I’ve had a number of readers express their love for Smudge so I thought that I would do a post about the real cat that Smudge is based on.
He was technically my son’s cat. He was a big (7.5kg), beautiful, black and white tom cat and his name was Splodge. He was such a lovable fellow and nothing seemed to ever faze him. He was the most placid cat, really easy going, and never lifted a paw to scratch a person intentionally.
He was also a very clean cat. He used to spend hours upon hours a day cleaning his beautiful white fur keeping it immaculate at all times. He also had a fixation for hair. If your hair got too close to him he would try to clean it.
But he also had a very cheeky streak in him. He would terrorize the other animals in the household and he used to strut around like he was the boss of everyone and everything.
If we left the house for any length of time we could be sure to come home to some sort of destruction. Usually in the form of a shredded roll of paper toweling. Many’s the time we came home to find that the kitchen and dining room floor covered with shredded paper towels.
In my old kitchen I used to have a cupboard that sat up over the counter where I kept the drinking glasses. I remember one night as we were watching television in the living room there came an almighty crash from the kitchen. We raced out there to see what had happened and found, much to my dismay, that Splodge had climbed up onto the cupboard and pried the door open from the top. He had reached in with his paw and hooked it into my, one of a kind, Coca Cola glass sending it crashing to the floor where it smashed into pieces.
And then of course no story about Splodge would be complete without mentioning the Christmas tree. Each year, until he got too big, he would terrorize the tree by running up the centre of it and then it would over balance and fall to the floor. In the process several ornaments were lost each year, including a rare pair of colored glass reindeer that had belonged to my grandmother.
He was always getting into some sort of mischief but he could also be very lovable. He had such soft fur and was very squeezable and when he had been asleep for a long time he was kind of squishy. His favorite places to spread out was either on the coffee table or the living room window in the afternoon sunshine.
My nickname for him was Sploddy. We unfortunately lost him to what we think was cancer, in April 2008. The house has never been quite the same since.
P.S. The real Smudge (Splodge) was not psychic in the slightest. If anything he was a bit slow and clueless.
