Hurrah for Sterquilinus

Mark has gone, and I am living my solitarily cloistered life again.

I have not been living it for very long, at the time of writing, just an hour or so, although that was quite enough to make me wish that either it would stop raining, or that the dogs might thoughtfully walk themselves.

I am pleased to tell you that so far today, it seems that our interlude of animal accidents has not recurred.

This is just today. Wait until you hear about yesterday.

Yesterday was so awful that Mark was moved to suggest that I must have upset some God somewhere. The God of poo is a little-worshipped deity by name of Sterquilinus, although for the life of me I can’t see what I might have done to upset him. It is not as though I might have accidentally used his name in vain without noticing. Also I have never paid him much attention in the past and so it isn’t as if he is feeling any more ignored than usual.

Nevertheless I have lit a candle for him, just in case.

Yesterday was awful. I mean, truly, dreadfully awful.

It began when I noticed one of the cats sliding her bottom across the tablecloth, in the way that animals do when they have an itch or something unpleasant going on at the rear end.

I shrieked, as one does, and dived across first to disinfect, and then to boil the tablecloth.

The cat in question, guessing that something might be going less than perfectly in our relationship, fled upstairs.

Shortly afterwards I discovered a lump of cat poo on the chair next to the table.

When I went upstairs there was the most ghastly smell.

I could not quite work this out.

A little later we had gone downstairs for morning coffee by the fire, and the cat reappeared. She repeated the bottom-dragging performance on the floor.

She was followed by a long, brown stripe.

Of course I howled in horror and rushed after her to capture her, which took some doing, I can tell you. Cats are agile and cunning when they do not wish to be captured. The chase that followed could have been accompanied by the music that once used to feature on the Benny Hill Show, and which our now-deceased resident tramp in the Library Gardens, Ziggy, used to play on his guitar whenever he noticed me pursuing Oliver with demands that he come back and do his homework.

In the end I caught her.

There is no horror to match what we found.

There must have been half a pound of soggy diarrhoea hanging in the fur around her back end. She has very long, dense, fluffy fur, and it was caked everywhere. It had not even dried. It was dreadful.

We wrapped her in a towel, because she was fighting like a drunk slapper outside the nightclub whose boyfriend has been chatting up a blonde from Teeside. There were a lot of teeth and claws.

Fortunately we have got rubber gloves.

There was so much that not all of it could be removed manually. I pulled some off, and then trimmed some off – with the animal-trimming scissors, not a pair I would ever use for opening a packet of cheese – and then the rest had to be shaved off with the dog clippers.

We washed her with warm water and TCP. She was very sore. I would like to say that she was grateful, but she wasn’t, not in the least. Livid might be a better description.

When we had finished we contemplated the problem, gloomily. Then, since we had the clippers out, we captured all of the other animals and trimmed around their rear-ends, in order to stop any possible recurrence of the problem later.

They were not grateful either.

We bleached the scissors and the dog clippers. After that started the clean-up operation. Every room, every surface, every cushion where the cat might have been sitting had to be scrubbed and disinfected. We hoovered and disinfected the carpets, scrubbed the floors with bleach, changed and washed cushion covers, from the loft right down to the conservatory. I was profoundly glad that we do not have a very big house, I can tell you.

You can never be too polite about Sterquilinus, that’s what I say. He is a jolly splendid sort of chap.

You wouldn’t want to upset him.