thoughts of a longcat: lost and found

i got back from work on thursday and dinah told me that she hadn't seen balthazara all day...

which freaked me out a fair bit... neither of us could remember if we'd seen her that morning...

in a moment of half-sleep that night balthazara was near me but just out of reach, but this was just my brain giving me what i wanted,

so friday morning brought no cat return and me, dinah & spski went out for the very last dawn project, (videoblog to follow) and afterwards i took a picture of balthazara round all the houses whose gardens back onto ours, there's a kind of a rectangle of gardens behind our house that stretches quite far back and we thought she must be stuck in a garden, or had been taken in by a household somewhere in the rectangle...

near the southernmostpoint of the rectangle i was talking to a woman who hadn't seen her and had no cat of her own, i asked if she could hear the meow i could hear and she told me i must be imagining it...

i could still hear it but it didn't sound like balthazara, i wanted to ask her neighbours if they had a cat but they weren't in... i couldn't see the cat whose meow i could hear.. it foxed me... i moved on...

no joy and a little later i made the rounds again with a leaflet to put through the letterboxes of the households i hadn't spoke to someone in and again passing that corner i heard the meow...

i stepped back to see if the cat was on the roof, i looked all around but i couldn't see it.. and again i thought it didn't sound like balthazara...

so friday passed and i came off my bike while cycling across a park (right over the handle bars)... the front brake had messed up (still is messed up)... no return of the cat...

i became sure that she was in one of the gardens near our end of the rectangle and i spent quite a long time sat on the shed at the back of our garden rattling dried cat food in a tupperware box and calling her but the sun went down and she was still out there...

bear in mind that on thursday night there had been horrible rain and wind and the wind had carried on, is still there now... really nuts wind... the idea of her out in that weather was driving us a little mad...

the worry of it, constantly there in the background... over at floopy & T's i looked at their cat and i felt tears coming, partly to do with the little sleep i'd had before the dawn project that morning...

so this afternoon we were due to go filming with K-wo & spski and we both went out to walk the streets looking for balthazara before hand, a couple of neighbourly individuals allowed us to go through to their gardens, close to where i was sure she would be, but no avail...

so i said to dinah we should check out the meow i'd heard the day before and we went down to that house... finally finding someone in who also let us look in their garden, but the garden was much further down than i thought she would have got to and lo and behold she wasn't there...

and on leaving the house i once again heard the meow, when i pointed it out the man in the house said:

"oh it's not a big cat is it? there's been a big cat running around the front here..."

so i said no it can't be her, (always in denial about how fat our beloved cat is), dinah went through that front garden to the hedge and i went round to the neighbours front garden, same hedge, and dinah said:

"i can see a cat's arse"

"is it her?"

"it might be"

...

and it was...

and i picked her up and took her home where she now is, she ate an awful lot of food and i apologised to her for not getting her until 26 hours after i'd first heard her meow...