We've lost that loving feline

If you exclude Caractacus - a small fish given to me as a present in my early 20s (complete with bowl) - I'd never had a pet before Lil.

This rescue cat was a lovely little creature, but never one for sitting in someone's lap. Perhaps her early experiences had taught her to be wary around humans. But over time, there was plenty of affectionate marking, nudging and purring, as she grew to know and love the members of the family.

A poisoning incident affected her kidneys back in 2016. We still don't know what it was she ate or drank, but ultimately it's led to a very hard decision today. We agreed that to stop her suffering - and because of a fairly obvious deterioration - that it was better for the vet to put her to sleep. She died very peacefully. I cried a lot more than I anticipated.

Earlier this year, Lil had benefited from a couple of days on a drip and then seemed to get a new lease of life. But just over a month ago, she had to spend a whole week as an in-patient to achieve the same effect. And unfortunately, on this occasion, the recovery was very short-lived. Her kidneys were getting progressively worse and what was described to me as a 'poor man's dialysis' was no longer going to do the trick.

So, Lil, here are a few of the things I'll particularly remember about you:

(1) The weird noise you made when you sighted avian prey. A sort of slightly manic clicking sound, which you never made in any other context.

(2) The way you sat with me while I worked on the desktop computer in my bedroom, often purring contentedly on a window ledge or occasionally jumping up to encourage me to feed you.

(3) The fact you never realised your cat flap and the front door led to the same location. You could never understand how two exits at 90 degrees to one another could arrive in the same place, could you?

(4) The weird noise you made when you brought in mice. A kind of demented yeooowwling sound which made my heart sink.

(5) The fact that you once followed me half a mile to a parade of shops, waited patiently outside while I did my errands and then followed me home.

(6) The time you made me jump out of my skin by carrying in a magpie.

(7) The trick you performed when we first brought you home and you were confined to a particular room. Do you remember lying on the floor on your back and sticking your paw under the door to lever it open? Inventive.

(8) The weird noise frogs made when you brought them in. They screeched. And they were harder for me to deal with than birds or mice, because they moved in every conceivable direction on multiple planes. Up, down, left, right. You never ate them, but liked to lick them.

(9) The way you used to follow Mrs W to work and end up a kilometre away from home. Eventually, you'd stop, go no further and howl. We'd find you later in the day in the same place. You always thought it was better to wait there for us to come back, didn't you?

(10) The effect you had on everyone at the vet's and the fact that they referred to me as your dad.

RIP, little girl. You're now scratching where the carpets are plush velour.

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...

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