Back in the summer of 2001, when I was a 15-year-old boy with bleached-blond hair, I had the pleasure of waking up at 4.45am six days a week. This gave me exactly 15 minutes to find a Billabong sweater, some fat-tongued Vans and a pair of jeans you could literally go camping in, and report for duty at Mr Singh’s shop – the legendary Everest Stores on Old Bath Road, Cheltenham.
Looking back, I don’t think this working arrangement was strictly legal. But, then again, I wasn’t spending my mornings going up and down chimneys, breathing in soot and stunting my life span. And Mr Singh did pay me £14 a week, which I invested in blank CDs before illegally downloading albums – and, crucially, album artwork – off WinMX to sell to school friends and acquaintances for £2 a pop. It was the early noughties equivalent of a Gen Z side hustle.
As every former newspaper deliverer will tell you, carting around the weekend papers – with their Alan Titchmarsh supplements and Saga brochures – is a way of guaranteeing chiropractic treatment in later life. You have to do a round in stages and, one particular Saturday, I had just left Everest Stores for what I thought would be a very humdrum stage two in the upper Charlton Park area – where all the big houses are, and where at Christmas time you’re more likely to find a red-nosed reindeer having its breakfast in the porch than a tip.
Credit: Google Maps
To get to said area, you have to cycle along the back of Old Pats, a rugby club that’s adjacent to a disused railway line – now Pilley Bridge Nature Reserve, then a fenced off wilderness with a polluted stream and a patch of grass that, as far I could tell, served absolutely no purpose to anyone. It was wasted land and, by virtue of it being long ol’ railway line, there was lots of it.
Anyway, on this particular morning, I was cycling behind Old Pats clubhouse towards its car park, when I glanced through the chain link fence down into the disused railway line. Why? Because a massive yellow dog – perhaps 20 or 30 metres away – had caught my eye. Somebody must be taking it for a walk down there, I thought, perhaps so it can drink from the stream that’s just as yellow.
But there wasn’t an owner. There was no way for an owner to get in. Why would a dog owner even want to get in, especially at that time of the morning? Is that where the word ‘dogging’ comes from? I don’t know. If that was strange, so too were the dog’s movements. It was bounding, for two or three paces, before turning on its heel and darting back in the other direction. Over and over again.
I closed my eyes. No, surely not, I thought. I opened them again, slowly, and really stared at this massive dog. At this point, my stomach turned upside down and my eyes started watering, which was incredibly annoying as I was really trying hard to concentrate. But my body was reacting this way because my brain had decided, conclusively and beyond doubt, that this was not a massive dog. It was a massive cat.
I blinked away some of my disbelieving tears and stared at the animal for a few more seconds. Writing this almost 20 years later, I can still picture exactly what I saw. A big, sandy coloured cat – probably a puma – playfully pacing around. Perhaps it was toying with a vole. Maybe it was practising its early morning exercise routine. Whatever it was doing, it was time for me to scarper. I didn’t want to be its breakfast.
Now, I know this sounds ridiculous. I really do. I’ve had two decades’ worth of ridicule, which started when I arrived back at Mr Singh’s seven minutes after the sighting, told him what had happened, and got laughed out of the shop. About half an hour later, having finished my paper round via an alternative route, I suffered the ignominy of my parents’ smirks.
Credit: Google Maps
A few days later, however, the Gloucestershire Echo reported a big cat sighting in Cheltenham – about 200 metres from my own. An older lady claimed to have seen a large, sandy coloured feline in her back garden on Pilford Avenue, which partially backs on to Pilley Bridge Nature Reserve. I called the Echo immediately, and they came right over to interview/humour me.
And that, really, is where the story ends. My friends and I spent an afternoon after school exploring the disused railway line after finding a hole in the fence. They were ever-so-slightly fatter than me, so I figured the big cat would go for them first and I could take some pictures on a disposable camera I found in the battery drawer, because in 2001 – much to my chagrin – camera phones didn’t exist. But was there any sign of the puma? Any sign at all? No, there wasn’t.
I’m happy I can settle on the cat being a puma, though. According to Live Science, pumas:
Can adapt to a wide variety of climates and habitats
Live by themselves in large territories
Hunt during the twilight hours of dawn and dusk
Hunt domestic animals such as sheep, pigs, horses and other livestock
Are listed as ‘Least Concern’ for extinction (by the International Union for Conservation of Nature) because they are so widespread
So, there we go. I definitely saw a puma and you didn’t. The end.