Ooh! Ooh! Me sir! Me! Me! Me! *raises hand*
The title has absolutely nowt to do with the content. I was just excited…

I may have posted a reference to this before. However I can’t be arsed to trawl through my postings to find it, so this is a remake (or ‘re-imagining, if you prefer).

My ex mother in law was a soft touch for cats. Especially spakker cats with no teeth, or nasty biological diseases that meant their shit was permanently of the liquid variety. Rescue cats all. One day, a friend of hers that worked for the RSPCA rang and asked her if she would be interested in another cat, knowing that one had just died of old age. Off we all trooped to have a look, and sure enough, there was this lovely lickle puss, white and tortoise-shell. Rather cute and lovely looking, if a little on the tubby side, and blind in one eye (ironically, because of a cataract). And so, she came home with us, and was christened Dillon (yes, that’s how she spelled it).

Turned out, after a check up at the vets, that Dillon was pregnant, hence her tubbiness, but that’s not really relevant.

Now at this point, I wasn’t a cat person. I didn’t mind them, but had never really had a lot of experience of them. Dillon changed all that. She sort of adopted me one morning when I was spread out on the floor doing a spot-the-ball competition in the local rag, which at that point in time was still a broadsheet (I bloody HATE broadsheet format newspapers. Not the content, just the format. Grrrrr). Dillon decided that was her cue to climb on my back and fall asleep, so I was stuck there. After that, I became her favourite human – anytime I was in the house, she’d stop what she was doing and literally launch herself at me. Even if she was outside and up a tree, she could somehow sense my presence and would dash in from the garden and jump into my arms. I’d have to carry her round like a baby, while she nuzzled and nibbled my earlobe.

The one thing she didn’t like was loud noise. Especially the vacuum cleaner… Which my mother in law forgot about one time, and switched on while Dillon was in full cuddle mode with me. As the vacuum cleaner sprang noisily into life, Dillon forgot all about her lovely cuddle and made a break for freedom. Which, unfortunately for me, involved wriggling from my grasp like a thing demented and running for the safety of under the bed, leaving me with a severely lacerated right arm which proceeded to pump blood all over the carpet.

It took a hell of a lot of pressure and TCP to stem the flow. I’ve still got the scars to show for it, one of which perfectly follows the track of a large and important looking vein.

I miss Dillon sometimes.
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Thu 24 Apr 2008, 16:35, Reply)