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From Rev鈥檇 Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

Eight months ago, a ring at the Vicarage doorbell, but when we answered no-one was there, just a basket left on the step and in it a tiny and frightened kitten. 听There鈥檚 a precedent in our line of work for taking in abandoned tinies in baskets, so we named him Moses, and after three days hiding from our four sausage dogs under the Hostess trolley he emerged and gradually took his place in the pack, feeding with them, chasing things in the garden with them, sleeping curled up with them, and coming on holiday with them, which didn鈥檛 seem weird at all to me.

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And then, last Friday, a call on my mobile. It was the lady at the vets down the road. Did we have a cat? I thought for a moment it might be our last cat, absconding Thomas, who we took in for Christmas, but he found the dogs too tiresome and made other arrangements. No: 鈥済rey tabby with an amazing bushy tail?鈥� 听It was Moses, confirmed by a scan of his chip, who had been hit by car and brought in by a kind stranger, but nothing could be done. 听鈥淒o you want to collect him or shall I arrange a cremation?鈥�

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It happens all the time. On the stretch of road outside the Vicarage, a notorious rat run, I know of at least four cats who have met their doom. And Moses was unsentimental about untimely deaths himself, a great many of which he inflicted on the small mammal population of Finedon. 听

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Good news for shrews, but bad for us, and his death has cast a longer shadow than I thought. It鈥檚 the way he fitted in that I miss most, finding a way of accommodating four dachshunds with a very different agenda from his own. I found it encouraging and heartwarming, in a divided and intolerant world, that he achieved this unlikely d茅tente.

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The Bible looks forward to the blessed day when the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid; but it so nearly could have been the tabby cat with the sausage dog. RIP Moses.