Missing cat had me in a flap

Pets soon become part of your family's social fabric.

The human heart is a funny old thing. One minute it can be tough as ole boots and locked up tight like a rusty sea chest; the next minute it's owned by some furry or feathered creature who ought to mean not too much but ends up meaning the world.

I learned this the hard way recently when my rascal of a kat went missing (I spell it that way because he's not quite kitten, but also not quite cat, and going through that rangy, awkward teenage stage with all the mischief that goes with it).

Dave is an SPCA rescue cat, a surprise Christmas present from a year ago, and through a winning combination of nurture and nature, his personality and bearing is part human, part dog and 100 per cent part of our family.

Dave loves our dog, Greta, like a little brother should. They sleep together, play rough together and even huddle on the porch in the cold, driving rain together (despite Dave having a cat door and a bed by the fire).

The first thing we hear after the alarm goes off each morning is Dave galloping down the wooden floors of the hallway, before he flies at us with noisy demands for the first snuggle of the morning before Greta (not a morning dog) eventually comes for one too.

A homely cat, Dave is not the type to wander far, and is always waiting just outside the front gate at 6pm each evening, never venturing further than the next-door neighbour's garden.

That's why it didn't take us long to get worried last week when the lil' guy wasn't about at dinner time and by bed time still hadn't made an appearance.

We called him, we rattled his biscuit tin, we sent Greta and her gun-dog nose hunting in the neighbour's garden ... but no Dave.

Eventually we concluded that something dark and tragic had happened to him, and went to bed feeling like we'd lost a central member of our family.

After registering his absence with the SPCA and the local vet the next morning, we asked our neighbour as a last resort to check her garage. Inside, a relaxed Dave was stretched out on the bonnet of her car, oblivious to the anguish that had been going on only metres from his night-time bolt hole.

Having only just recovered from this bruise to my heart, yesterday while out for a morning constitutional I found a small fledgling fantail, blown from the nest and looking forlorn and helpless on the pavement.

Despite knowing what a first-class pain in the posterior he was going to be, I picked the feathered chap up and took him home, and then to work, where he required hourly feeding and general maintenance I could probably have done without.

Much like Dave, by bedtime he had wedged a small space for himself in a corner of my heart, so that by breakfast when he was pronounced dead (no thanks to Dave, who batted his box off the bench in a bid to get a closer look), I was once again bereft.

What this showed (apart from an obvious need to harden up) was how quickly things that don't matter at all can suddenly come to matter so much. Is this a fault of the human condition? Or one of its greatest attributes?

Either way, I learned two valuable lessons from the week's tumult. Always ask the neighbour first, and if you can't walk past what you come across, just don't walk under lofty trees on windy days.