I go on a silly little walk... to Ilford Pet Cemetary

Paying my respects to Able Seacat Simon and Mary of Exeter the spy pigeon.

It’s been a while since I wrote here. I am currently on sabbatical leave from work, so one could argue I ought to be able to get a lot of silly little walks in. However, mostly what I seem to be doing is sleeping for 12 hour stretches, compulsively reading bad books about sexy faeries, and watching The Traitors. The body needs what it needs. This is self care. This is healing.

However, today I have a special silly little walk to complete - really more of a pilgrimage. Today, I am going to pay my respects at the grave of Able Seacat Simon.

Simon was a stray found in the Hong Kong docklands by ordinary seaman George Hickinbottom of the Royal Navy, who smuggled him aboard his ship, the HMS Amethyst. Once discovered, Simon endeared himself to the crew with his rat catching prowess, and was often found sleeping in the captain’s cap.

In 1949 the Amethyst was shelled on the Yangtze, with one of the rounds ripping through the captain’s cabin, killing the commander. Badly wounded, Simon crawled onto the deck, where he was rushed to the medical bay before being tended to by the ship’s medical staff. Despite being riddled with shrapnel, Simon survived - unlike many of the ship’s crew - and returned to his duties soon after, even disposing of a particularly large and vicious rat known as ‘Mao Tse-tung’, for which he was awarded the Blue Cross medal.

Following the escape on the Yangtze, Simon became something of a celebrity back home, and was presented with the Dickin Medal (a sort of animal version of the Victoria Cross). As of 2025, Simon remains the only cat to win the award.

I have been meaning to visit Simon for some time. Although the pet cemetery claims to be in Ilford, where I also live, I would argue that it is really more Gants Hill - almost Woodford. And so, I must walk for an hour first.

As I walk, I wonder what one ought to put on the grave of a cat. At perhaps the most famous pet grave in the UK, that of Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh, I had been moved to see that human visitors leave sticks next to his gravestone, ensuring that Bob always has the choicest selection to work with in the afterlife. Sadly, canine visitors are not allowed in the graveyard - a sign loudly and somewhat ironically proclaiming ‘NO DOGS’. The bundles of sticks have taken on the semblance of a pagan offering, a makeshift funeral pyre.

Image - © 2026 Greyfriars Kirk

People keep asking me what I am doing during my sabbatical, which is a question I find difficult, as the answer is “as little as possible, quite intentionally”.

Autistic burnout differs from professional burnout in that, rather than being caused by having too much work being heaped onto your plate, it can be caused by things like too much interaction, too much time spent masking, too much sensory overstimulation, or periods of too much change and uncertainty. For me, what I have realised is I do not get on well with constant change. I am now on my seventh manager at a company I’ve been with for less than 5 years, and having to repeatedly learn new people, new rules, new ways of working, chips away at me until I am exhausted. When you are performing your self - masking - every day, it is tiring work to build new masks as the audience and the plot keep changing. I can’t trust the shifting sands. I can’t trust my own feet. What I may intellectually know is just ‘restructuring’ or ‘organisational transformation’, a.k.a the usual cost of doing business in the modern world, feels like existential threat.

Add on top of that a new health diagnosis (POTS, or ‘standing up disease’ as I sometimes call it) and coming to terms with everything that chronic illness entails, continuing to burrow into my own neurodivergent rabbit hole, and relearning how to socialise or indeed to function in a still-relatively-recently alcohol-free life. All of this necessitates endless self-remaking, as you tear apart the narratives and stories you’ve told youself about yourself for years and work out what’s left. It’s too many things to juggle, and eventually the only choice is to let go and drop all of the balls.

I’ve been through this ball-drop few times so I recognise the signs in advance now: I disengage from my work and the people around me. I fail to thrive. And then, I fail to function.

I caught it early this time, and I am hoping to head things off at the pass. This is really all you can do about autistic burnout, which often comes in cycles and can be a lifelong affliction; learn to recognise it, learn its triggers, try to reduce them in your life so that you burn out less often. It is difficult to explain to people, when they are aware you must be swimming in an ocean of time with apparently nothing to do (and aren’t you BORED?!), that actually you are trying to minimise social interactions and inputs and it is best if you do not see them, or anybody, for a while. It is difficult to explain to people that you are purposefully making your life smaller, in order to try to make it sustainable.

Recovery is hard work that needs your full attention, but that attention must be held lightly, the thing itself not looked at too intently, or you disappear inside yourself.

I am currently reading The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden, and was caught by this exchange between the protagonist Isabel and her brother:

Then he said, “You’ve been alone for too long. You’ve not been around people for too long.”

“I’m not alone.”

“The maid doesn’t count,” he said, “Saying hello to the baker twice a week doesn’t count.”

She could feel a flush rising. There was no reply she could give that wouldn’t confirm the awful way he saw her: sometimes she went for tea at the Van den Bergs. Sometimes called with Hendrik. Small moments, too small for someone who lived with others; who went to work; who went to bars; who had girlfriends.

But I digress. I am giving you context for why I am on a walk on this gloomy Tuesday, instead of at work. We have only limited light at this time of year, and so must get a move on.

It does feel like everyone is getting ready for spring today. Builders are out, drilling and hammering new extensions into place. Bulbs are making an appearance; the birds are singing as though they know something we don’t. A few bedraggled Christmas trees sit slumped next to bins. A tree surgeon has left large logs dragged across the pavement as he removes a dead tree. Everyone is busy clearing away the roughage of last year, and hoping they’ll make room for something new.

I don’t know what we’ll get this year, and - geopolitically at least - I’m not sure what we’ll like what we get. But we prepare anyway, we hope anyway.

I circumnavigate Valentines Park, an award-winning park that has played host to past episodes of Celebrity Bake Off and which promises us a new lido later this year, and where I spend a lot of my time. I don’t really believe this news about the lido, but I want to.

As I hit Gants Hill the houses get larger, tidier, smugger. Rather than each house being split into four separate dwellings, you can see that they are each a full home. Don’t we all deserve a full home, rather than eking out a living on the edges of each other? All day every day I have to listen to next door’s bad music and smell their bad dinner. They had a cockroach infestation a few months ago and occasionally one would pass the invisible (to it) boundary into my flat, make me panic, double wrap all the grains, even though I know roaches are really looking for water and what can you do about water? I am tired of living like this, with other people’s intrusions, although I know that I am so lucky to live alone.

I pass an Italian restaurant that I always forget is here; cramped onto the corner of Cranbrook Road and Beehive Lane, at the crux of many traffic lights. Somehow it is holding onto the little spot it’s carved out with al fresco tables, checked table cloths, fairy lights and trellis covered in climbing plants. They are pretending they are in Amalfi, and who can blame them? The lunch menu, chalked into a board outside, doesn’t look bad. I would probably eat there, if it were somewhere else.

I have turned left, away from Gants Hill, and now I am off my own map. The houses along here are a little smaller, but still fully self-contained rather than divided out; still probably pushing a million for what in any other part of the country would just be ‘a normal house’, undistinguished, indistinguishable.

The late sun is shining on the Wentworth House Estate and I’m reminded of Doreen Fletcher’s paintings of the local area, which find such beauty in the everyday. I chastise myself for getting tired of London, tired of life.

Doreen Fletcher - Capel Point

The minute I remind myself to look out for the wonder of things, I almost fall over a dead rat on the pavement, as though the universe has a sense of humour. Everyone is stepping around it without even noticing it.

And speaking of rats, Wes Streeting’s office is coming up on the left hand side. He’s in between a thai restaurant and a manicure shop. I think back to the tree surgeon I encountered earlier, briefly consider leaving a log of my own on the pavement.

We have hit true suburbia, where people actually have cars - needed, I suppose, to drive themselves to the many Harvesters that dot the East East London suburbs, all the way up to Epping Forest. I pass Beehive Harvester here, replete with its own Travelodge. There aren’t many people around - a few lads in school uniform with footballs, heading home from Redbridge Recreation Ground. This doesn’t really feel like London anymore; it feels like edgeland, it feels like the edge of anywhere. I think I came here once on the bus, years ago, to visit the hygienist. But it might not have been here.

A sign! A brown sign for the pet cemetery. I turn left.

A man with a large beard on the other side of the road is eyeing up a tabby cat that he clearly wants to give a stroke to, but he also doesn’t want to make a fuss about it because I’m here and I might judge him. The only judgment I am casting is that we would probably be friends, man with beard.

Three teenage girls in hijab, talking at the top of that lungs in that way that you do at that age, showing off to your friends. “Oh, FLIP!” one of them shouts.

Huge construction work here - some type of mega complex bankrolled by Alan Sugar, incorporating a community centre and a care home. Opposite and through an enormous metal fence, Roding Valley Park. I am struck by some huge balls of mistletoe, parasitic in the skeletons of trees and silhouetted against a sky straight from a Turner painting.

My friend T asked me the other day whether mistletoe balls are there all year, underneath the leafy clothing but only exposed in the winter. This is the sort of thing people think I know about, and sometimes they are right, though not this time. I think so, I said? It’s an evergreen. That’s why we like it at Yule. Someone has fly-tipped a boot-load of empty plastic takeaway boxes against the fence here.

I pass an old cottage called St Swithen’s and take a photo of it for my friend Swithun. I’m sure he is as fed up of people doing this sort of thing as I am of people sending me pictures of the NAT HAS HERPES graffiti tag that covers East London. I don’t, for the record. Though obviously it would be fine if I did.

I have overshot the turning for the pet cemetery because I was thinking about herpes. This is always happening to me!! To access, you go behind the PDSA pet centre, through the car park, and then through a slightly twee archway reading “Love Never Dies”. A sign to the right tells me that many of the animals buried here were recipients of the Dickin Medal, and that I can use a QR code to find out more. I will not do this! I will find my own way.

The gravestones are very many and very small, which makes a kind of intuitive sense, though really the size of a stone has nothing to do with the size of the thing under the stone, does it? I doubt it’s anything to do with physical size; I imagine even a horse would get a small stone. I suppose you have to have a human size soul to get a full size stone. I wonder how big my soul is, in stone.

Walking between the aisles of headstones, occasionally stepping over one, I read through the names. Bijou, Flo, Prince, Kenny, Kaliph. Judy, Tony, Kim - I love animals with person names. Nickel, Mitzi Lu, Toots. Rags-Wilson and Rodney-Wastell, two hyphenate reprobates sharing a headstone. Tich, who says in parentheses, (desert rat). Whisky Francis and Flash Francis - “Here lay two of nature’s own, one loveable rascal, one equally lovable gentleman.”

Zorka Price, an alsatian who died in ‘62 - “Mummy loves you lots”. Conchita, also ‘62 - “Rest in peace my loving son”. I had always assumed the “fur babies” phenomenon of referring to yourself as the pet’s mother or father was modern, but it’s evidently older than I thought. People have always been insufferable, I suppose! I am regretting turning down the QR code, as many of the old stones aren’t legible. This one is, though - in bright glowing white - Rusty, faithful friend of Penny, Debbie, Julie and (double-take down at the dirt), Bruce Forsyth.

I do find one horse, a race horse called Plum Jam (perfect name), and confirm that horse headstones are no larger than any other animal’s.

It takes a long time to read all the gravestones in even this small cemetery, and I stop halfway round on a bench to have a Babybel. My hands are getting cold and cramped because I have been writing this.

I do judge people on their pet naming. These ones (below) are my winners - “Our greyhound Swan, and our cat Brandy Ball”. Aren’t greyhounds so like swans, all that slightly alien elegance, that frantic paddling underneath? Absolutely perfect names both.

The winner of most confusingly-named is Rip, which I’m sure was a good name in real life but looks absurd on a gravestone. Nonetheless, he was a very good dog and he helped locate victims trapped under blitzed buildings in the war. Special mention too for Crumstone Irma, who had the same job but a much more baller name. Irma assisted in the rescue of 191 people, while Rip assisted in saving over 100.

How welcome to the victims must have been the first sounds of those scrabbling paws, shrill terrier yaps, and the first sight of the grinning Tommy Brock face with its merry friendly eyes.

 Jilly Cooper, Animals in War (1983)

I also spot the interestingly-named Mary of Exeter, whom I google to discover a truth which I could not have even guessed at: she was a spy pigeon. Mary served with the National Pigeon Service (!) between 1940 and 1945, carrying top secret messages between England and France, and was awarded the Dickin Medal after her loft was bombed. A pigeon! Rats with wings, they say.

Fortified by my Babybel I finally succeed in finding the grave of Able Seacat Simon, which pleasingly reads: “Throughout the Yanctse incident his behaviour was of the highest order”. I still don’t have anything to give him that I think a cat would like; they can be fussy creatures. I give his headstone a little scritch.

As I am about to leave, I spot the first snowdrops in bloom, beneath a large skeletal tree. Next to them some crocus shoots are pushing up through the leaf litter; early signs of the coming spring, though I now cannot feel my fingers at all and know we’ll have more cold snaps before it arrives.

I catch the bus home and have mistimed myself, so it is rush hour. The man next to me paws through his Instagram reels with his sound at top volume, treating me to repetitive blasting snippets of noise. I remember when people used to have headphones, and also social awareness. I stuff my own earphones into my ears to try and cover it, but alas, the battery is dead. I remember when headphones used to have wires.

Back on my street the surgeon has made progress on felling the dead tree, which is now listing at a 45 degree angle, leaning hard against the telegraph pole next to it. GO ROUND, he shouts to me, FAR, FAR. He has set out one traffic cone out as a warning. I nod, I go round, I go far, far. I hope he’s nearly finished; this doesn’t seem like the sort of job that you should be doing in the dark. A large branch slams onto the pavement behind me.

I will leave London soon, I think, though I am not sure yet where I will go.