I am sitting in an unfamiliar bed.
This is going to be a short entry because unfamiliar as the bed is, it is entirely comfortable, and sleep is beckoning with increasing urgency.
Mark is just finishing in the shower. When he reappears we will cease to be wakeful, even if I am in the middle of an exciting bit. You have been warned. If this ends with a cliff-hanger, the sort where you are dying to know if the washing dried or not, you will just have to wait until tomorrow to find out.
We are in Manchester.
We have come to visit people, after having come to do a flying visit to Lucy’s to feed her cats, because Lucy and Jack are having an exciting foreign holiday. The cats were going to come and visit us, but there are actually three of them, and one of them does not like dogs. Given the multiplicity of noisy dogs in our house at the moment, this seemed a misfortunate preference, and so the cats have all stayed here.
Jack’s father has been feeding them so far, but this week he has also gone away, and so today we set off to replenish their supplies of care and nurturing.
For some reason it took us all day to achieve this. I do not know how we managed to faff about so completely thoroughly, but we did.
Mark was left in charge of the washing whilst I took the dogs up on to the fell. He did not do a very good job of the washing. He put too much soap in and everything seemed to be on the wrong settings.
I mentioned this, tactfully, when I got back, but he did not seem at all concerned, merely shrugged and said that he was sure it would all come clean in the end, which it did, so I forgave him, albeit a bit reluctantly.
We washed the sheets and I did the banking and paid things, and eventually we had organised ourselves to the point of departure. I faffed about a bit more then, making sure that Oliver would not starve to death in our absence, but he said that he could look in the fridge for himself if he really needed to, and he could probably deduce which was the ham without my needing to point it out.
He seemed to feel that it would be a good idea for us to depart, so we did.
I completely forgot to leave him any strawberries.
I hope he does not get scurvy.
We trundled down to Manchester and to Lucy’s house, for which fortunately we had remembered the key. We had barely been in the house for a couple of minutes when our attention was caught by a loud mewing.
I am a recent cat-owner, as you know, and have begun to be schooled in what sort of mew is the most urgent, and this one certainly qualified.
It was very urgent indeed.
I went rushing up the stairs only to discover that one of the cats had somehow become trapped in one of the bedrooms.
The door was shut and the windows were shut.
He was frantic. He had dug a hole in the carpet by the door.
He shot out as soon as I opened it. I was horrified, and followed him downstairs, where he dived on the cat food with a desperate enthusiasm.
This surprised me, I would have expected that his most immediate need would be water, but it seemed not. He ate an entire dish of dried cat food in about six mouthfuls, and only then rushed off to their water fountain.
We felt very sorry for him, although he seemed perfectly all right after a few minutes, and went off to yawn and stretch out to sleep in the shade underneath the tree in the back garden.
We thought that he could not have been there for very long, because a couple of days in the heat without water would very soon have finished him off, so it was a jolly good job we had turned up when we did.
It was a happy ending, fortunately.
Mark is here.
I am going to say goodnight.
