This is Sparkle, our 4 year old grey tabby cat who was killed by a speeding motorist on Marlborough Avenue on Thursday 29th April between noon and 1pm.
Unsurprisingly the motorist didn't stop. They simply drove on leaving Sparkle lying dead in the gutter - after all, it's only a cat, so what?
We are lovers of all animals, and I'm sure that you can appreciate that discovering that your pet has been killed in this way is very distressing.
Trying to explain to our 7 year old daughter why her pet was dead is not an experience that we want to repeat.
At this point you may be wondering "What has this got to do with me?" or "Why are these people telling me about their dead cat?"
The answer is this. We and many others are extremely concerned about the speeds at which some traffic is travelling on the roads of our estate.
All of the roads have 20mph speed limits and signs that clearly state this, but some people simply ignore them. This isn't the first time that a cat has been killed on the roads of our estate.
Our question is this "What is it going to take before we do something to stop it? Do we need to wait until a child is killed before we take action?"
Is getting home or to the end of the road a few seconds quicker really more important than the life of a human or an animal?
We are painfully aware that it's too late for Sparkle, but what we would like to do is to stop anyone else (human or animal) from suffering the same fate.
The easy thing of course would be to do nothing, to just grumble and moan about it behind closed doors. This horrible experience has just made us even more determined to do something to make our estate a safer place for all.
So what's the solution? We'd like to think it was as simple as appealing to everybody's better nature, to ask everyone to take extra care and to observe the speed limits whilst driving around the estate - but this clearly isn't enough.
What we are proposing is for the problem of speeding on our estate to be looked at by the authorities.
We have already been in touch with the local Liberal Democrat team and are arranging to meet with Mark Hunter (or whoever is elected as our MP) and also with local Council members.
We would like to take a petition with us to show that many local residents share our concerns about this problem on our estate.
We will be knocking on doors in the next few days and would be grateful of your support.
Thank you!
Ian Littlewood and Ruth Berry - 5 Marlborough Avenue