Cheerio to Our Own Small Stupid

The night before last, just as Mrs The Millbrooker and I were finishing off our dinner we got an unexpected ring on the doorbell; two young women nervously asked if we had a black cat with white paws.

Well, the answer, of course, was "yes" and they told us that he'd been hit by a car. Sadly it wasn't a warning nudge to stupid black cat on the road in the dark; he'd been killed instantly.

Anyone who met Trelawney (or Stupid Cat, or simply "Stupid", as he was more normally known) will remember that he was a real little character with almost no sense at all, let alone a sense of dignity.

Mrs The Millbrooker and I are both very upset by his loss; he might have only been a small and rather dim cat but he was our small and rather dim cat. He never learned the basics, like the universal truth that cats don't like wine - he would constantly sniff and recoil from our glasses. And I do mean constantly; he did it over and over and over again.

He did, however, like liquorice allsorts.

And being vacuumed.

He was also a constant companion-cum-minor-irritant as he insisted on having a chat and "helping" in the garden. His vocabulary might have been a tad limited, consisting as it did of "mao mao" and the occasional chirrupping "brrrp" but we enjoyed many a fascinating chinwag with the little fellow.

The exchange usually went something like "...and just how miaow do you think things are today then, Stupid?"

"mao mao"

"mmm, yes that's what I thought, too."

"mao brrrp"

So, Millbrooker Towers is a bit greyer at the moment; I know he was only a cat and this hardly counts as a major bereavement, but we loved him and as far as a cat is capable of reciprocating, we felt he loved us too.

Cheerio, Stupid Cat, it's not quite the same around here without you.