Late one night, at the end of January, my cat Misty came downstairs, tore me away from the Horror channel with a series of unusual cries, stretched his mouth wide like a yawning lion, shivered, collapsed and died. He was a fortnight shy of his ninth birthday.
If I said that I loved him and that this sudden, wrongful loss floored me for days, drained the world of light and colour for weeks and still jabs at me now, I would be stating what any but the most exasperated pet owner would recognise as the bleeding obvious. But if I said that six months down the line I think about him more often and more painfully than I did about my mother six months after she died, at the age of 88 in 2022, I might cross a line for some of you.
