I used to live with Rachel, Rachel had a cat. This cat was called Daisy. Daisy features in many of my tales of Bristol, largely because she was the most cute & vocal – but also entirely insane creature I’ve ever had the good fortune to come across.
I always imagined that she still thought she was the size of a tiger, occasionally debating whether to eat us for lunch and then being shocked by the failure in scale; and sometimes she’d let loose with a string of different meows – on one occasion around 30 seconds of solidly different ones – and then stare at you as if to say “and what are you going to do about it”?!
She was clumsy as all hell, inside the house she’d misjudge gaps, distances, heights, and yet would scale the trees in the garden without fear. She’d bring in animals to ‘play with’ but they’d frequently be alive and unharmed flying round the house. And she was a quick learner; when I started doing shift work and started to get up at 5, she quickly realised that I was the place to be early in the morning, because I’d feed her first. Then she took to standing on me, her nose an inch from my nose which would allow me to wake up and have the biggest shock.
When I worked from home she also picked up that Ctrl-Alt-Del was an effective way to get my attention.
But my favourite thing about her was that she was just nuts.
Back then I had a webcam, and she’d occasionally feature in the idents which a little script I wrote put up when there wasn’t any activity and so, in Memory of a cute bundle of insanity, here’s a shot from way back when
Daisy passed away on the 1st of May, 2007 – and the world has lost one of the finest cats to prowl this planet.
