Nine lives used up

Mr Simpkin, one of two brothers that my parents had as cats, has died, put down by the vet after massive kidney failure - felines don't get dialysis.  He had stopped eating and, as cats do, was preparing for death, so it was the kindest thing that could be done.  The saddest thing was I never got to say goodbye to him.  One day I was tapping on a window to get his attention as he camped on a lower-lying roof.  Now I won't be able to observe his often inscrutable personality.
He was a veteran bruiser who never shirked a fight.  With my own Puss-Puss, he turned himself into a cannonball and barrelled both off the edge of the roof of my parents' kitchen extension, a drop of about 12 foot.  There was a time when my parents said that he had returned to them with a limp and we wondered what kind of animal would have done that to him.  I saw my grandmother at the same time and in her garden I found a foot-long rat on its back on the lawn with its neck ripped open.  I buried the rat to ensure that Simples Pimples would not come to reclaim his quarry.  When my parents' neighbours had a pond, it was a magnet for frogs to lay their spawn and at the height of summer, the corpses of frogs were being fried into my parents' lawn under a baking sun.
He could be lazy as well.  Walking along a fence, Simples came across a rose bush hanging across his path.  Instead of hopping down and going around before resuming his progress, he pushed through the bush, thorns and all, headfirst.  And eventually he came out the other side and continued walking along the fence.  Notoriously hard to please, he would only be happy for you if he wanted to be happy - he never set out to please, unlike his energetic brother Jack.  He was more intelligent than his brother as well, often acting like a general, looking down from on high and co-ordinating his brother as a footsoldier on the ground when a cat would encroach on 'their' territory.
My dad even created a Facebook page for Simpkin with the affectionate name handle of SOB - Son Of a Bitch (biologically unlikely).  I myself was still new to Facebook at the time and when I went onto Facebook, it was still logged on for Mr Simpkin and so the mysterious SOB sent out numerous friend requests to my friends (and was accepted by a fair few).
It is the habitual nature of pets that you will more than likely outlive them and then a hole is left in your family.  No nonsense and occasionally ferocious, Simples was still lovable and I will miss him.