One day in the autumn of 2010 a black and white cat snuck his way into our house in search of food. We kept the back door open for our siamese Willow (though she was often happy to stay inside) and he had obviously caught smell of her special diet food (kidney problems)
H was deshiveled and dirty with no collar and looked to be old. Every time we approached he would dart back out of the door...and yet one day when I found him lying in the grass I was able to sit down and stroke him for a bit.
It was clear he was a stray, possibly abandoned: it was that kind of area where animals would be exchanged between mates at the pub (no word of a lie I woke up one morning to the sound of our next-door-but-one neighbour yelling at some newly aquired chickens to "shut the $%^& up" - they were gone within 2 weeks)
So we decided to trap him in so we could get him checked out at our vets and somehow managed to close the door, an event that led to him leaping up towards the window and scrabbling against the glass to try and get out. Somehow we managed to catch him and take him to the vets, where we were surprised to find out he was only around 1 year old.
It was clear he wasn't being looked after and was having a rough time of it so we decided to adopt him and took him home, where he immediately hid under the sofa and refused to move. We set up a litter tray and a food bowl under the table so he could go and use it without feeling threatened and two days later he stank the house out using it for the first time. From time to time we would stick our head down and say hello but otherwise leave him to it.
Sooner or later he started getting braver and would go and hide under the bed and then, lay on top of it - it might have been two months before he was ready not to run away.
He continued to be afraid of strangers, particularly strange men but he started coming and sitting on us, rubbing his face into ours.
We decided to call him Giles - on the grounds that we had inherited a Willow and would keep with the Buffy The Vampire Slayer theme. He had a few other nicknames (I was occasionally known to call him Chairman Miow because of his imperious expressions) and eventually we lengthened his name to include Mr
When we came to move house we had no choice but to leave him in a cattery for a few days - when we came to collect him his bed was wet and he was clearly stressed. Again, as we were now in a new area we kept him inside until he acclimatized and took him out of the house on a lead to get him used to the area (something he disliked intensely) - once we were happy he was settled he came to love it and could often be found sitting on a rock or splayed out on the ground. In the winter he would disappear upstairs and sit in a small box in the attic where we put a blanket and at night he would push his way into the bed and lay down beside me, or moreoften with his bum in Herself's face.
The first time he was properly ill was when he suddenly started having manic episodes and would lash out and bite a hand, or run around crazily. It turned out that he had a thyroid problem and he had to have radiation treatment meaning we had to keep him seperate from us for ten days after he came back
Then, last year, i noticed some blood in his urine and we found out he'd been hiding stage three kidney failure (there are only four stages)
From there we tried him on specialist foods (which he ignored) and had to start him on diatry supplements. He began going off his food entirely and we had to put him on more pills to stimulate this and dull the pain...this worked for a while and we even got to the stage where we were lessening the doses for a while but then the pills started having less and less effect and last weekend, over the Bank Holiday, he refused even chicken and tuna which he would usually enjoy when all else failed. We took him in on Bank Holiday Monday and the vet gave him some medicine but the effect was negligible and so, on Thursday, we took the decision not to make him suffer any longer
We are now, for pretty much the first time, entirely cat-less: but our house is surrounded by his things and his memory. We will always miss him x
