It has taken me twenty minutes just to get as far as writing this line.
This is because I thought I would write to you before I dashed off to work, and when I came to my computer, everything had disappeared from it.
It was not difficult to work out that the problem was. We have got a visiting kitten.
This one is not Lucy’s, but belongs to Number One Daughter. We have also got Number One Daughter’s dog. Number One Daughter’s offspring has, perhaps fortunately, gone off to visit his Other Grandma, Number One Son-In-Law is on an oil rig somewhere, and Number One Daughter is going to be in a competition for having lots of muscles.
The visiting kitten, whose name I was told but have forgotten, and which I have got a vague feeling is List, is very sociable indeed.
I do not really think it is called List, even Number One Daughter is not that weird, but it might be, and that is the word that keeps coming to mind when I try and remember what it is called. It does not seem to care and answers perfectly well to Kitty, just like every other cat.
It likes to be with people. Regrettably, it is less interested in dogs, which is a nuisance, because we have got loads of them. They are never too busy and Roger Poopy likes the kitten very much, although not with the passionate adoration he bestows on Lucy’s kittens.
It does not like to be excluded from anything, and our showers last night were punctuated by agonised mewing from a kitten that we had thoughtlessly left on the other side of the bathroom door.
Once we had apologised, and admitted it, it watched our showers with considerable interest. It decided, after some careful consideration, that it did not actually wish to participate, and then thought it would most like to sleep on the pillows next to us when we went to bed.
The problem was that it is an earlier riser than we are, especially when we have been up until long after the dawn, and at ten o’clock this morning it was trying to encourage us to start the day by hooking its claws gently into Mark’s eyelids and drawing them upwards, presumably to see if he might be awake behind them.
We were so tired that even this failed to work, so it settled itself down to give his face a good wash, presumably to save some time once we actually got out of bed.
Stupidly, I had forgotten to remove the computer keyboard, and so whilst it was bored and waiting for us to get out of bed, it thought it would do some typing. It got rid of the dock at the bottom of the screen which enables me to find my way through the vagaries of the cyber-universe, and when I came to the computer there was nothing to be seen but a display of photographs. This was very nice but it took me a long time to work it all out.
The dog is not at all a nuisance by comparison, although even dogs are not the Flavour Of The Day. Mark took Oliver over to the farm, where he has been practising his driving skills in his new car, hurtling around the fields and turning it around with the assistance of the handbrake.
Roger Poopy had been gallivanting about after the rabbits, and eventually, to everybody’s surprise, he caught one.
Horrible as this was, he was very pleased with himself, and promptly ate it. You could practically see his self-esteem spraying out of his ears.
After a while Oliver became sick of the dogs dashing about chasing after the car, and chucked them in the back before he accidentally ran one of them over.
You will not be surprised to hear that five minutes later, Roger was messily sick.
Scrubbing regurgitated dead rabbit out of carpets is not the finest overture to car ownership.
In other news, the weather is divine, the Lake District has been overflowing with people all weekend, and it is Bank Holiday Monday and so tonight it is Double Time in a taxi.
I am very pleased indeed about this, and am going to go and extract people’s money.
Happy holidays.
