Personal Blogs

It was not a good day. Our guests left late and I was still cleaning the kitchen in the early hours. We left our son to turn off the lights and close up the stoves. What he didn’t realise was that we’d reinstalled the cat flap in the sitting room door when we replaced the old door at the end of the hallway with a double glazed one. This is a much better arrangement as we can just close the sitting room door and the cats have no access to the stairs and bedrooms. When he went to bed he made sure the cats were in the hallway and shut the sitting room door, their only access to the garden. He'd also left a couple of bedroom doors and loft door ajar as he’d been going through the loft and all the cupboards looking for ski gear. Yesterday I’d made up eight beds for guests, clipping and sewing duvets together for warmth. The cats must have drunk vast quantities of water before being locked in overnight.

The washing machine has been going since 5am since I heard them in the hallway asking for food and realised where they’d spent the night. Five cats were locked in and, given the choice, each cat likes its own bed, preferably a double one with freshly laundered sheets and duvets.   There is still a pile of duvets and mattress protectors soaking in the bath, in plastic bins and every water tight container I could find. I just hope the tumble drier can survive being run continuously for hours on end.