He didn't often sit in a box ...

 but just occasionally he would surprise us

We were saddened and shocked yesterday to lose Markko, the last of our cats, bar the visiting Alessandro. The OH took him to the vet for a check up, as he had been losing a bit of weight and was fairly lethargic. We thought it was that thyroid disorder that is common in elderly male cats and involves you in a daily struggle to get a pill down their throats, somehow or anyhow. But it wasn't. The vet diagnosed  a large tumour, and said it was best to put him to sleep. Had I known this would be the outcome I would have gone with them but as I say it was a total surprise so I had stayed at home. 

Years ago Markko used to hang around the house, occasionally slipping in to grab food from the plates of the cats we already had. We never knew where he came from but assumed he had been either lost or dumped as he knew about litter trays. He had been picked up at some stage by the local feral cat people and taken to the vets to be neutered and then let go again; we could tell from the nick on his left ear. . When I went to my first conference, in Gdansk in 2014, I remember saying ' I don't want to come back and find that that black cat has taken up residence in the house'. But, as inevitably as rainbows follow rain, when I got back from Gdansk that was exactly what had happened. 

Because of this I called him Interloper at first, and then Greebo after the cat in the Discworld but we eventually settled on Markko. It's odd that all the cats we have named for ourselves have ended up with names ending in O. 

He wasn't a particularly snuggly cat, which was another reason why we thought he might have been dumped. It took years before he would sit on a human knee and I could count the number of times he did that to me on the fingers of one hand. The OH, and Son No 2when here, were much luckier int hat respect. But he must have liked it here because he never wandered off; whether it was the company of other cats, the warmth, the plentiful summer  supply  of rabbits, the food on demand or the large numbers of comfortable spots to curl up and sleep I don't know. But he stayed. 

And now he's gone, and he was the last of them. We won't get any more but that doesn't mean that all the ones we have had over the years aren't remembered and kept close in our hearts.