It’s a story that’s more extraordinary than some movie scripts – three orphaned kittens are found in a garden shed. Two find homes, but one black kitten does not. He has nowhere to go. An animator hears about his situation, and drives for miles to adopt him. Cut to a few years later - the rescued cat is the inspiration for a mega franchise of animated videos, gaming, publishing, apparel, and merchandise, with one billion views on YouTube, and an international fan base of millions, celebrating its tenth anniversary this month. The cat was Hugh, and his owner is award-winning illustrator Simon Tofield, commonly known as ‘the guy from Simon’s Cat’.
Simon’s Cat is one of a kind, but in a sense, he is also everyone’s cat. Hugh, who passed away of old age two years ago, displayed endless buffoonery and affection that was immortalized in Tofield’s videos, causing cat owners around the world to collapse with laughter, but only after commenting, ‘the same thing happened to me’. The channel also welcomed a character that Tofield added after he rescued another black kitten, Teddy.
“Cats are very rewarding. They’ve got so much to give,” he says, adding that no two cats love you the same way. His rescue Lilly plays ‘fetch’, and his other rescue Maisy sits behind him on a chair and taps him lovingly on the shoulder. Tofield volunteers with several charities, encouraging fans to adopt animals from shelters, and to avoid discriminating based on fur colour. “There’s a stigma,” he says. “It’s a shame, because they’re all cats, aren’t they? On National Black Cat Day, I always do a post about my own black cats. They’ve given me nothing but good luck, really”.
He reveals that a bizarre story that he had drawn in his first book ended up coming true, unfolding exactly as in his fictional account from years ago. “Two years ago, Teddy went missing,” says Tofield who couldn’t bear the thought of him being trapped somewhere without food or water. “(I was) like a worried dad… I couldn’t sleep,” he says, recalling that he climbed over a hedge to a farmer’s field nearby to search for him (though he was trespassing on private property), and that he walked endlessly, calling out Teddy’s name, staring at the road expecting to find his dead cat. When Teddy mewed at him from a tree, he ran to get a ladder and climbed up, and realized after dropping Teddy down safely from a low branch, that the ladder had fallen away. Tofield was forced to clamber down the rest of the way by holding onto the jagged bark. “I was cut to pieces,” laughs the proud owner who walked home, kitten in one hand, ladder in the other, covered in his own blood. The reverential way he speaks of his feline overlords is probably why cat owners everywhere recognize themselves so well in Simon: “They’ve got me wrapped around their fingers. You’d do anything for them”.
