The return of ‘Little Miss Loud’

As some of you will be aware, our cat Goldie went missing last weekend. It’s not the first time. Once, she went missing for about 5 weeks (and cried in her sleep for weeks afterwards), but this time didn’t feel good. That might just because of the other things going on, such as the dog being sick and Tony having pneumonia. You need some background to fully appreciate what happened this morning.

We rescued Goldie as a very young kitten. She spent two days crying in the front garden at Christmas time before we softened and bought her into our household. After all, we already had a cat and a dog. The lesson Goldie took from that was that yelling works. 

Goldie is an unusual cat. Oftentimes she’ll call out to us as she comes into the house, and then call out all the way down the hall. If we don’t answer her she just waits, and keeps calling; so we call out things like “come on, it’s okay, you know were we are”. She calls back, we call out again, she calls back – you get the idea. And it’s loud (see above). We call Goldie the “loudest cat on the planet”. We’ve watched some tv programs where people reckon their cat is loud. We have news for them! Mum is two-hearing-aids worth of deaf but as a young cat, she could wake Mum.

This morning at about 7.45 I heard a cat cry, and it got louder and louder. I called out “Goldie” as I shot out of bed. The yelling got louder and by the time I got to the back door she was really yelling. I opened the door, said “where have you been?”, opened a tin of food, then left her to it and went to tell Tony in case somehow he had missed the commotion. She finished her food then started up the hall, crying out to us and she walked. I called back and she yelled again. By the time she got to our room she was crying so loudly we were both laughing. It’s hard to find a way to describe how loud she was; there’s just no obvious way of indicating her true volume. Tony did mutter that she has the volume of a smoke alarm, but at a different pitch!

She seems fine. She isn’t skinny, dirty or injured. We used to wonder if she gets herself shut in people’s houses, because we know she goes visiting, but I can’t help thinking she just goes hunting. She has spent the morning wandering in and out of the house, eating a few more biscuits etc – and every time she comes back to find us she calls out to us the whole time. Welcome home again Little Miss Loud!