The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

And I’m still here.

But it gets worse.

It’s Monday.

And I’m feeling sentimental.

Sorry.

A few weeks ago, I thought we had lost our beloved cat, Rosie.

She sometimes rushes out the door when I get home and when she hadn’t come out to see me after 10 minutes [she actually likes me, though it could also be because I give her treats], the reality that she may have got out started to become a reality.

But it got worse.

You see we live on the 5th floor of our apartment and there have been occasions where she has rushed out the moment I’ve got in and run into the lift before the doors have closed.

Every time this has happened I’ve been able to get her but maybe this was the time she succeeded.

I got in the lift and went to every floor of our building.

Nothing.

I went to the underground car park.

Nothing.

But it was when I went back to our apartment to check if she had been found that I really started to feel a sense of panic because I could see Jill was starting to get worried.

She had checked every one of her hiding places – even the vent that once fell down and she basically climbed into the walls of the building – but she wasn’t to be seen.

It was about now that I started to think she had gone.

She had run out of the door when I got home, got in the lift – which returns to the ground floor – and then, when the doors opened, panicked and ran straight from the apartment lobby, out of the automatic doors and into the madness of the China streets.

While she fancies herself as a tough cat, she’s pathetic and wouldn’t survive a minute on her own. She’s even scared of birds.

So I decided to check every floor again. Just in case.

But still there was nothing.

Then I went back to the underground carpark and looked under every car.

Again, nothing.

So all that left me to do was go out and walk the gardens shouting her name.

I grabbed a pack of her favourite treats and with a sense of despair, but a need to feel I was still doing something, I went out into the rain and shouted “Rosie” over and over again.

I walked and walked and walked but nothing.

Not even a meow from the street cats.

And it was now – after about 40 minutes of looking – that I started to come to the realisation that she had gone, that I would never ever see her again.

I loved that ball of fluffy mischief.

Yes she was a whining pain in the ass, but she was my whining pain in the ass and she had given me more happiness than I ever could have imagined.

The thought that she was on her own, out on the wild streets, was incredibly upsetting.

I imagined her hiding. Too frightened to move, too frightened to stay in one place for long enough to be found.

She would be cold and hungry and alone and all I wanted to do was find her, take care of her and protect her.

I started thinking how I could never have another cat.

That all it would do was remind me of who it was replacing.

And that wouldn’t be fair on the new cat.

I felt a real and deep sense of loss.

Why did Rosie have to run out?

Why hadn’t I noticed her escape when I walked in?

How could an evening go so bad so quickly?

Then the phone rang. It was Jill.

Rosie had just walked into the lounge from somewhere in the apartment.

THE LITTLE BITCH.

THE BEAUTIFUL, ADORABLE, WONDERFUL LITTLE BITCH.

The sense of relief was incredible. I mean totally out-of-proportion incredible.

Except it wasn’t really ‘out-of-proportion incredible’ because while she’s a cat, she’s a member of our family.

I used to snort in derision when people used to say that, but it’s true.

We know each others ‘ways’ and indulge each other – whether that’s letting her meow at 7am to announce she wants breakfast or me waking her up with pats when she’s curled up – which is why I live in the delusional belief that had she escaped into the wilderness on that cold, lonely night in Shanghai, years later we might have come face-to-face again and when it happened, the reaction would be something like this …