It was a blow-up globe – something he’d bought for his children years before to show them the locations of all the countries of the world. He pressed his lips to the toggle and with a series of determined puffs fully inflated the globe. Oh yes, he thought, I can have some fun with this … Given Felix’s fans came from all across the world, from America to Hong Kong and everywhere in between, the globe seemed a particularly apt prop for this global superstar to play with.
The following morning, on 22 August 2016, Mark got to the station around 6.30 a.m. As usual, despite the early hour, there were still a fair few commuters already on the platform, rustling newspapers as they caught up on current affairs and nursing cups of takeaway coffee. It was a rather windy morning and people glared crossly in the direction of the railway tunnels, which were causing the wind to whistle down the platforms towards the King’s Head. Though it was allegedly the height of summer, that bitter wind was a hint that, in Yorkshire, winter is never far away.
Ignoring the weather, Mark walked with increasing excitement towards the customer-information point, already anticipating Felix’s reaction to the blow-up globe. It seemed she was excited too: as she did most days, she was already waiting for him on ‘their’ bench, close to the Head of Steam pub, eager to see what treats he had brought for her today. The pub staff had got there early that morning as well – already, they had their advertising A-frame hoardings out on the platform, promoting the jazz night they were holding in two days’ time.
‘Good morning, Felix,’ Mark said to his little friend, bending down to stroke her as she arched her head into his now familiar hand. Then, without further ado, he whipped out the blow-up globe and proceeded to inflate it with a series of short puffs, attracting a few bemused looks from his fellow commuters. Once the globe was inflated, he popped it down on to the platform, soon followed by a Dreamie to encourage Felix to investigate further. Mark chuckled to himself as he set the scene he hoped to photograph. He could just imagine it: Felix checking out her world domination, looking for the locations of all her many fans. He had already come up with the caption: ‘My global appeal is growing.’ He hoped it would go down a treat.
But, that morning, Felix’s treat was not going down at all. Without wanting to gossip, it is fair to say that she has a reputation as a rather greedy cat, yet this morning even the temptation of a treat had not brought her to the globe’s side, as Mark had hoped. She looked at the scene with caution, none too sure about this latest prop that Mark had brought to their daily meeting. In the business world the mantra is ‘no idea is a bad idea’ – but it seemed that Felix did not subscribe to that particular ethos.
Mark was standing back, his phone ready to take the picture, while he encouraged Felix to come. Usually, she ‘obeyed’ promptly (as much as any cat ever ‘obeys’ a human), eager for snacks and photo shoots. But today she merely narrowed her eyes and looked suspiciously at the globe. Untethered, the beachball-like sphere was gently rocking in the breeze and its independent movement was clearly freaking Felix out. What was this brightly coloured creature, which wasn’t a mouse or a pigeon or a crow? What was she to do with it?
Mark could see pretty quickly that she was not going to come, so he reworked his vision. Instead of snapping Felix next to the globe, he would try to capture it in the foreground with Felix in the background (where she was keeping her distance from this unfamiliar foe). He took a few steps back to line up the shot.
Whoosh! A particularly blowy gust of wind whistled along the platform – and took the inflatable globe with it!
Well, Felix might have conquered her fear of crows, but she was not yet ready to tackle this strange new bird! She legged it – leaving Mark alone on the platform with a runaway globe.
He grabbed for it; it danced out of his reach. He stretched out his other hand; it rolled just that little bit further away. Then the wind gusted once more and the globe flew even further along the platform in the direction of the King’s Head.
Mark started sweating. He had visions of it changing direction and blowing on to the tracks, where it could potentially cause many hours of expensive delays (something that Felix’s employers – and the passengers – would be none too pleased about). Consequently, Mark threw caution to the wind and flung himself after it at top speed, his eyes fixed only on the prize.
Bang! In his focused quest he ran headlong into one of the Head of Steam’s A-frame hoardings. With a cacophonous clatter, the metal advert fell to the ground and all heads swivelled to the commuter. Teetering, he just about managed to retain his balance, if not his dignity, and somehow styled it out. Best of all, he managed to capture the globe. All in a day’s work for Felix’s Facebook manager!
What had been particularly striking for Mark, even in the relatively short time that Felix had become famous, was how very much she meant to her fans. Earlier that summer, there had been a dramatic incident at the station where an armed man had run into the train tunnels. Huddersfield station had been put in lockdown while the police resolved the dangerous stand-off. Felix, sensibly, had tucked herself away during the entire saga and was never involved, but her thousands of fans did not know that. As soon as news of the ongoing drama hit the headlines in the Huddersfield Examiner, her fans were on Facebook clamouring for an update from Felix to let them know she was OK. Mark – who had known nothing of the incident until his account was suddenly flooded with messages – was very happy to let them know that was the case.
Perhaps it was that incident that started more people coming to the station, needing to know she was OK – to see with their own eyes that the station cat was the same confident diva she had always been. There had been a rush of visitors when Felix had first been promoted, but this had tailed off in the intervening months. Nevertheless, that summer Huddersfield station had played host to Felix fans from Switzerland, New Zealand, Kazakhstan and Canada. There was even someone from the Isle of Wight! The team also remembered meeting a blushing bride who had come all the way from Australia to marry in England, and as she’d had a few days spare after the wedding she had chosen to use those first few days of married life to come to Huddersfield to meet the cat. Meeting Felix was, you might say, the icing on the wedding cake.
Felix wasn’t always ready to meet her public. She could be grumpy if she was disturbed from a catnap, and it wasn’t unknown for her to lash out if she was in a testy mood. At other times, she was simply AWOL, off on a patrol, and her colleagues had no idea where she was. However, on other occasions it was neither her mood nor her absence that was at issue. Passenger Stuart Gelder remembered walking through the ticket barriers one day and spotting Felix on the platform … enthusiastically licking a bin bag (one of her not-so-secret guilty pleasures). It was hardly her most glamorous moment. Yet Stuart added affectionately, ‘Even though she wasn’t at her most majestic, I was still ecstatic to have finally seen her.’
Many visitors wanted to see Felix dressed up in her famous yellow hi-vis jacket. Oh yes – she had one too, just like every member of the TPE team. She had worn the jacket when receiving her promotion and the adorable pictures of her in her ‘uniform’ had gone viral. But, not too long afterwards, Felix had thrown a diva strop about wearing the jacket – perhaps feeling, somewhat justifiably, that her pretty black fluff was already perfection … and how could anyone improve on that? Unlike the mere mortal human employees of the railway company, she felt the uniform was beneath her. She had chosen her moment carefully, and then, while dressed up in it one day, she had cleverly run off to one of her favourite hidey-holes: the disused train carriage on platform two. Here she had wiggled her way beneath the carriage, and then wriggled and jiggled until she’d managed to lose the coat. Ever since then, she’d insisted that her birthday suit was all the decoration she needed to meet her public.