Who's The Daddy: RIP Marleyboo - enjoy the herbaceous borders in Cat Heaven

Nicknamed Six-Dinner Sid, on account of the number of households on our street who could legitimately lay claim to him as their cat, he paraded around like he owned the place - which he did, we’d seen him leisurely strolling out of two front doors that weren’t ours in the past year.

Four years ago Daughter #2 spotted him glaring at her from the windowsill of an upstairs window of a house five doors down. This after he’d wandered into the house one day and made himself at home.

We often wouldn’t see him for days on end. One afternoon we got a call from the vet to say he’d been brought in by a young chap whose house he’d claimed as his own and wanted to keep him, but when they scanned Marleyboo through the bipper, our address on his chip flashed up and we shared custody ever since.

Fifteen years ago, when our daughters were at primary school, we adopted two rescue brothers - one each - primarily as champion mousers as an ever-expanding family of lavishly doubly incontinent mice had taken up residence in our house.

After a day or two, the mouse problem had gone as the Kray Kittens flexed their feline muscle and ruled their manor with an iron paw inside a velvet glove.

I don’t speak cat, but Marleyboo’s piercing yeowl meant you could usually hear him before you could see him, and it signified one of two things. “I can see a little bit of the bottom of my food bowl. Feed me, slave.” Or “Give me what I want right now or I’ll squirt my bum juice up your precious loudspeakers.”

Our grown-and-flown daughters’ reaction to Marleyboo’s untimely passing could not have been more different. Daughter #2, on a short break in Glasgow, was distraught. Her big sister on the other hand, whose cat he actually was, was more concerned with how I was after picking up his body from the side of the road and taking him to the vet to organise a cremation.

A special mention here to Suzi from Lancaster Vets who couldn’t have been more kind and helpful, even arranging paw prints and some clippings from Marleyboo’s fur as something to remember him by. As for his last journey, there were three options. 1. Dig a pit in the garden but risk our sighthound Walter catching Marleyboo’s scent, digging him up and carrying him around in his mouth like his teddy bear. 2. Mass cremation with ashes disposed of. 3. Individual cremation with ashes returned to us. Free, £70.83 or £192.17.

We went for the latter. It was the least we could do. Marleyboo was a furry lunatic, but he was our furry lunatic. Well, ours and half the street’s by the sound of it. But he deserved better than to die, on his own, by the side of the road.

RIP, buddy. I hope the neighbours’ herbaceous borders in Cat Heaven are deep, wide and freshly dug.

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