My favourite old boy

I know it's Thursday and I am about to write about last weekend but the kittens have kept me REAL busy this week, plus I actually did write the below at the weekend without publishing it. Oh it's a long one...

I escaped from work earlier than usual last Friday and headed to my mum's in Innisfil for the weekend, leaving Celia and the kittens in Matt's hands, which are of questionable capability. My mum and I went for a walk by the lake with our champagne glasses and caught up on some girly chitchat, which is just what I was looking forward to after a busy week. I was also looking forward to seeing my favourite kitty of them all: my baby Tiddles. He's not actually a baby, I was in fact nine years old when I got him, but he still is and always will be my precious boy. 

For my ninth birthday, my parents had actually bought me a fish tank and four goldfish. Bizarrely, one died each day until they were all dead, leaving me with mild but significant traumatic scars (I still remain a sensitive, sensitive soul), so my devastated mum decided to crank things up a notch and bought me two little black kittens. 

Although I never forgot the fish (Misty, Moddy, Mardi-Gras and Goldie), my dream had come true. My older brother and I named the kittens Zack and Tiddles. Back then we lived in a fairly small house in Hampshire, England, and my mum was very house proud, so the cats weren't allowed on work surfaces, furniture or upstairs and were sent out into the garage to sleep in a heated box at night. 

Zack and Tiddles saw many years pass by in that little house, and saw both my brother and I grow up, become adults, move out, go to university and our parents separate. My mum eventually moved in with her new partner in High Wycombe before they planned on moving to Canada. In light of this, and because her partner didn't want to keep the cats in his house, we gave them to a rescue shelter. I know, it's awful and there's no excuse, but after a few days, we couldn't bare being apart from them, including my mum's partner. We took them back, much to the understandable annoyance of the shelter worker ("I hope you're not just going to abandon them again.") but it still upsets me to think how close we came to not having them in our lives anymore. 

They then lived like kings in High Wycombe, enjoying a bigger house and marvelling at the strange looking horses in a field the house looked onto, but the bliss wasn't to last too long. I'd just moved to London and started a busy corporate lifestyle when my mum called and told me that Zacky had died. He'd had a stroke right in front of her and was dead within literally seconds. I was inconsolable, to say the least. 

Zack & Tiddles in High Wycombe

Tiddles in Canada

Zack was always the friendly, bossy one who liked his food above everything else, whereas Tiddles was more reserved, slimmer and had affection for my family that stretched beyond just pursuing food and warmth. Throughout my troublesome teenage years, he'd always find me when I was upset and rub his face against mine as though he just knew I needed comforting. 

After Zacky's death, Tiddles soon became the centre of attention, enjoying a spotlight he'd not got a fair share of before. A few months later, my mum and her partner moved to Canada and took Tiddles with them. Since they've been living in Innisfil, Tiddles has been spoilt beyond belief. My mum is more house proud than ever, yet Tiddles now has complete run of the huge house, goes and sleeps wherever he likes and is fed fresh prawns and chicken breast. In fact, he expects no less. He is cuddled and cooed at and stroked by all of us all of the time and even gets fought over, each of us begging him to come and sit in their lap. At his ripe old age of 15, he even caught a finch just the other day (I'm not particularly for this type of hunting, but we believe the bird must have been weak. Natural selection, then?)

Each night I'm here at my mum's, he insists on sleeping at the foot of my bed, where he purrs until he falls asleep and sneakily crawls up towards my face and curls up as close to me as possible in the middle of the night. I don't think I could love a cat more. And bizarrely, having now got used to Celia, seeing Tiddles is like seeing a giant bulldozer of a cat because she is just so small in comparison. I wonder if they'd get on if I were to convince my mum to adopt her...