Sitting on a deck chair in my parents’ garden at the weekend, a cat leisurely idled past with its snooty nose in the air, and with a jolt it dawned on me that this is the same cat that has lived next door for the last twenty five years or so.
Twenty five years of life experience flashed before me in that instant. In particular I couldn’t help dwelling on all the relatives, friends and pet dogs I’d lost in that time, and yet here was this bullet-proof furball still going about the crucial business of terrorising starlings and generally swaggering around like it owned the world.
Had I fallen into a worm hole and travelled back in time?, or was the moggy taking a giant leap for cat-kind into the future from my childhood? You could answer, “Shut the hell up you idiot. Cats live a long time, deal with it”, and many would, but I can’t shake the bizarre sensation of unreality and foreboding.
So that was my weekend. Perhaps the question I should be asking is, when did I become Karl Pilkington?
