In Memoriam

I have sad news to report; Butch the cat is no longer with us.

Although an extensive search of the neighbourhood has revealed no body, the fact that Butch has never been known to miss a meal in his life means that we are assuming that he is no longer in the land of the living.


Oh Butch, most comedy of all the Serrano cats. You who were given exactly the same amount of food as the others, yet were somehow about three times their size. I will miss the way you waddled around hesitantly and, blind in one eye, bumped into almost everything.

I will remember how you shunned sofas and cushions and all other soft things. You, dear Butch, were a true man cat who sat solely on hard things. Yours was a world of pizza boxes and glass tables and edges of desks and, your favourite place of all, the toolbox. Was it cruel of me to laugh when you inevitably fell asleep and tumbled off the edge of whatever hard thing you had sat on. Why did you never sit in the centre of the desk? This I can never ask you.

Although he was cross at the time, Scott now looks lovingly at the huge scratches you made on the scooter seat. Being a mancat, you loved leather (and even fake leather). When we ride the scooter we will think of you.

It’s Fluffer who misses you most though. It was beyond sweet how the two of you used to sleep cuddled up together on the plastic chairs (rock hard of course) outside the house. We may have teased you for being gay lovers (we're clearly not as liberal as we claim to be), but deep down we respected how devoted you were to each other. It’s been two weeks since you left, and every night Fluffer is still howling desperately up at the stars for at least a couple of hours. He’s the only cat sleeping outside now. We would let him sleep upstairs with us but, you know, he has that spraying problem.

Oh Butch, we will miss you. If you were to come back, I’d even forgive you for the time you shat on the rug and then spent 10 minutes sitting on your own poo while I desperately searched the apartment for the source of the stink. It was a clever move on your part to try and hide the evidence of your wrong-doing although, you know what Butch, it was probably you that suffered most by having to sit on your own shit.

I know that Lloyd, your original (and also deceased) owner, would have liked you to have been buried in the bizarre pet cemetery he constructed at the bottom of our garden (a collection of terracotta plant pots full of cement and bones and each topped – wedding cake-like - with a metallic representation of the deceased, an even mix of cats and what look bizarrely like dragons). I’m sorry that we can’t give you this honour, dearest Butch, but know that you will stay in our hearts and minds forever.

Josh, who at five is Serrano’s youngest resident, thinks that dead cats become stars that he can gaze up at in the night sky. I like that image a lot Butch. I think you would’ve too.