Tuesday 23rd February 2021 - Alfie's impending demise has prompted me to record my experiences with Karen's cats. I will add to this over time to form a longer term memorial.

It was back in April of 2013 that I was invited to have a drink with Ron and Tracy, who had come to be like family to me. Unbeknownst to me they'd invited a friend of Tracey's, Karen. We got on well, but the death of Tracy a couple of days later meant my immediate focus wasn't on a new prospective relationship. When Karen and I eventually did start seeing each other she introduced me to her cats, Lilly the mother and two of her litter, a brownish female Smokey and a male LJ with his striking white nose.

I've always loved most animals, but was really a dog person at heart. My first encounter was illuminating; Lilly was very friendly, but when she thought the encounter was over you had to be quick to avoid being bitten or swiped; Smokey was initially very friendly but when she'd had enough she'd walk away; and LJ, where was LJ? He was the archetypal scaredy cat and had run away!!

The casual reader might wonder, what happened to Alfie? Well, the male cat, living with his mother and sister, in a home with Karen and her 2 daughters, had been given the moniker LJ, shorthand for Lilly junior, due to his colouring being similar to Lilly's. The indignity, surrounded by females and he didn't even get a proper male name!

For the first few weeks, every time I visited LJ would disappear down the end of the garden and perch on top of one of the sheds, presumably to be safe from the stranger, me! It was nothing personal, he always did this when new visitors entered. I would go down to the shed and talk quietly to him and offer my hand to sniff, and occasionally he'd let me get a brief touch! It took a couple of weeks before, quite suddenly, he decided I was 'safe' and he came into the kitchen, while I was there, for his food. That was to be the start of a special friendship.

Alfie was an unusual cat, I used to tell Karen that he was the most dog-like cat I'd ever encountered. He would chatter incessantly, as if earnestly trying to chat with me, he would greet me enthusiastically when I arrived and quickly run outside to encourage me to go and play - he enjoyed rolling around, and loved to do forward somersaults, the like of which I'd never seen a cat do before. He'd often wait in Karen's front window to spot us arriving, and his evident joy to see us was just like a dog's! When it became obvious that Karen and I were going to be a permanent 'item', I asked if we could change LJ's name, and Alfie seemed like an obvious choice - with his incessant chattering - what's it all about, Alfie - seemed like an obvious response!

That first summer I spent a lot of time with the cats, and hadn't realised that what I thought were summer colds were the early signs of a serious cat allergy! It was strange observing the cats, Lilly was clearly the boss, and she thought she was the boss of the house, freely swiping or biting anyone who didn't do what she wanted, cat or human! Smokey sat in the middle, always trying to groom Lilly, but occasionally following Lilly's lead and having a go at Alfie or a more half-hearted one at an annoying human, Alfie was at the bottom of the pecking order and tried to stay out of everyone's way! Being at the bottom of the pecking order also meant that Alfie was the smallest, he'd always defer to the girls if they wanted his food or spot.

As my attachment to the furballs increased I bought them various new toys, Alfie and Smokey loved the catnip toys, and would spend ages raking the life out of them, and snuggling up to them. You can see a video of Alfie here and Smokey here, with a rare all 3 cats here. Lilly didn't show much interest in the catnip toys, but on several occasions she'd spend time with me knocking a ball back and forth!

By the end of that first summer, I'd started to get tired of trying to avoid Lilly's swipes and bites, and got Karen's permission to see if I could change her behaviour. Many readers won't like what I'm about to share, but trying to correct this behaviour in a cat is nothing like doing it with a dog. Next time she tried to bite me I was ready, and instead of backing away I quickly smacked the end of her nose with my finger. She flew out of the room and ran outside, but a few minutes later she came back in and made to be friendly, so I stroked her, but the instant she started to go to bite I raised my finger and she thought better of it. Thought it would probably take 3 or 4 instances of smacking her nose for her to learn, but Lilly always was a very smart cat, and it only took a couple more raised fingers and she never did it again. The clever part, when she wanted me to stop stroking her she meowed, something she rarely did, and thereafter that replaced her biting and scratching. For many months afterwards she would greet me like her new best friend, and when I sat in the garden she would come and sit beside me, always making sure she was touching me, even if only a paw against my shoe - that's probably when I learned to love Lilly, and who could blame me.

Smokey was a totally different proposition. She was always inquisitive, so would often be the first to greet a stranger, but interactions with her were always on her terms, and she'd usually quickly go and do her own thing. That changed a little when I tried to buy different foods for the cats to see if they had any favourites - Karen had always adopted a pragmatic view that she put cat food out for them and they could eat it! Having grown fond of them I wanted to enrich their experience. My first success was Tuna, they all liked it but for Smokey it was like her 'crack cocaine', she LOVED it, and suddenly I was on better terms with her! With Alfie it was chicken, and as I wanted to beef him up a little, so he could hold his own with the girls, he got lots of chicken to supplement his normal cat food. It took a year or so of feeding him up until he became as big as the girls, but all muscle, and the bullying stopped, and that gave me a smug sense of satisfaction! The first time I saw Alfie force Lilly to back down gave me a kind of father's pride in his son, silly but true!!

Finding something that Lilly really liked proved far more challenging. The best I managed was a game in gravy cat food that she seemed to enjoy more than others, she seemed to have a preference for stronger flavours. Then one day, having noticed how she liked to drink what appeared to be dirty water that had accumulated in a tray in the garden, it occurred to me that she might enjoy her game in gravy with a lot of added water, so tried it, and bingo!! My mistake was taking it outside for her, and thereafter she would sit patiently on the patio outside the kitchen door until I brought her soup out to her, but how could I resist.


I've mentioned several times that Smokey was a bit offish, but I should balance that with the observation that when Karen was away and I cat sat, each time it was Smokey who ended up on my lap for over 30mins!

By the end of the first summer, we'd got a cat-flap for Karen's back door and micro-chipped the cats, both allowing them to come and go as they pleased, but saving us the grief of commuting between our homes 2 or 3 times a day just to let them in and out! We both used to hate having to go back late in the evening to let the cats in for safety, before going back to mine to finish the evening - didn't miss that one little bit.

In the ensuing years we had some great times with the cats, although as my allergy got worse it became impossible to spend as much time as I wanted with them. At first allergy medication helped, it gave me an hour or so before the itching got seriously uncomfortable, but within a couple of years it had little effect. To give some idea how intense the itching was, there were times when the idea of ripping my nose off to get at the source of the itch didn't feel unreasonable! In the worse cases my nose wouldn't stop running for a couple of days and I went through dozens of handkerchiefs per day! When I first experienced my throat closing, and struggling to breathe, it reached another level. It had become necessary to change our clothes when coming back to my home from visiting the cats, combing our hair to get rid of any trapped dander, all that on top of buying air filters to reduce the dander load in the air at Karen's... all good training for the pandemic to come!! It also meant that when we started to look for a home together it would need to have space for the cats that we could separate from the rest of the house, not easy to find.

One incident with Alfie left us somewhat bewildered, and financially rather worse off. One evening we noticed that Alfie was limping, quite severely, so we rushed him to the vets. The vets examined him and couldn't find anything wrong with him, yet he didn't limp while at the vets, who seemed to think we were imagining things! The next evening we spotted him limping again, but this time we filmed him limping. We went to the vets again, and again he didn't limp and the vet couldn't find anything wrong with him. When we pulled out the video we'd shot they were puzzled, but felt they needed to take a range of x-rays and blood tests. Strange thing was after all the tests the vets gave him a clean bill of health, me a £700 bill, and Alfie never limped again!

In 2019, after 6 years with the 'babies', as we'd come to refer to the cats, we noticed that Alfie had stopped going on walkabout, we never did find out where, but had taken to spending most of his time alone at the bottom of the garden. At first we thought that perhaps he was missing a friend he'd made on his travels, but as it continued, and his condition deteriorated, we took him to the vets who diagnosed diabetes. Alfie never liked going in the car, even when the vets we used was only a couple of minutes away, and he would shake continually and usually void his bladder, but he needed to go. We struggled with getting his insulin doses right, but Alfie stoically took the ear-pricks to determine his blood sugar levels and injections without a murmur, he was the perfect patient, and Karen the perfect nurse - I loved seeing the way nothing was too much trouble for her to care for Alfie. We bought him special food aimed at diabetic cats, that didn't include the ton of grain based carbs in most standard cat food - finding ones he liked wasn't a problem, as his appetite became increasingly ravenous and we often struggled to keep him away from food for the other cats, although the saving grace was he never really liked the dry food which both Lilly and Smokey would happily consume.

Having done a lot of reading about his condition, I convinced myself that the struggles with getting his insulin 'right' was because he had a tumour, probably on his pituitary, but possibly on his adrenal gland. Having convinced Karen to take him to the vets to get more detailed blood tests, sadly the results showed he almost certainly had a pituitary tumour, or acromegaly, which meant he had high levels of growth hormone that interfered with his blood sugar management, and resulted in diabetes. Sadly the acromegaly also meant his bones continued to grow slightly which, over time, would cause discomfort. The first sign of this was the effect on his palate and ability to meow at us, quite quickly he lost his charming voice, although for some months he still tried to 'talk' to us - it was heartbreaking watching him try and no sound come out. We decided that we wouldn't put Alfie through surgery, which meant a number of long car journeys to London, and a life time of medications, for an operation that would in all likelihood only give him another 18months. We didn't feel comfortable putting him through the trauma involved, as there was also the possibility that he wouldn't survive surgery, instead we opted to treat his diabetes and attempt to give him the best we could in whatever time was left to him.

Treating Alfie largely put paid to our house hunting, as we were looking at moving an hour or more away, and it became too impractical. We also made a special effort to give Lilly and Smokey attention during the difficult time with Alfie. Then, out of the blue, in June 2020, Lilly stopped eating and looked really unwell. Sadly the visit to the vets discovered a large lump in her intestines, and the vet recommended euthanasia. The speed of it all took us by surprise, but at 16 years old Lilly had lived longer than most domestic cats, but losing her was gut-wrenching. Luckily, despite the pandemic, we were both able to be with her at the end, holding her and talking to her. We bought a cat shaped casket for her ashes, which sits on Karen's computer table. Having not been able to be with my beloved family dog Snowy when he was euthanised alone(I'd moved away from home and my father only phoned me afterwards), I'd long felt a sense of guilt about not being there for Snowy, so I really appreciated Karen letting me share this time with Lilly, it felt good, almost cathartic, being able to make the effort to be there for them. I really didn't want to be around other people with the pandemic going on, certainly not indoors, but I had to be there for Lilly.



Smokey had always had a close relationship with her mother Lilly, and would often seek her out to groom her, not always appreciated or reciprocated by Lilly, but it was sweet to observe. With Lilly gone, Smokey took a while to adjust, and her attempts to use Alfie as a surrogate didn't get much response, so she sought more attention from her humans!

She started to become far more vocal, almost like Alfie used to, and she started sitting on the patio, like Lilly used to, to wait for her food or treats when I visited. Many years earlier, during the time when Lilly was treating me like her new best friend, Smokey would often spend time with me down the bottom of the garden, away from Lilly, probably a cat hierarchy thing. Now with Lilly gone we made a thing of it, I'd run to the bottom of the garden, usually with some treats in my hand, and Smokey would charge down after me, and we'd have some cuddling and stroking time. With Lilly gone, and Alfie getting more lethargic, it was lovely to see Smokey taking up the slack emotionally, as it were.

At the beginning of 2021 Alfie began wetting his bed, and his abdomen appeared to be more distended than normal. Through lack of exercise his back end had become quite boney and he had little muscle mass, and strangely his blood sugar levels were all over the place. A visit to the vets resulted in some antibiotics to treat a bladder infection. Treating his acromegaly meant we had been giving him very high levels of insulin, levels that would have been fatal to a normal cat, even one with diabetes, but we'd got him to a place where his blood readings were stable. Now, strangely we had to drop his insulin by 2/3rds to again get his levels stable - presumably there has been some change in his tumour. Less insulin was undoubtedly better for him, but even after the antibiotics his bladder/bowel control got increasingly erratic. He was still using the litter tray, he still attempted to clean himself, but clearly struggled to bend, still seriously enjoyed his food, and still took great pleasure in a neck rub. Karen and I debated if his time had come. I tried to liken him to an old man, which at 15yrs old he effectively was, and posed the question of how acceptable it would be to euthanise an old man who often smelt of urine and shuffled around, even if he obviously took some pleasures out of life? He'd been a serious bundle of joy for us since we'd been together, but what was the right thing to do? Karen even took to bathing him in warm water, no mean feat for any cat, but while he didn't like it Alfie let her do it. Then, the other day we noticed he had what looked like bed sores on his legs, probably from where he'd been sleeping in his own urine, and that settled it in our minds.

Given Alfie's reaction to travelling in the car, we've tried to get a vet to visit, and probably euthanise him in Karen's garden. For us it's not only safer in this pandemic, but would avoid having Alfie's last hour or so being largely filled with terror. We're also exploring getting some sedatives for him in the event that we can't get a visiting vet. In the mean time we're trying to spoil him, giving him his favourite foods, even some that are not really good for him. It's proving to be a really challenging time, particularly emotionally, but it has prompted me to record some memories of Karen's cats who had/have become an integral and important part of our 'family'. Quick update(24th Feb2021) - our vet has kindly agreed to supply Karen with a sedative tomorrow, so we plan to spend a lot of time with him tomorrow and Friday morning, before taking him to the vet late Friday afternoon. It's far from ideal, but it's the best we can do for him.
Quick update(26th Feb2021) Just got back from the vets. Alfie had a quiet journey, both to the vets and his final rest. The vet was really understanding, and Karen and I were able to spend time with him as he passed away.

When I first met Karen's cats, our 'babies', it was Smokey who seemed favourite to go first, or to get diabetes, as she was always the largest. Despite her size she was always as athletic as Alfie in his prime, and thankfully has continued to be so. In the past few years she's lost a lot of weight but has the saggy skin around her middle that many human dieters will know only too well. Being Alfie's litter mate, Smokey too is getting on in cat years, but although domestic cats live on average 10-15 years, they can continue on past 30!!

When this pandemic lifts and we start house hunting again, it will be easier to find somewhere to cater for one cat and my frustrating allergy, but in our hearts there will always be a very special place for three remarkable cats.


I'll always be grateful to Karen for the generous way she's shared her beloved cats with me. To say I grew very fond of them would be an understatement of incalculable proportions.