My mum found Sofa in a small town in March 2008 — or rather, Sofa found her. Mum was taking out the rubbish when she saw a dirty, skinny, hungry little cat of an indeterminate colour. When she went back inside, the cat was already sitting on her doorstep.

When I first met her in August 2008, she had transformed into a beauty — a Persian, as it turned out, with a chinchilla coat, and a great love of sleeping. The name came to us effortlessly. She was a true Sofa!

We decided to take her, because she’d been bitten by a tick and had nearly died. And besides, that white coat and long fur were no life for a street cat — every weed was ours!

There was never any trouble with Sofa. She didn’t hang off the curtains, eat the flowers, hiss at guests, scratch the furniture, or cause any damage at all. As my mum (who always has five cats and two toms at home — all from that same town dump) used to say: “Cats just aren’t like this.”

Car journeys? No problem, no meowing. Vet visits? Fine. She’d sit quietly in an open carrier bag, not try to escape, give blood, have ultrasounds or X-rays without complaint. The vets called her “perfect.” I was never embarrassed by her — she really was perfect. Always unhurried, calm, beautiful, silent, even sleeping in elegant poses as though she were modelling.

She had, without exaggeration, a human mind. She was a person in a cat’s body. I always told her that in a past life she must have been a queen.

And now she is no longer here. The sky hasn’t fallen, the earth hasn’t spun off its orbit, but my world has changed. It is no longer the same.

Thanks to Spogad, it feels as though my Sofa has come home; that we’re together again. More than anything, she loved to sleep. And now she has fallen asleep forever inside my broken heart. As one of my colleagues, who also lost her cat, once said: “Now I’m not afraid of dying. I know my cat will be there to meet me.”