If you follow me on Instagram you’ll know all about John the Cat (full name Johnny Park after the Foo Fighters song). He was born in August 2008 and came to live with me when he was twelve weeks old. He was by my side through four house moves (two cross country), various health diagnoses, personal crises, and career changes (I had to give up teaching yoga for health reasons and then go back to law part-time while I tried to write a book that sold enough to live on - 10 books later still trying ha ha). He was the best cat I have ever known and I’m not ashamed to admit he was my best friend.
Just over a year ago he got very ill very suddenly. He couldn’t breathe properly and was rushed to the animal hospital for a scan, a diagnosis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and chest drain. They said he might not live through the operation. He did. They said he might not survive the week. He did. They said it would be 3-6 weeks but by the summer he was going strong on his heart medication, more demanding than ever. They said he wouldn’t see Christmas. He did.
I guess I was lulled into a false sense of security. I’d prepared myself for the worst a year ago and then I got another twelve months with him. Admittedly he got a bit frustrated that he couldn’t play for long without getting out of breath, and he slept more than he used to (but most fifteen year old cats do anyway), but he was happy and I made sure his life was as good as it could be. He’d always been by my side, now it was my turn to be by his.
On Monday 18 March something changed. He didn’t eat his dinner and I’ve never known him walk away from food. He got a sort of glassy, faraway look in his eyes as though he didn’t recognise me and then, on the Tuesday night he vomited up blood while I was asleep. I knew on the Wednesday morning that it was time to say goodbye to my boy.
Losing him has floored me. The house feels so empty without him (and very quiet, he was a talker), and my heart is breaking. Nemo, our other cat, seems completely lost now he no longer has somebody bossing him around. There is nobody to chirrup at me every time I walk into the room and nobody screaming for food at 6am every day (although Nemo gave that a valiant effort today).
It’s easy to say he was just a cat. But he was so much more to me than that and I will never forget him.
Here are some of his best bits!
He loved elastic bands, could smell them a mile off. Any elastic bands that entered the house had to be removed or the next time they appeared was in the litter tray….
He also loved to chew wires. I cannot tell you the number of headphones and mobile phone chargers I’ve bought in the last 15 and a half years due to his teeth. Not to mention the laptop he short circuited or the alarm clock he electrocuted himself on….
He once dug a hole in the wall. There was some damp in the wall that had something to do with the neighbour's porch and we were waiting for it to be fixed. Somehow John peeled off the plaster and dug in. My husband's solution was to tape a piece of paper over the hole. It fooled the cat but not my yoga students who arrived later that morning with questions….
He was very food motivated and would eat anything - butter, eggs, bananas (please note - he stole these things, I did not give them to him). I remember my mum once giving him a long lecture about why he shouldn’t be licking the inside of an egg shell. Then there was the time he got into the marmalade….
When he first came to live with me we had a black and white cat called Aurora who became his nemesis. When he was a kitten she would hide under the stairs and punch him as he walked past. They grew to tolerate each other but when she died there was no sign of grief on his part. I guess they are more like us than we think….
He was always a favourite at the vet, sitting quietly for his annual boosters and he always took his medicine as long as it came with food (which was just as well considering the amount of meds he was on in his final year - almost as many as me!). Even right at the end he held his paw out to be shaved so they could inject him…
Other than me (and a basic tolerance for my husband) he hated people. Whenever anyone came round he would hide either on the top of the kitchen cupboards or underneath the bed. When I bought a divan bed he was really pissed off with me as he couldn’t get under it anymore, but he learned to open the drawer and get inside it. Once he was so sick of people in the house he came down and peed on the floor to announce home time…
He also had a low tolerance for other cats, probably Aurora’s fault to be fair. When Nemo first came to live with us John growled at him for days until he lost his voice entirely. Nemo didn’t care in the slightest…
Fly high little man. I’ll never forget you.
*****
Up until the 18th, the month trundled on much as normal.
I finished my edits for my tenth novel, The Butterfly Garden, which doesn’t have a cover yet but you can preorder here (it’s out on 28th June).
My ninth novel came out on 14th March and you can buy that here (the audio version is out today!)
Work was horrendous - you don’t need to know about that.
It rained a lot but the blossom came out anyway. My favourite season is upon us and I’m very much looking forward to it.
I also read some books:
The Masters by CP Snow - this is a book that was written in the 1950s and set between the wars in an unnamed Cambridge College that is obviously Christ’s and is set around the death of the old college Master and the election of the new one. My dad recommended it as I’m currently writing a book that has a Masters election in it. I really loved it - one of my favourite reads of the year so far.
The Rose Code by Kate Quinn - this is one of those books that people have been recommending to me for years but sadly it wasn’t for me. The ‘Prince Philip as a romantic hero’ trope never really sits well with me.
Morse’s Greatest Mystery by Colin Dexter - in need of comfort reading after my edits were finished I turned to this book of Colin Dexter short stories. Not all of them feature Morse but the best ones do!
Victoria Park by Gemma Reeves - A short selection of interconnected stories about a group of fictional people who live in and around the park in East London. I really enjoyed it and it reminded me of Robert Altman’s ‘Short Cuts’.
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens - the latest book in the Mega Dickens Readalong and it’s a long one that I read relatively recently so I listened to the Juliet Stevenson version on Audible.
The Distant Echo by Val McDermid - OK so this was my first McDermid and I really enjoyed it but I knew who the murderer was in the first few chapters. This didn’t really stop my enjoyment of the book as the point seemed to be the working out of how they did the murder and how to prove it but is that normal for this writer? Or have I just, for the first time in my life, managed to work out the killer?!
That’s it for this month. For those of you who aren’t as cat-mad as me, normal service will resume on here and Instagram in the next week or so. It’s been very interesting going through old photos for pictures of John the Cat and looking at how social media has become more and more curated over the last ten years or so, but that’s anther post for another time.
Rachel
They're never just cats.