In Memoriam

Geoff first entered our lives when I was the tender age of 10. My mother and I had been away for a weekend for my mother’s birthday, in mid-November, and we had left our two cats to roam free, with some food left for them in the garage. When we came back we discovered that the garage had developed the addition of a small black and white kitten, who did not so much miaow as go ‘meeeh’ in a very plaintive way. We brought him into the house and for some reason sat with him in the bathroom for a little while – possibly finding out if he was friendly or something. We also introduced him to our 6-month-old puppy, who seemed to take an immediate motherly liking to him…well, where ‘liking’ means treating him as another puppy and knocking him over.

Please do not ask me why the 10-yr-old me thought Geoff would be a cool name for a cat.

When we moved house the following summer, Geoff was the only one of our cats to really make the transition happily – Debbie and Squeak were both much older and more set in their ways. Debbie became mostly a house cat and Squeak wandered off after about 6 months never to be seen again (although my mother thinks she ran onto him on a dog walk several years later). Geoff, however, seemed more than happy at Braehead, and was soon discovered by the neighbours sneaking in through their cat flap and sharing the food of their doddery 20-yr-old cat Dennis. When Dennis died a year or so later, the neighbours acquired two new kittens. Debbie still ignores those two to this day, but Geoff developed friendly rivalry with them and I think banded together with them to repel other neighbourhood cats when occasion required. He regularly sat on ‘their’ garden seat, tea-cosy style, master of all he surveyed (or he certainly thought so).

He never did learn how to wash more than his front paws and face (and always looked ridiculously pleased with himself when he did think of doing that much). He often shed claws all around the house…how he grew them so fast I don’t know. He tended to purr when you were doing something that he wanted you to stop. For years we thought he didn’t like human contact, and didn’t like being patted, because if you tried he would just sit there unresponsively. Then, when I was home one holiday during university, I decided to see if I could make him like being patted, and succeeded a little too well. Once you got past his initial unresponsiveness, he would start to push back with his head…then fidget and push against you…and flip onto his back…and flip back again…and turn round and round in his basket…and finally get to a point where he wouldn’t accept you stopping. If you went into the next room and sat down and tried to read a book, he would follow you in and walk up and down your legs and push your book out of the way until you stroked him some more. When he got like this the only escape was to actually leave the house.

I still remember the look of fear on his face when Gigha had puppies and he had to traverse a dining room full of 5 cat-chasing puppies to get to his food in the kitchen.

Food was always a factor in Geoff’s life…he was very fond of sitting on the kitchen floor begging for scrap of anything you were cutting up…whether it was chicken or runner beans, he always seemed to think you were keeping something fantastic from him.

I could go on and on. But Geoff was put down on Tuesday because he had kidney failure last week, so all of it is now no more. Nothing remains but the memories, and the one or two photos (he was not the most photogenic of cats). So here shall a few of them be collected, to commemorate my Geoffy-boy in a small way.