Chris meets a cat whose name doesn’t match his reputation
Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
There’s a cat on my rounds who’s a menace to tradespeople. In fact, he’s pretty much a one-cat crime wave.
Meet Cuddles, a mottled tabby with two split ears, half a tail and probably the most misleading name in the history of pets.
Even before I ever started looking after Cuddles, I knew who he was. Any cat who was mentioned on the radio after knocking a roofing contractor off a chimney is going to get noticed.
Happily, the roofer didn’t quite make it all the way to the ground, or Cuddles would have been even more infamous. However his sudden appearance and a right-paw cuff to the nose was enough to send the roofer crashing down onto a flat roof a few feet below.
Cuddles can probably take a certain amount of credit for not finishing him off, but I think that was more due to him being just as startled as the roofer.
The fact he spent the next three hours caterwauling from the top of the chimney is testament to that (Cuddles… not the roofer).
So, when I received a call from Cuddles’ owners, almost two years after the incident, I have to say I felt as though I was being asked to cat-sit for a local celebrity – albeit a celebrity for all the wrong reasons.
You know how meeting your heroes can sometimes be a bit of a letdown?
You build them up in your mind to be some kind of superstar, then you arrive to find them standing in a litter tray, accidentally peeing up the wall?
Okay, I admit that’s quite a cat-specific example and I doubt anyone will have encountered that scenario when meeting Brad Pitt or the like, but that was certainly my introduction to Cuddles.
Two days into looking after him, I discovered that he’s never actually stopped harassing workers.
Arriving early one morning to serve Cuddles his br
