Six Dinner Sid

My best friend Charlotte lives about 120 miles away from me, which means that throughout the pandemic I haven’t been able to see her. Not being able to catch up so easily has been sad, for sure, but we’ve managed to stay in-the-loop on the big stories in each other’s lives as much as possible.

It’s an exciting year for us both – we’re buying houses! Separately, of course; but I have a feeling we’ll spend a good amount of time drinking red wine and eating nachos in each other’s gardens later in 2021. Having this to look forward to has really kept our spirits high when things felt tough.

One of the highlights of Charlotte's lockdown story is Sid.

About a year ago, around the time that all of this mess started to unfold, a stray cat started to visit Charlotte’s garden.

Now, Charlotte has a cat of her own named Bear, and a dog called Jack, so it’s safe to say she’s an animal person. Feeding Sid the odd snack was a no-brainer for her. He had no collar and wasn’t microchipped, so she couldn’t trace him back to his owner, and, bottom-line, he seemed hungry.

The more times he came to see her, the friendlier he became.

Clearly, he was enjoying the cat food and gourmet chicken leftovers. Charlotte’s dinner menu was evidently more appealing to Sid than that of her neighbours. Her family joked about how he was just like the eponymous Six Dinner Sid in the popular children’s story.

Heard of it? Here’s a (very) brief summary:

A stray cat, named Sid, enjoys dinner at six different neighbours’ houses, because no one knows that he’s been fed by someone else.

So from then on, that was his name. From the days when he used to prowl around the neighbourhood and come and go as he pleased.

Except one day, he decided to stay. Sid came into Charlotte’s house, and he didn’t leave.

There was a bit of tension between him and Bear at first, and Jack was more than a little bit interested in what Sid might taste like, but all-in-all the move-in was a success. Though she had no real idea of where he came from, Charlotte was now taking care of this cat full-time, whatever his real name and origin may have been.

Fast forward to just two months ago, and Sid went missing.

Upset, as you can imagine, Charlotte assumed he’d gone back to his own home, with his original family, and that she’d be unlikely to see him again. Weeks went by without seeing him reappear in her garden, and she had almost given up hope.

But, as she was scrolling through Facebook one evening (as we all do), up popped Sid’s face.

He had turned up in someone's garden, and that someone was concerned about who he belonged to. Charlotte rushed to collect him. It turned out that lots of people in the area knew Sid, though not by that name; instead, he'd been known as Pudding and Billy.

Sid had, it turned out, belonged to an elderly man down the road who, for whatever reason, had a pride of no less than 15 cats… Animal welfare got wind of the condition of this man’s house, and came to take the cats to a rescue shelter.

Except Sid was out when they arrived. He missed the trip to his new home, and so, when he returned, he found the house empty of his feline room-mates. Perhaps this was when he first decided to move in with my friend.

Within just a few months, the elderly man passed away, which meant that Sid really didn’t have a home to go back to. When he disappeared from Charlotte’s house a few months ago, he was left disoriented, alone, and abandoned. And this is when Sid’s face popped up on Charlotte’s Facebook feed.

Now, Sid has a happy, permanent home with Charlotte; an owner who will pay his vet bills, feed him those all-important gourmet chicken dinners, and has since got him officially registered as hers.

For me, this is the perfect model for giving a pet a forever home that it desperately needs.

Though Sid is not my own, his story is a version of one I have seen quite often, where the cat chooses its home and, with a stubbornness that cats are known for, refuses from that moment on to accept anything less.

It was Charlotte’s home he wanted to live in, and it’s now her cuddles that he receives throughout the day. If that isn’t true love, I don’t know what is.

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