Parents phoned. Cat's dead. Balls.

Apparently he hadn't been eating very well for a few days and had to be kept at the vet overnight while they tried to understand what was wrong with him, but he died overnight after they discovered he was anaemic with potential other problems. (Such as dying, as it turns out.)

In truth I feel like I'm being awfully unsympathetic because this hasn't really affected me as much as you would reasonably expect. I've been far away enough for the last two years, only coming back for a week or so at the time, and I think of him as so much a part of the house that the concept is honestly quite difficult to grasp. Chekhov secured his position as the second longest living of our cats a number of years ago, and made it to nearly sixteen years - this is apparently about 80 according to a batty-looking woman on the Internet, and it would seem that males don't have the stamina to keep going much longer. The only one of our cats who got further than that was Pushkin, a female cat with a gender-inappropriate name that must have been slightly older than that when I was born and seemed to give up on any sort of activity shortly afterwards, being indistinguishable from a lightly breathing pillow that occasionally changed which radiator it sat under.

Apart from the Russians, I don't think any of our cats made it to anywhere near that age. Near the end of Pushkin's life we introduced a black and white spotted cat called Toby to the house, and they instantly developed a complete resentment of each other and had to be kept in separate parts of the house. Toby had the house to himself a couple of years afterwards, but after a while he kept on disappearing for several days at a time and eventually decided not to come back for reasons best known to himself.

It was after him that we got Chekhov and Cleo together, and I'm certain that a third cat by the name of Jaguar was around for a while but I can't remember what happened to him. I think we might have just been taking care of him before someone adopted him properly. So I'm not sure where he is now, and Cleo, despite surviving jumping off the neighbours' roof while chasing birds, eventually had to be put to sleep after getting in a fight with a large lemonade truck.

Max and Smokey came next, who both developed a form of leukemia a few years later - I'm not sure if there's anything that could have prevented that. Their successors were Gandalf and Cassie (who was notable for quickly growing an absolutely enormous fluffy tail that made her look like a squirrel in disguise and regularly dragging entire trees back into the house with it). Chekhov never seemed to get on with the younger male cats, but was always very... cuddly with the female ones, making him seem like a sort of feline Hugh Hefner figure. I have absolutely no idea what happened to Cassie, but she hasn't been around for at least the last few years.

So that just leaves Gandalf now, who is an entirely black cat with none of the wisdom that his name suggests (quadralien explains this by saying that Gandalf the White was slightly wiser than Gandalf the Grey, so Gandalf the Black should logically be a bit thick). He normally greets people by staring up at them with his eyes just about popping out of his head and then gradually falling over, and I'm not sure if he'll even really notice the change.

Does this mean it's time to introduce another successor to our house's long line of Russian cat overlords? If so, my vote's on calling him "Tchaikovsky".

All right, it's just hit me. This icon from pami_zee has now taken on an entirely new and tragic meaning. I might have to go and do something unmasculine for a while.