Joy

A few weeks ago, we attended the wedding of our nephew, my brother-in-law's son. As would be hoped with such an occasion, happiness - joy- abounded because, after all, weddings are happy occasions. Some time removed from the actual event, it makes me think what exactly is the thing that makes a wedding a happy event. We are conditioned, in effect, to know that weddings are happy occasions and, consequently, we should feel happy through our attendance.But why should our mere attendance make us feel happiness? Surely there must be more? Well, I think there is.

The father of the bride was a career military man, someone who, on paper, might have been the buzzkill act when it came to speeches at the wedding breakfast: one too many references to 'duty' and all things espousing conformity might have been expected. Instead, he embraced the concept of a wedding being more than just the joining of two people, but instead being the joining of two families. He beautifully celebrated the fact that his family had just been expanded through the wedding we were all enjoying. And it suddenly, it made me realise that I'd never seen it that way before: marriage is, of course about two people,  but it is also two about families coming together. His words were so optimistic about that wider union, so filled with sentiments that brought joy to my cynical old heart.

A couple of weeks before the wedding, I had attended the funeral of a customer of the bar that I worked at.  On one night I had been speaking to him and a few hours later he had died. It was a shocking loss. Whilst he hadn't been without health issues, he was not displaying the signs of any distress that night so I will regard it as a death that came out of the blue and really affected the staff and regulars at the bar. When I attended his funeral, the accounts given by family, friends and work colleagues in the chapel at the crematorium were filled with lovely memories just as I would have expected. It wasn't until we all met up at the wake where a continual loop of family photos were being projected onto a screen did I suddenly feel the joy of this man in the life he had lived and the family that surrounded him. The wordless photos said so, so much more about that person than a ten hour speech. The faces in the photos told a story of love and happiness in a way that words could probably never do so.

Who would have thought that joy could be found in such a place, yet there it was.

Alfie

I want to feel better. I keep telling myself I should feel better but it's not yet working. A week on and the absence of Alfie still feels raw. As much as his presence in the world was loud and very physical with his in-your-face ways, the sudden withdrawal of all that energy is just so noticeable. I am sitting in the office as I type this and for some time I have been expecting him to trot into the room and jump on the desk, parading in front of the screen until I give in and attend to him by pushing the keyboard out of the way, laying him down and stroking him while he purrs and purrs. When I wiped the counter tops in the kitchen, Alfie would try to catch the cloth or sponge I was using as if it was a game I had invented with him. And his love of the laser pointer was unbounded: he never tired of running after that red dot and even two days before he left us, he was still chasing that dot.

He was our little panther, our sweet little boy cat and I miss him terribly. I hope there are laser pointers over the Rainbow Bridge.

I Nearly Stole a Cat

Cats are sociable animals. I know many will dispute this fact thinking them to be stand-offish, sly and, often, confrontational balls of fur and in many ways I would have to agree: they have their moments when they can be anything but sociable. However, even the most difficult, feisty cat will, at times, need a stroke, a cuddle and gentle words accompanying scritches under the chin. Feral cats can be won round to appreciate that purring next to a human is infinitely preferable to spitting and hissing at them. I know this to be the case from personal experience. Many moons ago when my late dad worked at Gatwick Airport, there was a colony of feral cats on site. Eventually, the airport management decided that the cats needed to be 'cleared out' (i.e.  rounded up and killed), so the guys that my dad worked with decided to rehome at least some of them. Thus, my dad brought home Pushkin, a tiny tortoiseshell kitten. When he opened the box and put his hand in to take her out, she turned into a land-based piranha lacerating his hand and forearm with her tiny teeth and claws. Throughout her early years she remained very much a loner and didn't really interact with us or with our other cat. However, little by little, she decided that ignoring or fighting us was a lot less fun than getting strokes and being fussed over and the second half of her life was entirely different: she would jump on my bed a night for strokes and cuddles, all the while purring her little head off. Love won through in the end.

Not all cats need such a long term approach to winning them over, The fact that Pushkin was feral made it a more difficult job but most kittens, coming from cats that are already house cats, are ready to receive love from day one. Ninety-nine percent of cats want to be adored and, in receiving that love, they will love their owner back. That's why it breaks my heart when you hear stories of people moving house and just leaving their cat behind with no arrangements for someone to take it in. Or kittens left in a sealed box by the side of the road who, only by some miracle of chance, were found and rescued. How many others were not found? From the moment you take on a pet of any kind, you are responsible for that little life, not only in terms of feeding it, but also in terms of its welfare, its wellbeing. Just keeping a dog or a cat alive is not enough, you also need to ineract with it, to show it love and allow it to show you love too.

I was visiting my mum this week. She has recently taken on a cat that was being ignored by its owners and had taken to hanging out at her place. She did the responsible thing and spoke to the owners and asked if it was OK if she took on the role of 'owner' of the cat (though I'm not sure that anyone ever 'owns' a cat: I think they probably own us) and they were happy for her to do so. He was a little cautious at first, but her constant takling to him led to strokes and purrs. He's by no means a lap cat but he has come on so much in a relatively short space of time. He now realises there is more to interacting with humans than just getting fed.

Anyway, I digress slightly. Mum's next-door neighbour has a small ginger tom cat which is probably still classed as a kitten as it is probably around 9 months old. Again, this is a cat that is fed and watered but is seemingly not given anything else. There is no one home during the day and he is locked outside and he is often alone outside in the evening. I just don't see the point in having a pet if you are not going to pet it. I was taking stuff out to the car, getting ready to leave and the little ginger chap was making little forays into mum's hallway, rubbing up against my shins, miaowing and purring, then rolling over for strokes and belly rubs. He was such a little love sponge and it just depressed me that most of his life was spent on his own without the love he deserves. And for one moment, as I opened the door of my car to throw a coat on the back seat, I found myself thinkng "If he jumps up into the car, I'm just going to close the door and drive off with him!" (Full disclosure, we had lost our beautiful cat, Alfie, the previous Friday so my catnapping urges and, indeed, this whole blog, is probably motivated by the still raw emotions surrounding loss). In the end, the cat didn't jump in, I didn't steal a cat and I left him with his rightful owner. I really, really hope he gets much, much more love in his life. It's the one thing I can say, hand on heart: Alfie never went short of love, not even for one day of his nine years with us.