Felix The Railway Cat

Felix shook her fur – for it had been flattened a bit by the jacket and she needed to puff it out again for the golden-girl glamourpuss look that she favoured. Then she jumped down off the desk and wandered away, thinking no more of it.

But Andrew’s work wasn’t yet done. Chuckling a bit to himself, he went through the pictures and pulled out that money shot. He attached it to an email addressed to all the team at Huddersfield station and wrote in jest:

Date: 30/01/2016

Time: 04.42

Subject: Felix’s new uniform

Hi all,

Below are some pictures of Felix in her new uniform, please make sure this is worn at all times; regardless of any injuries you may sustain when attempting to dress her.

Of course, Felix was never actually going to wear the uniform on duty – she was too much of a diva for that. It was all part of the joke. But the real joke was going to be that picture. His colleagues had known nothing of his plan to get Felix a hi-vis vest – let alone an official name badge too – and Andrew couldn’t wait for their reaction. If it was anything like his own, this was going to go down brilliantly.

And it did. All that day throughout Huddersfield station there were guffaws and giggles as team members opened up the email and saw Felix kitted out in her brand-new uniform.

‘I thought it was brilliant!’ exclaimed Angie. ‘Super! Wonderful!’

Everyone thought it was really cute – and a lot of fun. Andrew also got quite a few cheeky emails back, telling him he was mad because of what he’d done and the lengths to which he’d gone to do it: absolutely mad.

And there was another email that came through, too: from a colleague asking if he’d mind if they sent the image to Mark Allan, for him to upload to Felix’s Facebook page.

Felix’s popularity on Facebook had been steadily growing. Only the day before, 29 January 2016, she’d hit a new milestone: 1,000 likes on Facebook. Mark and the team members helping him with the page had started adding videos as well as photographs to the site and that had perhaps encouraged more people to start following the feline. The railway cat had spent Christmas with Glenn and Teresa that year (they’d gone to town, buying Felix her own stocking full of cat-friendly presents and treats) and they’d uploaded a festive video of her playing with a bauble on their tree, tapping it repeatedly with her paw in transfixed fascination. Things like that enamoured Felix to her growing legion of Facebook fans, and the team involved with the page thought that Andrew’s image of the station cat in her hi-vis vest and name badge would go down a real treat.

‘Yeah, sure,’ Andrew said casually when they asked him. ‘No problem at all.’

At 5.54 p.m. on 30 January 2016, Felix changed her profile picture on Facebook to the hi-vis vest shot.

No one at the station knew it, but life would never be the same again.

31. Felix Is Famous

Andrew McClements was walking into the station concourse for his shift when he noticed a couple of the gateline team nudging each other as they looked at him.

‘Andrew,’ they called out. ‘That picture of Felix is gathering some steam online.’

Yeah, Andrew thought sarcastically, of course it is. He knew the Facebook page had got a few more likes since the profile picture had been changed; a couple of days afterwards, Felix had been up to 1,266 fans, which Andrew assumed must be what the team were referring to. He supposed it was pretty special – it had taken Felix seven months to reach 1,000 likes, so to get a quarter of that in just a few days was great. The ever-loyal Huddersfield Examiner had run a piece on Felix’s promotion (‘Felix the Huddersfield station cat gets a purr-motion’ read the headline) and even the online website Mashable had run a story on it: ‘I’m famous!’ posted Felix jokily on Facebook as she shared the link. But whether all that counted as ‘gathering steam’, Andrew doubted.

He headed into the team leaders’ office and sat down, his mind running over all the tasks ahead of him that day. Working at the station was a relentless job in many ways: the services ran day in, day out, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No wonder Felix took so many catnaps.

Just then, his work phone rang. ‘Hello?’ he answered.

‘Andrew McClements?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m ringing from head office at Bridgewater House. I work in the communications department,’ said the caller. ‘I’ll cut straight to the point: what’s going on with that cat of yours?’