What's the point of Postcodes?

From today's NZ Herald Sideswipe column:

NZ Post has just launched its "what's your postcode?" campaign to remind people about using postcodes, writes Paul. "My wife went to post a parcel at the Victoria St post office in Auckland's CBD and although the parcel was correctly addressed including the postcode, for Kaiwaka in Northland, the staff at the counter were unable to locate the code on their system and consequently informed her that they couldn't accept the parcel!"

The 'Paul' in this item is me. When Rochelle related the story to me, I got on the NZ Post website and used their postcode finder to look up the code she'd used in the address. It came up instantly with the correct details. I've no idea why the staff at the post office were incapable of doing this. Coincidentally, the glossy brochure from NZ Post promoting the Postcode education campaign arrived in our mail box on the very same day that this incident occurred!

Getting back into the Groove

Today has been a day of shifting gears and getting back on track.

For many months now, I've been writing The Comic Strip Companion, a book about every Doctor Who comic strip created in the 1960s and 1970s (and yes, there are a lot of them).

I had to lay the book to one side to tackle another, quite different writing job. I can't say much about that other piece of writing yet (I'll blog about it when it's been announced), but I will say that this was a hugely different discipline to writing the book, and I found it enormously challenging to get into the right headspace for the duration. That's now done and delivered.

So, after about a month of doing very little on the book, I've just resumed work on it.

Time to take stock. Where am I at with this? A few facts and figures might help. When I left off in mid-August, I'd completed the first drafts of nine chapters, which between them cover 87 comic strip stories. My total word count when I left off was 98,116 words (Believe me, I was sorely tempted to push on to the next chapter to break that psychological 100,000 barrier!).

I've another five chapters to write, plus three appendicies which are each probably going to be long enough to be considered chapters in their own right - so there's still a lot left to do.

Today, rather than launching straight into a new chapter, I decided to get back into the mindset by revising Chapter Six (which covers the comic strips published in 1970). The revisions included adding in a whole new subsection, and trimming down some overly wordy bits.

Having completed this revision, I took the plunge and sent this newly polished chapter out to a test audience for feedback and comments. I held off doing this until now because I didn't want the distraction of replies while I was working on the Other Project. Now it's time to start soliciting and receiving that constructive criticism. I've emailed a group of seven readers, and just hours later, I've already received my first feedback which has already got me thinking about making a few tweaks to the format. I'll hold off doing that though until I see what the others have to say.

Missing Targets

My obsession with Doctor Who grew out of a love for the highly collectable Target novelisations of the Doctor's television adventures. When I was a boy I used to seize any opportunity to nip into a bookshop and peruse the shelves for the highly distinctive slim paperback books. I arranged these carefully in series order and accorded them pride of place on my bookshelves. Once I'd caught up with all of the books already available it became a matter of tracking down each new monthly release. Because each novelisation was based on a television story I always knew exactly how many gaps there were in the book series and how many titles there should be in total when the range was complete (this latter figure was of course adjusted annually to keep up with each new season of television stories).

The Target range finally ended in the early 1990s, following on the heels of the cancellation of the television series itself. The 154 novelisations covered almost but not quite all of the television stories as there were at that time. There were, frustratingly, just five gaps remaining on the bookshelf. The missing Targets were three Fourth Doctor stories, all scripted by the late Douglas Adams, and two Dalek stories scripted by Eric Saward. Due to unsuccessful negotiations with these writers, the publishers were prevented from completing the set. So close, and yet so far.

It was a desire to fill these niggling gaps that inspired me to produce my own versions of the missing novelisations. I novelised two of the five stories myself, and three other writers adapted one story each. When the books were offered as a set of five they proved extremely popular with fans worldwide (whom no doubt like me had those niggling gaps on their bookshelves). I found myself struggling to keep up with demand and had to keep reprinting in ever greater numbers. Although these books were always strictly amateur non-profit publications, this unfortunately didn't prevent buyers from onselling these with a markup. I decided to let the books go out of print and instead issue them completely free of charge as online ebooks. It has taken a couple of years to get all five books online, but I'm delighted to announce that the last of these, Doctor Who and the City of Death, went up yesterday.

The set of five novelisations can be read online (and downloaded) here.

Campaign

The Crusade is not the only 'lost' Doctor Who story featuring the First Doctor that I’ve helped rescue from oblivion. I also had a hand in the restoration of author Jim Mortimore’s self-published novel, Campaign.

Jim’s novel has a fairly turbulent background. Campaign was originally commissioned by BBC Books as a purely historical adventure set in various time periods during the life of Alexander the Great, but the book Jim delivered was late, underlength, and differed radically from the original synopsis, becoming a mind-bending adventure about multiple realities set largely within the confines of the TARDIS and, for the most part, only tangentially dealt with Alexander’s life. The book was cancelled so Jim took it upon himself to self-publish the book for charity in 2000.

The limited-run paperback proved popular with fans, garnering many online rave reviews, and consequently completely sold out of its limited print run.

In late August 2006 I was browsing the Outpost Gallifrey Doctor Who discussion forum, and read a thread about how copies of Campaign, which was by now long out of print, was changing hands for large sums of money on Ebay. My only prior contact with Jim Mortimore was when I had bought copies of Campaign off him years earlier, but I dropped in an email suggesting that he take a look at the TSV website where David Bishop’s Who Killed Kennedy novel had been reissued as an ebook free for all to read and accompanied by new supplementary material including a chapter-by-chapter commentary. I proposed that if he was interested, we could perhaps do something similar for Campaign.

Jim responded positively, writing “THAT is a brilliant idea. What do you need from me?” and started bombarding me via email with some highly creative suggestions including randomised alternative endings, a complete rewrite of the manuscript, an interactive slideshow, and especially composed music (Jim’s also a musician) to accompany the book. None of this eventuated, but it demonstrates just how enthusiastic Jim was initially about the project.

We soon struck a major setback; when I’d worked on the Who Killed Kennedy ebook David Bishop had been able to supply me with an electronic copy of his complete manuscript which made things fairly straightforward. After some time spent searching his files Jim confessed that he couldn’t find a copy of his manuscript; it had apparently been lost forever in a PC crash a couple of years earlier.

I could sympathise with Jim’s predicament; I lost many years worth of TSV files in my own disastrous computer hard drive failure in 1998, and subsequently spent ages painstakingly restoring these by scanning pages of the print master copies. Scanning a copy of the book was the only practical solution that would enable the continuation of the Campaign ebook project. I scanned the first few chapters from my own copy, but as anyone who has ever tried to do this with a paperback book will attest to, this is very tricky and results in both poor quality scans and a book with a wrecked spine.

Jim sent me a defaced copy of the book that I could use instead. The only way in which it was 'defaced' was that Jim had written a dedication on the title page and then scribbled it out. I didn’t allow myself to think about how much the book could still have fetched on ebay, as I took a sharp knife and sliced away the spine. The result was a set of perfectly flat pages that made scanning considerably easier, if still very time-consuming, but on 26 January 2007 I scanned the entire thing from end to end, and tidied up as many of the text recognition errors as I could find to create a Word document of the complete novel.

Jim was delighted to once again have an electronic copy of his novel, and told me he was going to set about restoring it to its original layout and also begin work on the supplementary features. I told him to take as much time as he needed, and in June 2007 he emailed me three documents. The first was an article tracing the history of the book from his initial idea through to its final cancellation; the second a chapter-by-chapter commentary, and the third a collection of reviews of the book harvested from various internet sites. These items were, in total, almost as long as the novel itself.

I had three main concerns about the content of these three articles. Firstly, Jim had included a great deal of the private email correspondence between himself and various individuals at BBC Books, some of which pertained to a dispute over the book’s commissioning and contract. I was naturally worried that if this material was published on the TSV website we could potentially invite legal action from the individuals concerned. Secondly, Jim hadn’t held back in his use of swear words in his commentary and while this was clearly genuine and heartfelt, I was mindful of the broad age range of fans reading at the TSV website, and felt the swearing needed to be toned down. Lastly, I wasn’t comfortable with a wholesale reproduction of all of the reviews from other sources, especially if these could still be found elsewhere online.

I put this feedback to Jim and he agreed to try to seek the necessary permissions. I didn’t hear much from Jim for several months. He finally got back to me in November, saying that the permissions would not be forthcoming and conceding that a rewrite was therefore required. Jim asked me to edit out what I thought needed to be removed, but by early February 2008 I still hadn’t found time to do this as I was by now working on a book project of my own and had little time to spare. I suggested to Jim that I pass the project on to Jamas Enright. Jamas is a long time TSV contributor who has done some excellent work proof reading the online reissues of TSV. Jamas admired Campaign, and his online review of the book was among Jim’s collection of critiques from the internet.

Coincidentally, in February 2008, the Doctor Who Forum’s Campaign discussion thread has a comment from a member with the user name ‘fridaydalek’, saying “Anyone know if Mr Mortimore plans / can be persuaded to release an ebook? Who Killed Kennedy is available in this format.” This was uncannily close to the truth of what had been in the planning stages for over a year, but no hint of this had been disclosed to more than a select group of people directly involved with the project. Another user responded saying that this couldn’t happen because Jim had been threatened by the BBC’s legal department. Jim was quick to post a reply himself saying that this wasn’t true, he’d never had any such contact from the BBC over Campaign.

Jamas began working with Jim on editing the Campaign supplementary material in early March, but another setback came in later that month when Jim emailed both Jamas and myself out of the blue to say that he was pulling the ebook project and was instead going to publish the book with all of the controversial emails intact. I was understandably most disappointed at this sudden about face. I challenged Jim on his reasons, and his explanation was that although he was fine with the work Jamas had put in, he was sick of the way he had been treated by BBC Books and wanted the whole unexpurgated truth to come out. The trigger for this was an experience he’d just had with Big Finish over a Doctor Who audio play that he’d been commissioned to write and was then cancelled. Jim said, “The fact is I’m sick of being kicked in the arse for doing what people ask, and having no recourse but to allow them to make it out to be my fault when their lack of professionalism sends the whole sorry mess spiralling down the pan.”

A month later, Jim emailed again to say that he’d reconsidered, and was now happy for the ebook to appear online, with Jamas’s edits intact. Jim wrote: “Why? I hear you mumbling, in weary abandonment. You were right. You guys put a f**kload of work into this and this book would not now exist without you. That means a *lot* to me. Far more than any stupid gripe with a f**kwitted editor.”

Campaign - the ebook version – was published online by TSV website editor Alden Bates on Monday 28 April, the day before I flew out to the UK for a five week holiday. I made a tentative arrangement with Jim to meet up for a beer in London to celebrate the relaunching of Campaign, but circumstances alas prevented me from finding a suitable time to do this.

Jim went ahead and got new editions of his book published in hardback, with all of the supplementary material in the back. Jim promised copies of this new edition for myself, Jamas and Alden as a thank you for the work we’d each put into the project. In August the books were finally posted to us and turned up in the mailbox just a couple of days ago.

The new edition is a heavy substantial hardback printed on good quality paper with a glossy, full colour dustjacket. I’m name-checked in the book’s introduction, and it’s a pleasure to not only be associated with such a good-looking tome, but also to finally have a copy of the book I helped in some small way to make possible, almost two years to the day after I first suggested to the author that it ought to be reissued.

The online version of Campaign can be found here.

TSV 59

In my editorial for TSV 59, published January 2000 I took the occasion of the turning of the decade to bemoan the fact that, notwithstanding the McGann TV movie, fans had gone ten years without newly-produced television Doctor Who. I wrote of the unexpected thrill that myself and a couple of friends had experienced when we first watched the cliffhanger ending of The Curse of Fenric episode three, a thrill that had been missing in the intervening years; and concluded by making a simple yet heartfelt request: "Can we have our series back, please?"

I had to wait a few more years after that editorial appeared but I’m happy to say that my request was granted and I'm now experiencing that cliffhanger thrill again, most recently at the conclusion of The Stolen Earth, which was so astonishingly unexpected it actually had me wondering whether I just seen the Tenth Doctor's swansong. Honestly, I cannot understate this: I adore the new series of Doctor Who and it's brilliant beyond words that it has been such a phenomenally huge success.

TSV 59 however belongs to a time when fans were still clutching at whatever passed for something new about Doctor Who. It seems highly unlikely that a spoof Comic Relief sketch would receive such prominence now, but there’s The Curse of Fatal Death (scripted by current producer-in-waiting himself, Steven Moffat), on the front cover. Actually that’s a rather good piece of artwork by Alistair Hughes which cleverly pastiches Target’s The Five Doctors novelisation cover.

There’s more goodness from Al Hughes inside the issue, in the form of a Lara Croft-inspired picture of Leela. The artwork appeared in black and white in the issue, but in an early example of the TSV website supporting the issue’s content, a link was provided for readers to check out the full colour version online. (Now, of course, the whole issue's on the website.)

Al’s finest work this issue is in the form of an eight page comic strip called Our Final Battlefield which is just stunning. When I first laid eyes on this I emailed Al and told him he should send a copy to Doctor Who Magazine to see if they might be interested in printing it. I’ve no idea if Al did, or if he received a reply, but to my mind it was certainly worthy of consideration.

TSV 59 also has some rather good articles, including an insightful examination of the subtext of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy by Peter Adamson. This caused a bit of a problem when an emailed comment was included that wasn’t intended for publication. Thankfully this genuine misunderstanding was soon smoothed over without the need to do anything as drastic as withdrawing the entire print run (though this was initially requested), but I have of course removed the offending comment for the online edition.

Peter was a prolific contributor to TSV for many years, delivering both quantity and quality with inspiring regularity. His input, if not always his name, infuses at least half of this issue’s content. The Machinery of Survival is one of his articles, a thorough examination (I’m tempted to write dissection) of the rather gory subject of converting humans into Cybermen. Now that’s why I think Cybermen are far scarier than Daleks.

I mentioned in a previous commentary that legendary TV historian Andrew Pixley has something of an aversion to being interviewed, claiming that the process of writing the Doctor Who Magazine Archives was simply too boring to talk about. I disagreed, and after some gentle persuasion on my part he agreed to an email interview. The first half appeared in this issue, and I think makes fascinating reading for anyone like me who regards Andrew’s Archives as the most thorough and reliable reference work ever produced on the behind-the-scenes history of Doctor Who. I just wish that these will someday get reissued as bound book editions, as it would be a lot easier to look things up if I didn't have to shuffle through more than a decade’s worth of magazines.

Even if you're already familiar with Andrew's interview from the print edition, I recommend looking up the online version as it includes a new postscript by Andrew in which he brings his comments up to date. I should add too that Andrew offered to write this for the online edition when he observed that the issue was due for republication, without any prompting from me. That's the kind of generous and thoughtful man he is.

Read the issue here.

Fellow TSV 59 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 58

At the moment almost all of my writing is taken up with chronicling Doctor Who comic strips from years gone by. What started out as an interest in the comics as part of a wider focus on all things to do with a certain Time Lord has just within the last couple of years narrowed to a singular obsession as I've developed the manuscript of what will eventually be my first professionally published book.

So it is that looking back at TSV 58, first published back in September 1999, I’m interested above all else in the article it contauins about the making of one of the Doctor Who Magazine comic strips. This item will in time no doubt end up being listed in my book’s bibliography (but not until the second volume).

It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To was an insight into the writing and drawing of DWM’s 1998 anniversary strip, called Happy Deathday. The article was written by Warwick Gray, better known to DWM readers by his professional name Scott Gray. Warwick – or rather Scott as I should call him from here on in – is possibly TSV’s greatest success story. Scott was illustrating and writing for TSV when he was still living in his mother’s basement in suburban Dunedin. The early years of TSV owe a great deal to Warwick's creative input, as I'm sure both long time subscribers and those who've had a thorough look through the online archive will be aware.

I remain very proud of the fact that we published Scott Gray’s earliest Doctor Who comic strips, the very same work that he submitted on spec to Doctor Who Magazine and resulted in work as a comic strip writer and assistant editor on DWM when he moved to the UK in the early 1990s. Scott is now widely regarded as one of the very best things ever to happen to the DWM Doctor Who comic strip, and it's a shame in my opinion that he stepped down as the regular writer when Paul McGann's Doctor was replaced by Christopher Eccleston.

I’ve kept in contact with Scott, and have caught up with him on a few of my UK trips (though circumstances conspired against us meeting up for a drink on my most recent foray to Britain in May this year). Despite his considerable success with his comic strip writing – which is really rather extraordinary good, it has to be said – Scott’s never forgotten TSV, and back in 1999 enthusiastically volunteered this article on the writing of one of his strips for DWM. As this particular story was a team-up with artist Roger Langridge, another ex-pat Kiwi now living in London, it was the ideal strip to write about for TSV.

I think if I recall correctly, the roughs came first. Scott adored Roger’s rough versions of the strip and thought they deserved to be printed. So that’s no doubt what got him thinking of TSV as the ideal place to showcase these. I think Scott wrote his article to give the roughs some context. As it was I didn’t have the page space to print the entire strip, but I did feature many excerpts with comparison panels from the finished version seen in DWM.

With the online publication of this issue I recently took the opportunity to pull out some dusty old box files and locate the original roughs Scott sent me all those years ago, still stored carefully away in a folder, with post-it notes still attached to the pages. There are no page constraints for an electronic issue, so for the first time ever, Roger Langridge’s roughs, plus his preliminary sketches for each of the Doctors, are finally available for all to enjoy.

Still on the subject of comic strips, but elsewhere in the issue, A Locked Room Mystery was significant for finally completing the set of all eight Doctors (as there were back then). TSV had published at least one ‘serious’ comic strip story for each of the Doctors except the first, so finally it was William Hartnell’s turn, in a suitably claustrophobic tale set entirely within the TARDIS.

Around this time of TSV 58 I know I was becoming concerned with the ever-growing number of VHS releases. I was determined to publish a review of each and every story as it was released, but with the frequency of VHS releases increasing as BBC Worldwide set its sights on completing the range within a few years, and the gap widening between TSV issues, inevitably each issue would have quite a few video reviews. So I started to look for ways to diversify these, and hit on the idea of doing a commentary in print. I put the proposal to Peter Adamson and Alistair Hughes, who responded enthusiastically, coming up with the regular Beyond the Sofa feature. These days this feature would be referred to as a ‘fan commentary’; only in print, rather than on DVD.

I can’t really make any claim to originality for the idea. I’d seen it done with SFX magazine’s regular 'Couch Potato' feature, and I think Pete and Al may also have been inspired by this source. Some readers thought TSV might have copied DWM, as their long-running Time Team commentary feature had only just begun at this time. I do know that I’d already put the idea for what became Beyond the Sofa to Pete and Al by the time I first laid eyes on the 'Time Team' feature in DWM 279, as I recall being astonished that we’d come up with a fairly similar approach at pretty much the same time.

Peter also drew the front cover artwork (providing regular cover artist Alistair with what was probably a much-needed break), and Peter’s piece ties in nicely with the focus on Nightmare of Eden for the Beyond the Sofa feature.

I’m fond of the New Adventures novels, so it was a pleasure to publish Jamas Enright’s comprehensively researched piece on All-Consuming Fire. I’d done something similar myself for Happy Endings, another New Adventures novel, back in TSV 49, and if time had permitted, I would like to have had more annotated guides in this vein in TSV.

As it was, by this time I was doing less and less of the writing for TSV myself. This was an incredibly busy and sometimes stressful time for me; a change of job was just around the corner and over the following two years I'd experience a meteoric rise from call centre supervisor to the general manager of the company. But enough about me - go off and read TSV 58!

Read the issue here.

Fellow TSV 58 bloggers
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

Eulogy for Chester

Chester died today. He had been our faithful companion for thirteen years. He was a very old cat; we believe he was five when we got him, which made him 18 when he died.

Rochelle found Chester in the North Shore Times newspaper back in 1995. He was free to a good home, unwanted by the neighbours of a family who’d gone to Australia for a holiday and had evidently liked it so much they’d decided not to return. Deserted by his owners, Chester apparently decided to move in next door, imposing himself on the neighbours who’d been feeding him in his owners’ absence. They had cats of their own who became very distressed at this newcomer’s unwelcome presence. In desperation the neighbour took Chester to the vet to be put down. The vet - seeing a healthy well-fed cat in the prime of his life – persuaded the neighbour instead to place an advertisement in the paper. Which is where we came in.

We had recently had a bad experience with a rescue cat, a stray we named Max. Max had previously lived in a supermarket car park, and was clearly unwilling to settle into the pampered life of a household cat. We made a valiant effort to domesticate Max, but he escaped through an accidentally open window one day.

Chester was Max’s replacement, and Rochelle knew it was meant to be as soon as they met. She went round to view him and Chester immediately began rubbing all around her ankles. His immediate and unconditional affection was a stunning contrast to Max’s complete absence of people skills. We didn’t name Chester – that was the name given to him by his previous owners who’d scarpered across the Tasman.

So Chester came to live with us in our small Glenfield flat. We lived at the time in a converted motel unit complex, and our gregarious tuxedo cat was soon the talk of all the residents in the units, schmoozing his way into the affections of the generally middle-aged single women who were our neighbours. He sometimes could be found befriending patrons at the Georgie Pie restaurant that backed on to the flats. He also accompanied us on walks several block distant, and could even be persuaded (when placed at the top) to try the slides at the local park playground.

When we moved to our house in Takapuna Chester adapted rather quickly to this new unfamiliar territory and once again ingratiated himself with the local residents. He became rather overweight for a while due, we suspect, to snacks he received from doting neighbours. He became firm friends with our neighbours’ cat, Sammy. The two of them were often seen exploring together, until Sammy died of old age a few years later. Chester then befriended another neighbour’s small tabby kitten, called Trigger, and almost seemed as if he was mentoring a young apprentice.

Rochelle and I got into the habit of going for short walks in the evenings and weekends, with Chester and Trigger accompanying us as far as they felt comfortable doing so. Chester once walked with us all the way to the roast meal shop located two blocks away. It was probably the wafting smells of gravy that lured him on – gravy was a favourite food. We’d give him cat food with chunks of meat in gravy and he’d methodically lap up every drop of gravy and leave behind the meat.

Chester was affectionate and energetic for a long time, but as old age crept up on him he became gradually more distant and took to sleeping almost all day. His favourite spots were clumps of long grass beside our driveway and also the sun loungers on our deck where, on warm sunny days, he liked nothing better than to soak up the rays until his black fur was almost too hot to touch.

Chester was a costly cat, too. He was fussy about his food and had the uncanny ability to discriminate between cat food brands based on price. He also lined the vet’s pockets on many occasions.

He suffered a scrape to his right eye which necessitated an operation which involved peeling off the outer layer of the eye and then stitching the eye closed whilst the layer regrew. Despite suffering a week of indignity going around with one eye stitched shut, Chester’s eye never entirely healed up and he always had a slightly milky glaze over his right eye after that. He also had to have several teeth removed at various time, including two of his four incisors which caused him to thereafter always eat with his head cocked on one side.

In the last couple of years, he developed a problem with one of his back legs becoming stiff and unresponsive. The vet diagnosed this as a pinched nerve in Chester’s spine, but due to his age, they were unable to safely operate to fix the problem. Chester would sometimes have rather alarming spasms in his defective leg, which he’d find upsetting as he’d growl and bite down on his leg until the spasms subsided. It was unwise to be in his vicinity when this occurred, as Rochelle found out to her cost not once but twice, when Chester confused her arm with his leg. The bites became seriously infected and required medical treatment. To this day she bears small bite scars as permanent reminder of Chester.

Three and a half years ago, facing Chester’s declining health we decided to get a second cat, another tuxedo male we called Monty who had just been weaned from his mother and seemed to latch on to Chester as a bit of a role model. Chester was having none of it though and growled and spit at this tiny impressionable kitten whenever he ventured too close. Perhaps Chester cannily realised that Monty was being groomed as his eventual replacement. Fortunately for us, Monty quickly befriended the aforementioned Trigger, who was much closer to his own age, and the two were firm buddies, with Chester accepted as part of the group. The trio would usually accompany us on our regular walks, which stopped after Trigger sadly died after being hit by a car, and due to his bad leg Chester became too immobile for him to walk very far.

We had hoped of course that Chester would go quietly in his sleep. We’d last taken him for his annual vet check-up in February this year, fearing the worst, but the verdict was that for his age he was in remarkably good health and still had life left in him. We took a trip to the UK in May this year, leaving instructions with our neighbour for what to do if Chester passed away. He looked so frail that we really didn’t think he had many days left. To our amazement and relief, Chester was still around when we returned after five weeks away, regarding us as usual with a disapproving glare that said, “And where do you think you’ve been…?”

In the few weeks since our return, Chester’s health took a turn for the worse, perhaps exacerbated by a bad patch of cold, damp weather. In the end though, like many old cats, it was his kidneys that got him. He went off his food and had even stopped drinking water. We were concerned for his health and tried to keep him inside and as warm and comfortable as possible. Midday yesterday Chester went outside. I went searching for him but couldn’t locate him before we were due to go out that afternoon. As I drove away, I thought I saw him sitting over in the neighbour’s garden, oddly enough in the same spot where Trigger had been buried.

In the evening we returned home and learned that our neighbour had found Chester collapsed on his doorstep, howling and soaking wet from the heavy rain and in our absence had very kindly rushed him to the vet. Chester was fed and rehydrated, but in the end there was nothing the vet could do for him; his kidneys were found to be inflamed and riddled with cancer and we made the heartbreaking yet inevitable decision to have him put to sleep. He died in Rochelle’s arms mid-morning on Sunday 29 June 2008.

Chester was very old in cat years. He’d had a good life and had been well loved by both of us. I like to write on my computer late into the night, and Chester would often curl up at my feet. As I’m writing now, I’m missing his familiar presence. The memory of Chester - the cat with a huge personality - will forever remain.

Farewell old friend. Rest in peace, Mr C.