that evening I had to break the news to her. She immediately burst into tears and then stopped within seconds and asked, ‘can I have another one then’? Grieving doesn’t last long with kids!

Anyway, a proper funeral was demanded for Camille and the planning started although it had to be pretty smartish cause she was starting to smell a bit by now. I found an old shoe box and ‘manipulated’ Camille until she fitted inside it (a cracking job !!) and then we set about digging a grave. We decided on the terrace across from the front door so we could pay our respects as we went to school each day but as I started digging I realised I’d probably need a JCB as the ground was so hard and full of stones. After a couple of hours the hole was nowhere near deep enough to ward off marauding foxes, boars and Shadow and so I stopped for the night completely forgetting that Camille’s sarcophagus (aka shoebox) was on the roof of Julie’s car. Now I know what you’re thinking but no, she didn’t drive off it with it but there was an exceptionally strong wind that night and the following morning we had to go and find a missing body.

Once retrieved and with the kids off to school, I returned to the task of digging the grave and finished it after another couple of hours. That evening, we placed Camille into her grave, covered it with earth and piled many large stones on top of it. Finished off with some wild flowers and her favourite food bowl it looked quite nice – as pet graves go. The next morning we went to pay our respects and………graverobbers had been! The stones had been pulled back, the earth dug and box was empty. The bowl and flowers were still there but that was not much consolation. I wondered why the boar (it must’ve been a boar – even Shadow is too lazy to pull away large stones and dig two feet down) had not has ‘its meal’ the night before but maybe in boar world, digging is the thrill. I mean, you never know what you’ll get at the bottom of the hole. Imagine you’re a boar. You’re starving. You find a newly dug (and filled) grave and you dig and dig and dig and there at the bottom in a box is a ………dead goldfish!

Anyway, that’s all in the past and the story of the replacement cat is for another time but when we moved house (next door) the cats (by then we then had three of them) found it difficult to adjust. Eventually, after much persuasion the two newish cats moved over and Lucy, who disappeared for days at a time, simply refused to move to the new place where the good spots were already taken, so she stayed put despite the new neighbours insisting that they hated animals in general and cats in particular. 

She’s now part of the family over there but as they’ve gone off to London for a week, she’s turned up at the door each day, asking in her plaintive little meaow for some food.  We feed her, give her lots of attention, provide her with plates of sardines (much to the annoyance of the other cats) and Guy takes his long, lost cat down to his room where she sleeps at the bottom of his bed each night.

Poor Lucy has had a lot to deal with (including a leg hanging on/off by a thread) but she is still the best cat ever. She’s gorgeous