The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (30 page)
Authors: Tom Cox
I try not to imagine life without The Bear, but when I let myself slip towards doing so, only a confused, blurry picture emerges. I find it easier to imagine myself with an entirely different name and career, living in a country I’ve never visited. I really do love all of my cats equally, and for different reasons, but my relationship with The Bear is unique: not so much a bond with a cat, but the kind of attachment you might have to a mute friend you’d met in a hostage situation, and who’d been burdened with the job of feeling every emotion twice as acutely as anyone else.
It’s a shame there weren’t more photos of him taken earlier in his life, but I take plenty now. People have a habit, in the age of cameraphones and
social networking, of being a bit too quick to turn all sorts of experiences into a ‘memory’, but I know it will be important for me to remember The Bear. When he is gone (and it pains me even to write the word ‘gone’), maybe I will finally crack, and go back on everything I’ve told myself about cat-related paraphernalia. Perhaps the photos will spread out across the walls of my next house, until there is barely any paintwork visible. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll get a tattoo dedicated to him as well. He certainly deserves a tribute of some permanence, because he’s been such a good friend, such an inspiration: a cat who’s weathered the tough stuff in his life – the plastic bag he was dumped in, Shipley, Biscuit’s rejection of his love, his several illnesses, the injuries inflicted by all those other, more violent cats alongside whom he just wanted to live in peace, his many house moves, the early uncertainty about which human would be his forever human – and never let it turn him bad, instead growing progressively nicer, more charismatic, more
him
, as a result.
Maybe he did go through a stage where he had the capacity to be a bit swaggering and indifferent, like my other cats, or maybe his eyes saw too much too soon for that to be possible, then just kept seeing more. I wonder, if he had his chance to do it all again, in a different way, whether he’d take it. Perhaps not. Yes, he might be younger, and scar-free. He could have the confidence to hurtle up a tree or rip a vole’s face off. And that would be great for him in many ways. But what wisdom would he lose in the process? What enigma, which layers? Would
he be so warm and interesting to be around?
And – crucially – could you then still say that he was truly The Bear?
A huge thank you to Hannah
Boursnell, my
editor, and
the rest of the team at Little, Brown, who believed in this book from the word go, and fulfilled my wish for a cover that reflected its content – which, as I’ve realised in the past, is not always an easy thing to find in the world of twenty-first-century animal-themed non-fiction. I am also massively grateful to Trent McMinn for taking such a lovely shot of The Bear for the cover (and for being very forgiving when I threw turkey in his hair by mistake), and to the following people for their encouragement during the book’s creation: my fantastic parents Jo and Mick Cox, Gemma Wright, Martin Fletcher, Kate Carter, Jazzmine Breary, Laura Penn, Pat Bristow, Adele Nozedar, Rebecca McMahon, Amy Corcoran, Hannah Harper, Jack Burton, Karen Nethercott, Ian Curtis, Will Twynham, Mary Epworth, Amy Lyall, Emily Aaronson, Elizabeth McCracken, Stephen Dray, Jonny Geller, Joe Hollick, Ed Wilson, Rebecca Willers, Emma Hope, my neighbours Deborah and David, and anyone who’s ever sent me a nice message about my writing over the Internet.
If you enjoyed reading about
The Bear,
Ralph, Shipley
and Roscoe, you can keep up-to-date with their antics in a variety of ways:
Twitter
The Bear:
@MYSADCAT
Ralph:
@MYSMUGCAT
Tom:
@cox_tom
Use the hashtag #goodbadfurry to talk about the book.
Facebook
www.facebook.com/pages/Under-The-Paw/93407930986
Pinterest
www.pinterest.com/goodbadfurry/
Blog
www.littlecatdiaries.blogspot.co.uk
Tom’s website
*
Each email featured an attachment containing a poem about one of her cats.