We found my cat!

I generally try to avoid posting information about my personal life here because if I wasn’t me, I probably wouldn’t care either, but this has just bowled me over and even as I sit here writing this, I half expect to wake up in a minute.

After finishing my NCTJ diploma and my internship at Bit-Tech, there was a missing week between then and starting to focus more on Chaotic Tortoise where I was trawling the river Wey looking for the family cat.  Let me give you a bit of background.

This is Flossie.  She is a beautiful seven year old silver tabby, one part fur and good looks to two parts spiky bits.  She’s friendly, she’s sociable, she’ll happily curl up to you if you’re warmer than her unless you are a mouse or small fluffy creature in which case she will do the cat-like thing and tear you to shreds.  She is the very last thing I’d want to face in a dark alley if I was any species other than human.  It goes without saying that she is a much loved family cat that we have looked after since she was a kitten.

A couple of weeks ago, my parents were on holiday on their narrow boat and planned to come up to Surrey and the river Wey so that I could meet them for lunch or dinner for an evening at some point before they turned around and headed for home.

On the morning of the day that I was expecting to see them I got a heart-breaking call from my mum saying that they had lost the cat.

This doesn’t seem odd to me, because I am very used to the set up, but my parents take the dog and the cat away with them whenever they go on the boat.  Incidentally, this is not against the will of the cat who will dive onto the boat at the first sign that any of us are going anywhere near it, bury herself into the sofa or the bed, and yowl, hiss and scratch if you try and get her off again.  She has been travelling up and down the river since she was a kitten.

I should also mention that she’s not kept locked up on the boat either.  Wherever my parents stop for the night, the cat gets off the boat and explores, hunting mice and voles in the banks and generally having a holiday of her own.  It was always a possibility that she might disappear at some point, but she was always so good and regular with her path-finding that eventually, we stopped worrying about it and probably took it for granted that she would always come back.

This time, just outside Coxes Lock in Addlestone next to a very busy railway bridge and rushing weir stream, she left the boat and didn’t come back.  At first, it was assumed that she was just taking her time in finding her way back, but after another day, it was clear that she was lost, stuck somewhere, stolen or worse.

We made posters, we stopped everyone on the towpath, we paced for miles around where the boat was moored, and not only could we not find any trace of her, we had only one report of anyone else seeing anything that remotely fitted her description.  She was gone.  It’s not until you’re looking for something as small and mobile as a cat that you stop and realise just how big the world is and how many places there are for a small cat-like object to disappear in.

When you’re looking for a small grey cat, you also notice how many small grey cat-like objects there are everywhere.  Discarded plastic bags, milk cartons, irregular rock formations, and one particular grey post that I think caught us all out at some point.  It soon became clear that this was more than looking for a needle in a haystack and more like looking for a needle in a field of hay where some of the hay looks like needles and the needle you’re looking for could move at any point.  It’s unbelievably frustrating to know that you could have just walked past the thing you were looking for if it was hiding away in the bushes by your feet.

Everyone we stopped and talked to was helpful.  Everyone seemed concerned.  The Surrey Comet ran a story about her (with an extremely good journalist very efficiently getting all of the extra information she needed out of me in a natural and friendly conversation before completely rewriting the dull copy I had submitted to them and turning it into a fantastic story that made me realise how far I had to go to be a good journalist, despite finishing my first qualification).  The Surrey Informer wrote a piece about Flossie that went through the door of thousands of houses in the county.  There were even a couple of complete strangers that were taking the time to go looking for the cat on our behalf.

After a week, we had given up hope.  My parents couldn’t stay in Addlestone any longer and had to start heading back up river to home and without any real sign of her, we were all silently assuming the worst, even if we were saying to each other that we were sure she’d turn up.  Sitting on the river bank with my back against a large oak tree and watching the boat slowly cast off and turn around, waving my parents off, was like saying goodbye to the cat and was an unexpectedly painful experience.  My initial reaction to the news that Flossie was missing surprised me, as I took it in my stride, and after a week of traipsing through fields and bushes looking for her, I had assumed that I had become numb to the fact that she was gone.  I turned around to face into the forest area behind the tree, buried my head between my knees and curled up into a little ball.

The next week passed and we heard nothing of note.  Somebody living near Teddington called me to say they’d read about the cat in the paper and wanted to say how sorry they were to hear about it.   Somebody else texted me to say they might have seen her in Woking and although I went and checked anyway, it seemed unlikely that she would have gone that far.  As of yesterday morning, I had given up hope and was getting on with moving on.

Then I got a phone call from my parents saying that they had just got a phone call from someone in Chertsey who had seen a cat that matched Flossie’s description in a bush on Chertsey Meads, a good two miles away from where she disappeared, and that they would be happy to meet me there and show me where they saw her.  Our hopes were sky high.  It wasn’t utterly implausible that she had travelled that far and the description just sounded like her. I instantly dashed out of the house in my shorts and tee-shirt to dive into the car and drive the fifteen minutes over to Chertsey to meet up with the cat-spotters and for them to show me where they saw her, whereupon it started chucking it down with rain making me feel like an idiot for not bringing at least a jumper.

It was sheer luck that they had spotted her.  They’d stopped for a second by the path and realised they were looking directly at a beautiful grey tabby cat that was staring at their dog and that stalked off before they could get near it.  They had then gone back to one of our posters that was up at the Thames Lock and called the number to let us know that they’d seen her.  They very kindly stayed with me for the better part of an hour to try and find her, and I heroically/stupidly crashed through several bushes to try and find her, to the extend that I can still feel my legs burning from the stinging nettles.

After it became clear to me that we weren’t going to find her, we went our separate ways.  I stayed behind for another half an hour just in case she turned up, but to me, this was more of the same.  I called my parents to tell them not to get their hopes up and left it at that, heading back to the car with a heavy heart and a selfish irritation that my hopes had been raised again and that it would take even longer to get over this now.

My mum insisted on coming down the next day to try and find her and so despite knowing in my heart and my brain that we were never going to find her in a million years and with a million eyes, we headed back out to the same spot to start calling for her.  I swallowed hard when I saw that my mum had brought the cat basket and some food for her in case we did find her, because I knew at that moment that her hopes were high and that she thought we really stood a chance of finding her, whereas all I could think of was how many places there were for her to hide in just that one area, ignoring the fact that she might have moved on overnight.

We started calling for her and hitting her dinner dish around the area that she was spotted.  My mum started putting up some posters to cast our net a little wider whilst I trudged through some of the bushes I hunted through the day before, this time sporting a pair of stinging nettle-proof jeans.  We called and whistled until voices where hoarse and mouths were uncomfortable in making that o-shape for whistling.  Just as I’d reached a small clearing inside the bushes I thought I heard something.

When you are looking for a cat and spotting cat-like concrete posts, you also hear all manner of cat noises.  Ducks, geese, bicycle breaks and children all inadvertently do their best cat impression when you’re listening for it, so I dismissed it, but it didn’t stop.

Walking carefully up a small ridge towards me was a slightly skinny silver grey tabby with a black and white collar.  I didn’t even do a double take, I just saw ‘grey cat’ and scooped her up.  My plan was to get her to the car first and then worry about whether or not I had just stolen somebody else’s cat.  I almost didn’t want to double check in case it wasn’t her, but it was her collar, it looked like her, it sounded like her, she was struggling and clawing like her, but again, when you’re looking for a small grey cat and a concrete post looks like a cat, a small grey cat looks even more like a small grey cat, so I really thought that maybe my mind was playing tricks on me.  To be honest I’m still not sure.

Pushing my way out of the bushes to see my astonished looking mother mid dinner-dish-hit, I paced off to the car whilst she went and gathered up the posters and followed.  The car seemed so far away whilst the cat meowed in anguish and wriggled, but there was no way that I was letting her go until that car door was shut.

Getting into the car, she paced around a little before settling down on my lap where my mother and I collectively found ourselves breathing out for the first time in two weeks.  We still can’t believe we found her and we still can’t believe that it was because two complete strangers had seen a cat, matched it to our poster, gone back to the poster to find the number, called us and shown us where they had seen her.  I have picked up a great deal of cynicism concerning human nature over the last few years, but this has demolished a large amount of it in one fell swoop.

The cat is fine.  She’s got a couple of scratches on her, and was more than a little hungry, but other than that you wouldn’t know that she’s been out in the wild for two weeks.  As I write this, she’s in the back of the car on the way back to Gloucestershire to her bed and her home.

I keep saying this, but I really can’t believe that we found her.  More to the point, as my girlfriend articulated when I called her with the news, we can’t believe that it was me who found her.  I am spectacularly unobservant and hopeless with most matters that don’t involve sitting in front of a computer tapping away at a keyboard, so to find, grab and rescue our cat is an equally unexpected feat.

Words cannot properly express how much I mean this, but thank you to everybody who has helped in any way to find Flossie, no matter how big or small.  Thank you to the amazing couple from Chertsey who spotted her and took the time to call us and show us where they saw her, thank you to the residents near Coxes’ Lock who took time to go looking for her and supported us, thank you to everyone that took posters for us and spread the word, thank you to my girlfriend for being so supportive and helpful and thank you to everyone that just expressed concern and wished us luck in finding her.  We certainly had a lot of luck with this.

I know there’s probably someone that’s reading this that’s thinking “I don’t get it.  It’s just a stupid cat.” That’s exactly right.  It is just a stupid cat, but it’s our stupid cat and we love her and feel so happy that we have her back.