When I was a kid, I always looked forward to Christmas, as most kids do. It was carefully explained to me how Father Christmas kept a list of naughty and nice children, and rewarded accordingly. This list was carefully compiled throughout the year. Now, I was an intelligent and pragmatic kid, and I reasoned thusly: It is now two weeks before Christmas, and Father Christmas has been working on this list since January. Conclusion: I'm sunk. Corollary: There's no point in changing my behaviour for this last two weeks since 2/52 doesn't count for much.
In a similar vein, I don't hold with commending souls to God. If He exists and is anything like I and many other people imagine, He knows the spirit He has just received, and will act according to His judgement, based on an intimacy that no man can know. That being said, I see no harm, and some benefit, in acknowledging and being thankful for the spirit that was among us and that is now departed.
And so to our cat. He came to us 13 years ago, with others, one night while our new French house was a building site. We soon saw him climbing a ladder onto a two-storey roof and narrowly escaping death when one of the planks slipped. We called him Minuit (midnight in French) since he was completely black and he arrived in the night.
When Anita picked him up it was clear that being held by a human was where he wanted to be. He would relax, start to purr, and settle. It seemed like he always wanted to be part of the household, part of the family. Which objective he achieved.
He came along with a smaller female friend who we called Matin (because she arrived the morning after). She was less adventurous, and would often stay indoors when Minuit was out exploring. He would come in the cat flap, announce his presence with a yowl, and she would get up to greet him. Matin was killed on the road within a year. Minuit remained with us, and became our sole cat when our old English one died.
He grew on a diet of organic, wild brown mice, good cat food and cuddles, into a large house cat. He had long legs and tail, and if he sat on my outstretched legs, his front paws would touch my toes while his tail ended at my breastbone. Sitting on people was one of his favourite passtimes; if he was asleep on the sofa, and you sat on the chair across the room, after a few minutes he would get up, walk across and sit on your lap.
He was companionable. If we were working in the garden, he would often come around, sit himself down nearby, and watch (especially as dinner time approached!). If we organised a snack or dinner on the outside table, he would come and join us after a few minutes. If we were at our desks he would sit in an in-tray if he couldn't sit on a lap, or lie just in front of the keyboard. If we turned the TV on and sat down to watch, he would come up (or in) to sit down, alternating between my lap and Anita's before spending the rest of the evening on his towel that was laid out between us. He would run away if anything on the TV was too noisy or had scary images of, say, a truck coming to run him over.
He was very talkative. He would reply if you spoke to him, and if you hadn't noticed him he would announce his presence by meowing. He also spoke to himself, and would make a chirrup sound when stretching, changing position, getting up, or settling and often when you walked by if he was sleeping. If he came in via the cat flap he would always meow to let us know he was back.
One day we decided to walk to down the river with some friends. Minuit followed us at a distance. We reached the river, at a point where it is crossed by stepping stones. We crossed, leaving the cat behind, expecting that he would go back home. Not a bit of it. He sat on the bank and howled, and I had to go back and get him. I couldn't persuade him to use the stepping stones by himself, so I carried him across the water, and put him down. He then proceeded to follow us the rest of the way, mostly behind us but sometimes scampering ahead, until we reached familiar territory again.
He always enjoyed climbing ladders. If I was working on the roof or at a similar height, he would wait until I was out of sight before climbing the ladder, and then sit at the top, looking at me with a "so come and get me" expression.
He climbed other things too. Our house is old, and it has a strange feature of a narrow (once external, but now an internal) glassless window above the TV. It leads from the mezzanine into a bedroom. We noticed paw prints on the telly one evening, from the cat having scrambled up it to jump through the window. There was nothing equivalent to the TV on the other side of the wall that he could climb up to get back out, so he was stuck. We let him out when we heard the yowls of course, but it was much later that we noticed the claw-marks in the wallpaper made by paws sliding down the steep access to the Velux windows. We also, on a separate occasion, found paw prints on the bath by a first floor Velux window that had been left open in the gîte. And of course the exposed beams of the mezzanine were an attractive climbing frame too.
He got into scrapes. He cut his tail badly as a young cat, perhaps on some barbed wire in the surrounding fields. He survived two viper bites, the first clearly not being enough to each him not to play with snakes. He had some kind of accident with his tail last year too that resulted in a good fraction of it having to be amputated. We sometimes called him Mr Stumpy after that. He probably got into other mischief that we didn't find out about; certainly he fought with any other cats that ventured too near the house.
If we spent time away from the house, he would greet us on our return. If it was nighttime, he would meet us outside, during the day or if it was raining he would normally be indoors, so he would greet us in the hallway.
Life with him had a routine. He was often outside first thing in the morning, but would come in as soon as he heard anyone moving about (or saw a light go on, or heard the toilet flush). We'd hear the clack of the cat flap, followed by his loud meow to tell us that he was here, and that it's time for his breakfast. Anita would usually go down and make herself a cup of tea, feed the cat, check that he had eaten the dry food during the night, and then they would both come upstairs where Minuit would stretch out on Anita while she read, and then he would spend the rest of the morning on the bed. He came down about mid-day for lunch, and would occupy himself for the afternoon. In the evening he would join us watching telly, and end the day sleeping in his designated area on a towel on the sofa.
The end was swift. He did not fade away in old age and we did not have to make that dreadful decision. We noticed that he wasn't himself for a few days; lacking in energy and eating poorly. He spent an entire day not two yards from his cat flap, resting in the Asters in the flower bed. Anita took him to the vet on Saturday morning for a check-up. Extensive blood tests revealed nothing wrong, just a very slight anaemia. The vet gave him some antibiotics, a worming treatment just in case and some high-energy cat food to perk him up, (he scoffed it down that evening, which reassured us) and she said she'd call us later next week to see how he was getting on. 36 hours later he was dead. He just got weaker on Sunday. Sunday afternoon we decided to take him back to the vet's first thing Monday, but early Sunday morning he woke us with a loud yowling. He was too weak to stand. The vet answered the emergency number, but our beloved Minuit left us on the way to the appointment.
He is buried in the garden behind the gîte. I planted a fuschia there on Tuesday morning. We drank a small toast, with thanks for the life of this special cat.
