It has been just over a week now since the dead cat on the pavement outside the house was finally taken away, with no little ceremony, by Hackney Council Environmental Health and already talk in the coffee shops on Stoke Newington Church Street has turned from the emotional highs and lows of its daily decomposition to the likely benefits of its legacy. Though some maggots are still visible, crawling in the gutter near where the dead cat lay, it is too early to say if they will hatch out into flies and what kind of flies these flies, if indeed they be flies at all, will grow up to be. The brown, dead-cat-shaped stain on the pavement, however, is expected to remain partially visible for decades, providing inspiration for generations to come and transforming the economic fortunes of the entire district.

When the dead cat first appeared on the pavement outside the house just over three weeks ago, I admit I was one of those who was sceptical about its long-term value to the borough. After all, there had been dead rats, a dead pigeon, and even an inexplicable dead fish, in the street before and they had had very little positive impact on the area. “A dead cat on the pavement in Hackney?” I scoffed. “It will be a disaster. The lady who teaches t’ai chi will probably steal it to make a hat. The infrastructure will not be able to cope. And Hackney is not even on the underground so the transport links will be horrendous. And the nature of the dead cat’s sponsors is so clearly in opposition to the ideals of putrefaction the dead cat itself embodies that the whole idea has already been undermined, surely.”

How wrong I was. After some teething troubles, the 393 bus soon rose to the challenge, delivering crowds of morbid gawpers from all over north London to view the rotting pet via specially marked out Dead Cat lanes; and no one could have predicted what a great sponsor the taxidermist on Essex Road turned out to be, despite the fact that the shop is dedicated to the unnatural preservation of dead animals, while the dead cat itself visibly and robustly espoused the natural laws of decomposition ever more profoundly with each passing day.

Like many locals initially unconvinced by the idea of a dead cat, I soon became obsessed with it despite myself, running out into the road every few minutes to check the progress of its slow physical erosion. Everyone in the family had their own favourite aspect of the process. I became fascinated with the gradual recedence of its beautiful green eyes into its collapsing brown face, the children enjoyed the slow stiffening of the furry limbs, while my husband and his mates from the pub, typically, loved the bit when “its arse fell into the drain”, an event disproportionately well attended by the sponsors and their clients!

There was something for everyone in the gradual decomposition of the dead cat and one could sense the sometimes divided community of east London – black, white, Muslim, Jew, Turk, Kurd, young, old, men, women, children, pensioners, lesbian, gay and transgender – being brought together by their shared bleak fascination with the inescapable fecundity of death, from whose icy clutches no mortal can ever wriggle free.

The variety of life forms contained within the rotting cat, in competition for the resources its bloated corpse offered, yet co-operating together as one, was a wonder to behold. Flies from many lands crawled over it laying their eggs in fertile patches of damp flesh and soon the carcass was alive with wriggling larvae. These tiny parasites’ sportsmanlike efforts to eradicate the host body caused, apparently, questions to be asked at the Football Association as to why Premier League footballers could not behave more like these maggots, which had so inspired lawless young people watching the putrefaction of the cat carcass.

In our house, the cheese fly maggot, Piophila casei, has become something of a hero, despite being cruelly mocked by TV comedian Frankie Boyle on his Twitter account, for looking “like that midget c*** Hervé Villechaize from Fantasy f***ing Island with two tea strainers sellotaped over his f***ing face”. Though only 8mm long Piophila regularly hopped 15cm around the cat’s body, a feat that made Boyle’s cruel and ill-judged jibes look to everyone sitting on our garden wall like a definite case of sour grapes.

The decomposing cat’s spectacular opening ceremony turned out to be a vital strategy in winning over the doubters and the tolerance of the schoolkids who usually sit on the wall by where it was, selling small parcels of crack for pocket money prices. Unrehearsed gaggles of infants dressed as Swedish detective Wallander sang a Blakean eulogy to the now abandoned Bookstart scheme, while veteran ska band Bad Manners, who had met at Woodberry Down school, performed their 1980 pro-hard liquor hit Special Brew. Then Lady P, the Hackney grandmother who swore at rioters last August, jumped from a nearby window using a Happy Shopper bag as a parachute, the climax of an ill-disciplined but exuberant event that avoided all the usual opening ceremony cliches in favour of opaque nostalgia and endearing have-a-go theatrics.

The closing ceremony was no less impressive, featuring, as it did, TV comedian Russell Brand, who used to buy drugs in the area. “I got all me smack round here,” he chirped, “and now look. A dead cat. This place has gone up in the world and no bleedin’ mistake, your lordships. Citius, altius, fortius and such like!”

Who can forget the hilarious song that Brand then improvised himself on the spot? “Dead catty-watty. Catty-watty woo. Catty-wat, Wittgenstein, big stinky poo!” After Brand’s wilderness years in America, and the whole Sachsgate scandal, we all realised finally, that he was a national treasure, and forgave him as one. Indeed, the very public rehabilitation of Russell Brand may yet prove to be the most enduring and valuable legacy of the whole decomposing cat.

But now the cat is gone and the spontaneous street party that has been raging in the road this month has abated. One of the students five doors down stumbled out the morning after the final night of celebration, in a dirty nightie emblazoned with an image of the decomposing cat. “Jesus!” she shouted, to no one in particular, “the decomposing cat is gone. But everything’s still broken, all the butterflies are dead, I’ll never own my own home and they just closed the library. Bastards.”