...like sands through the hourglass....

…another year slips away…

How? Where? Happy 2015, everybody!

Things I did this year –

Meet Miss Pollywobble

• No motorcycling (whoops!)
• Almost no blogging (whoops again!)
• Filled out lots of forms and spent a lot of time on the phone waiting for someone from Centrelink to talk to me.
• Adopted a three-legged kitten.
• Became a grandma.
• Did a little bit of cleaning.
• Did a fair bit of teaching.
• Did a tiny little bit of writing.
• Did a lot of painting. My latest hobby is watercolours, and I actually sold a set of prints! Wheeeeeeeeeee!

A tail is an excellent counterbalance when you only have 3 legs.

My 'Owl & the Pussycat' series - now residing in London.

This year I resolve to

• Make up my mind what to do about the Harley.
• Teach 3 days a week. 
• Keep designing, painting and making my greeting cards “Dreams of Indoor Cats” and “Pardon my Pardalote”.

                                                   

As for the usual resolutions – to lose weight, drink less, keep my house tidy – all that stuff – well, I shan’t even bother with those this year (once they’ve been ignored 3 years in a row they are consigned to the rubbish heap of history, ha ha ha!)

Here’s to a fabulous 2015!

Basil is GROUNDED!

I don’t know how he did it, the little shit, but he did. So now he’s grounded, pending the arrival of a collar with BELLS.

 I took the car into town to have the power steering belt fitted, and wandered about while I was waiting. Had some hot choc, did a bit of writing, got rained on, watched some birds, took some nice pics of the inlet under a very gloomy sky - you know, the sort of stuff you do when you’re waiting for your car to be fixed.

 Anyway – after a couple of hours I picked up my car and came home.  I opened my front door to find a feathered floor, and the sound of frantic flapping coming from the bathroom.

Basil, the little sod, had somehow caught what I think was a brush wattlebird (far too big to get through the palace’s ceiling mesh, I’d have thought) and had been having a right old game with it. I can only imagine its terror. There were feathers near the gate in the cat palace - is it possible he grabbed it and somehow dragged it in? I can't figure it out.

It was minus some tail feathers, not to mention quite a few other feathers, but it was full of fight when I finally managed to catch it and calm it down a little before liberating it. Birds 1, Basil nil, Betty cross. And Basil grounded. Grrrrr. Back to supervised walks on the lead until his bells arrive.

In the meantime, Georgie (pictured below) is keeping watch and hopefully discouraging the feathered beasties from getting too close. Georgie is made by a local lady who sells them at the hardware shop. Oaklands in Pambula also has them.

Basil's dream palace becomes a reality

Tonight, Basil is the happiest kitten in the world. He is also the tiredest kitten. Basil’s world expanded considerably today when father & son team Henry & Phil from Secure a Kat finished the truly palatial cat palace.

This is a shameless plug for Secure a Kat. I found them on the internet when I was researching cat-enclosures, but was dismayed to learn that they're based in Adelaide (half a country away!) Distance is no obstacle for Secure A Kat, though - they were only too happy to trek over to this remote corner of Victoria (Henry admitted he’d never heard of Mallacoota until now) to build the palace of Basil’s dreams.

And doesn’t Basil love it!

Before

After - look closely and you can see Basil enjoying his freedom

 He played site inspector at various stages during the two-day construction process, but it wasn’t until it reached ‘lock-up’ stage that I took him outside to the garden sans lead and harness for the first time in his life. Oh, the freedom!

Basil - free at last, and lord of all he surveys....

He pottered by the pond, poked about in the bushes, did a spot of bird-watching, lazed in the sun, lazed in the shade, climbed all the way up the netting to the ceiling, ran around in gleeful circles and finally brought himself indoors, exhausted, at about 4.30pm. He’s fast asleep on the lounge right now.

The palace is humungous – bigger than I’d expected – and it presented a few challenges for Phil and Henry, which they solved, of course, because they’re professionals. The palace is braced at several anchor points on my shed roof and the weathervane, and the wire provides perching spots for the birds while they wait for me to bring out their seed.

My view is not obstructed by the netting; in fact, the whole enormous structure is remarkably unobtrusive. 

Basil is inside and Phil/Henry are outside - but it's hard to tell! Very unobtrusive structure!

There are big doors at each end so I can get in and out to the washing line, woodshed and driveway.

So, Secure A Kat – I thank you, Basil thanks you and the local bird population thanks you for a job brilliantly done! 

Betty and Basil: a story of soulmates ;-)

 
You know I’m a kitteh tragic, right? I’ve always been this way, but my cat-craziness increased exponentially when I acquired my little bestie, (that's bestie, not beastie!) Basil, who has captured my heart and imagination utterly, totally, truly madly deeply. He’s a little cat with a giant personality. He grabs life by the balls (he has none of his own these days) and absolutely loves the ride. Indoors or out, Basil knows how to have fun, and he's made me his very own partner in crime. He even pats me on the head, coz that's apparently what besties do. I'm flattered, and pat him on the head as well.

We play chasey in the house, running and hiding around corners, and jumping out at each other. It’s just as well we live alone, or the Funny Farm would probably be sending a van around to collect me right now – and then who would feed the cat?

Outdoors, we are more sedate (ok, outdoors I am more sedate.) Basil goes nuts, leaping more than a metre in the air and executing mid-air twists and turns worthy of an Olympic gymnast. He forces me to undertake obstacle courses (oh my aching back!), ducking and weaving and bending to untangle his lead from the more jungular bits of the garden. He runs up and down trees and flies through the air with the grace of, er, something extremely graceful. He bounces and pounces, digs holes that a dog would be proud of, poops in the strawberry pot and eyes off birds, bees, beetles and butterflies. And lizards. He loves the lizards that love the rockery.

 He likes to sit atop the vegie cage watching kangaroos, 

and has made friends with the horses that wander the back paddock. I kid you not – they touched noses and he actually patted a horse on the nose. Truly. Then the horse did that snorty thing that horses do, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Basil, however, barely twitched a whisker. If I were to let him off the lead, I swear he’d be off, clinging to the mane of his horsey buddy and galloping across the field, tail streaming pennant-like behind him (why oh why won’t he get on the Harley with me?)

 He’s desperate to be better friends with the amazing variety of visiting birds, too. 

So near yet so faaaaaaar!

 Clearly that’s why he hopped onto the bird-table this morning and started nibbling at the birdseed while he waited for the birds to join him. The birds, less gullible than I, didn’t fall for his “look, I’m just another bird” cat-in-bird’s-clothing subterfuge, though, and stayed away in droves. Birds aren’t so birdbrained after all!

I'm just an innocent little birdie, heh heh. Hmmm, this birdseed's quite tasty!

He’s wanting to spend more and more time outdoors. This business of ‘walking the cat’ is going to get pretty old pretty quickly, so I’m thinking I shall build him an outdoor cat-palace. My internet research is about to begin, and my lovely neighbour has already offered me some timber. Watch this space for progress on that Grand Design. In the meantime I have ingeniously installed several strategically-placed anchor-points, and I can weed/dig/potter to my heart’s content, knowing that my Basil is having safe, bird-friendly fun, leaping on lizards, sniffing at snails and digging kitty-latrines.

Eventually, though, I always risk the Wrath of Khat by making him come back indoors when he doesn’t actually want to. He’s devised a brilliant win-win strategy. Yes, he thought this one up all by himself (not only is my cat Chuck Norris – he’s Einstein/Dr Spock as well!) He protests a bit, just for form's sake, then picks up his lead in his mouth, holds his head high and “walks himself” where I want him to go, as if it was his idea in the first place. So so SO unbelievably cute!

Oh Basil, how ever did I live without you?

Our Secret Garden

You’ve seen pictures of my Mallacoota garden. I thought I knew it, but I was oh-so-wrong (gee, how very unusual!) When it hasn’t been horribly hot and snakified(!) I’ve been out weeding or walking Basil on his little leash, and we’ve discovered a whole secret garden – the garden you only see when you have your nose at ground level, sort of Basil-like. So instead of the Big Picture stuff, like sunrise on the flowering gum

 or the birdbath, 

  you see this when you’re cutting back the hydrangea:

 or this, by the pond after Basil has taken an unscheduled swim:

 It’s an endless journey of discovery, and I’m only seeing it now, on my hands and knees as I clutch at the myriad weeds that have tried to take over while the house has been empty over the past year.

Basil is having a fab time, both indoors and out. He fell in the pond again this morning, but seemed quite unperturbed by it. There were too many things to look at for his sogginess to be a problem, so he shook a wet paw briefly at the world before ploughing on to look for lizards and beetles, and to give the birdlife the evil eye.

Thank goodness he’s on his extender-leash, is all I can say! It stops him getting the birds or escaping through the fence or onto the road. It doesn’t stop him getting tangled in branches, though, in which case he simply sits patiently and waits for me to untangle him. So cute. And today he climbed his first tree – something he’s been practising for indoors over the past week.

We’ve been residents of Mallacoota for nearly 3 weeks now, and it feels SO right. The days and nights have taken on a comfortable routine. The sleepy rhythms of life make the days seem longer and more livable. The 'franticity' of life has slowed to a reasonable speed, and it's fabulous. There's time to smell the roses (and dead-head them, prune them, pull out the weeds around them... wheeeee!)

Lead on, Adventure Cat!

Kitteh Therapeh

When you get to a certain age, you realise that a lot of the things you acquire may be the last ever…. for example, 'this will probably be the last set of saucepans I ever buy’ (bad example, they’re supposed to last a lifetime anyway, aren’t they?) Um…. how about ‘this will be the last new motorcycle I ever buy’, or ‘this will be the last new bed that I ever buy.’?

Anyway…. it’s why I splurged on a DeLonghi kettle a couple of months ago. It was horrendously expensive, even though I bought it on special, but I figured it was my last and only chance to own a superb bit of water-boiling kit. OMG that is soooo ‘first-world’ and I blush with first-world embarrassment.

Anyway, for a while I wondered whether it was weird to be so in love with an electrical appliance – but I so admired its drip-free spout, its gorgeous red enamel finish, its beautiful curves – it’s an aesthetic and functional masterpiece. 

But that love was nothing compared to this one…

I know I said I would never have another cat. When I said goodbye to my dear old demented Miffy, 18 months ago, I believed it. I meant it right up until Saturday, when I locked eyeballs with an adorable little grey and white kitten.

Not sure what it is about me and grey & white cats.... but Basil (as he's now called) is my third...

Basil was only 6 weeks and 2 days old.  I suspect he was a little young to have been in a pet shop, or anywhere away from his mummy. However, he could crunch dry food, lap water from a bowl and use a litter-tray, and I suppose that’s all that pet shops insist upon. So I rescued him. (Steve & Sara rescued one of his brothers at the same time.)

Basil and I have hit the jackpot. He has a mummy-surrogate who adores him, and I have a cat. Probably the last cat I will ever have (although I’m learning never to say ‘never’).

Until now I’ve never had a cat that willingly travelled in a car. Basil, however, loves it. He relaxes, looks out the window and goes to sleep, supremely comfortable. The day after I acquired him, he and I drove to Mallacoota, which was a huge road-trip for a tiny little cat. I’m going to keep taking him for daily drives, and will introduce him to Piglet soon. A Harley-kitty is my dearest dream.

Chillin' in the back of the car

After a wee stop at Cooma, chillin' in the (open) kitteh cage

He has the tiniest squeak, and he (so far) only uses it as a distress call. He’s alert, playful, inquisitive and supremely snuggly. He drops off to sleep in the middle of things. He springs and bounces, all feet off the ground, as kittens do, and he seems game for anything. I’m hopelessly, hopelessly in love.

Chillin' in the armchair in Mallacoota

Kitteh therapeh is the best!

Vale Miffy

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

                                                             -- Dylan Thomas --

 

My dear, feisty, cranky, demented old cat, Miffy  – whose name was really the splendidly Welsh Myfanwy – did the good Dylan Thomas thing today, and raged against the dying of the light.

Who was I kidding with my wishy-washy dreams of a peaceful, dignified end for a grand old lady who has terrified vets in her long, cranky lifetime? Miffy died as she had lived – with a snarl on her lips, and a fight on her paws. That’s probably how she’d have wanted it if she’d had enough of her mind left to know what she actually wanted. 

Dear, dear Miffy. When Pete the Vet made a very kind house-call to enable her to exit this life from a comfortable spot in her own home, she demanded a blood price. There was a brief moment when I thought I must’ve made a terrible mistake – and that Miffy was not ready to go – and that will probably niggle at me for a long time. 

The bowels that no longer hung on, even as far as ‘Poo Corner’, behind the armchair; the complete lack of customary catty toileting fastidiousness; the late night confused yowling; the daytime confused yowling; the weird behavioural loops… as I cuddled my growling cat in her last moments, and said  choked words of farewell to her, I tried to keep those things in my mind.

But I still felt like shit.

I'm sorry, Miffy. Deep down, I think we both knew it was time. Goodbye, my dear old friend.

Oh Miffy...

I think I’m opening the pages of Miffy’s final chapter. 

The cranky little kitten came to me in Goulburn back in 1995. Her feisty temperament wasn’t mellowed by a vicious dog attack in the first year of her life, and she grew into a cranky cat. She used to torment Spike, the cat next door, who wasn’t allowed outside, by wandering along outside his windows and pulling faces at him.

The pages of her life have been punctuated by hissy fits and tiger growls, and yet she showed great tenderness to a kitten she adopted for a while, grooming it, curling up with it, teaching it to hunt beetles in the back yard, and bopping it on the head when it was distracted by falling leaves or waving grass. She has slashed vets and frightened vet nurses. She hated Ollie the Wondercat and Oscar Bin Laden the Terrorkitty. The only human she has ever loved is Boomerang Boy. She survived a stroke last year, and is now a cranky, crazy old lady. It’s nearly time to close the book.

I keep holding off turning that final page, though. I watch her closely, to monitor changes in behaviour that might signal a decline in her quality of life. I keep thinking that I will somehow know when the time has come, but I don’t know what I am looking for.

Her appetite is bigger than ever. The dementia seems to have removed the ‘off’ switch. I leave food out for her in the evening, and by 2am she is yowling for more.  I leave the bath tap dripping so she can help herself to water from the tap, but it’s not enough. (Thank goodness the drought’s over, but oh God, my water bill!)

The nightly battles – mine, to sleep, and hers, to make me do whatever it is she thinks she wants (and sometimes she doesn’t know that herself) – have increased in number and intensity. Last night I fell asleep exhausted at 8.30, having been awake since 4am (thanks Miffy!) She woke me with desperate yowling at 10.30pm. And again at 12.30. And then again, finally, at 2.57am – and here I am, crying over my blog and desperate for some unbroken sleep. She is snoring next to me on the bed, and I am wondering how the hell I’m going to drag myself through 5 senior English classes today.

Her mournful  meowing sessions are loud enough for my neighbours to hear (I’ve asked) and they aren’t confined to the wee hours, either.  It’s driving me nuts.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that I don’t want to have to make that hard decision to end her life – and yet I don’t want to be a martyr to a demented cat either, living a zombie existence as she becomes more querulous and demanding, and less in control of her faculties, travelling through the days and nights in confused loops.

Why can’t her heart just give up? Why can’t she just die peacefully like Oscar did, curled up in a cosy armchair? I don’t want to think about her crying in the car on her last trip to the vet, or being afraid in the waiting room, or afraid of the bloke with the needle. I want her last moments to be, well, nice.  Dignified. Befitting a grand old lady who has been, in her youth,  a proud hunter of beetles, with a temper to terrify the toughest vet.

Life with Miffy - feline dementia

After another 3.30am wake-up, courtesy of Miffy the Geriatric Cat, and yet another toileting disaster - hers, not mine! - I'm running out of humour, bicarb of soda - and incense.

Things are getting difficult - and a bit smelly. I wonder whether Miffy finds it as distressing as I do? As her poor old brain deteriorates, she becomes increasingly stuck in weird behavioural loops, and is often confused.

Like this morning. At 3.30am. Picture this:

Loud yowling wakes me (and probably half the neighbourhood) again. The kitty body-clock is seriously out of whack. I get out of bed and turn on the light. Miffy is sitting in the bathroom, waiting to go through the routine. This is how it's supposed to go:

Human turns on tap in bath. Cat jumps into bath, drinks water from tap. Cat jumps out. Human turns off tap. Life goes on.

Holes are starting to form in even this simple and well-worn routine. I turn on the tap. Miffy hauls herself up and into the bath. She sits in front of the trickle of water and looks at it.

'Um, I know there's something I'm supposed to do now...' Sometimes she remembers, sometimes she doesn't.

We go through this at least ten times a day now. At least. It used to be a once or twice thing, back in the day.

It's starting to be the same with the feeding routine, which is supposed to work like this:

I rattle the bicky jar. Miffy comes running. I put food in the bowl and she eats it. Alternatively, Miffy yowls for food. I put food in the bowl. Miffy eats it. It's a simple process, right?

Not any more. Miffy instinctively initiates or responds to the first part of the process, but can't complete it. She looks at the bickies in the bowl, then wanders off – usually back to the bathroom, where she starts the 'Turn on the tap for me' loop again.

Her brain starts things that it can't remember how to complete. So she starts them again. She does the familiar bits that she can remember. Over and over. And over. Sometimes she just yowls.

I'm not sure what the yowls mean. Frustration? Fear? Simple selfish feline demands? I don't know, and I don't think Miffy does either. Half the time, I think that whatever it was she wanted when she started yowling has flown out of her head by the time I turn on the light. We look at each other.

'Um.'

She follows me around because. Just because. If there ever was a reason, she's forgotten it, but if she follows me around, she might remember it. Confusion radiates from her at these times.

And then there's the toilet thing. The hastily-bought litter tray, which lives behind the armchair, is only a partial success. For Miffy, it's a bit of a hit-and-miss thing. If her feet are in the litter, that's evidently close enough, and she pees with gay abandon. Her bum may well be hanging over the side of the tray, but her paws are in the litter, and as far as Miffy is concerned, that is the important thing. Wee finished, she gets out of the litter tray and poops about a foot away. On the carpet. She's also forgotten that peculiarly, fastidiously feline part of the process – you know, the bit where they bury their business? She just drops a few cat nuggets onto the carpet and wanders off.

I wonder whether she's happy, or content, or whether she's struggling through an unpleasant and impenetrable soup, in which jumbled fragments of a lifetime of routines float and bobble. Her increasingly loud vocalisations are carefully articulated, but in a language I don't understand, and I'm not sure what to do. Her mental deterioration has escalated quite markedly since (a) her stroke, in July of this year, and (b) Oscar's death in October.

I think my dear old cat and I are journeying towards a horrible inevitablility that I don't like thinking about - and if I'm honest, when I bring up the 'quality of life' argument, whose life am I talking about? Mine or Miffy's? Boomerang Boy accuses me of wanting to murder his cat whenever I bring up the possibility that euthanasia might be the kindest thing. Boomerang Boy, it must be said, sleeps through the worst of Miffy's weird behaviour.

As I write this, Miffy is curled up next to me, fast asleep. After the early start this morning, I think I'll put questions of life, death and feline dementia into the too-hard basket, and join her for a little nap.

The Rise of the Tyrant Miffy

It's 4am. I am wide awake. Why am I awake, and why have I given up on the idea of getting back to sleep?

[Dramatic music]

The Tyrant Miffy is on the warpath. I am blogging in order to resist doing her evil bidding at this ungodly hour, and also to avoid strangling her.

I know now why the dear, late Oscar Bin Laden used to wallop her, every chance he got. And I always thought he was picking on her. (Sorry, Oscar I misunderstood. Mea culpa.) He was merely keeping her in line.

Miffy, it has emerged, doesn't have an OFF switch when it comes to food. And she can't tell the time. She also gets stuck in petulant, querulous geriatric mode, yowling at odd and unreasonable hours of the night, like 3.27am. Like this morning.

FEED ME.

No, Miffy, I will not feed you. You were fed at 5pm. You will be fed again at 5am. You already look like a small planet.

Besides, I know that after she has had a few nibbles of breakfast, she will stalk down the hallway and sit in the bathroom doorway. She will yowl loudly and angrily and repeatedly. And, being in the bathroom, it will have a bit of an echo.

GET ME A DRINK.

This means “Turn on the tap in the bath so I can haul my arthritic arse in there and drink the tastiest water in the house, even though there's a bowl of fresh water right next to my food bowl. Do it, and DO IT NOW, MINION!”

See, it isn't about water. It's about power. Miffy is absolutely relishing her 'only child' status since the demise of poor Oscar. She's loving it. After 16 years of 'Omega Cat' status, she is in the Power Seat. I am the new Omega Cat.

After the water will come the most humiliating (for me) flexing of her feline muscle. She will yowl in the middle of the hallway, loudly and querulously. And non-stop. Her pointy little nose will point meaningfully in the direction of the armchair in the corner of the living room. Behind that chair is the litter tray I hurriedly bought because a certain geriatric cat had decided it was a good place to pee, rather than outdoors where she had spent a lifetime peeing.

She will be saying, very clearly,

CLEAN OUT MY LITTER TRAY, BIATCH!

After I move the armchair out of the way and haul my arthritic arse into the small space behind it, and scratch about in the kitty litter with my trusty pooper scooper, she will mosey on over, inspect the tray, then smugly wander off.

It's no wonder Oscar used to bash her.

And it's why I'm blogging at 4am.

Saying Goodbye - vale Oscar Bin Laden

I had to say goodbye to my little furry friend Oscar yesterday.

Oscar Bin Laden the Terrorkitty was only 10 years old. A fiendish kitten, he came to us after the death of Ollie the Wonder Cat in 2000.

Like Ollie, he was a Persian Himalayan cross – a lovely big grey and white cat – but the similarities ended there. He was, in fact, Ollie's Evil Twin, straight from the Dark Side. A leg-stalker par excellence, he was the bane of Miffy's existence, pouncing on her and tormenting her at every opportunity, right up until the day he died – yesterday, 25 October.

He wasn't all evil, though. Very much a people cat, Oscar would follow me around like a fluffy grey shadow. In the kitchen he had his little vantage point on top of the bread bin and loved to watch everything that went on (he was a terrible stickybeak!) from there. In the garden, he was never more than a foot away, batting at the evil weeds as I tried to pull them out (just helping, honest!) or simply just being a companionable presence. He sat beneath the washing line whenever I hung out the washing, and sat on my arms whenever I tried to use the computer. He sat on my chest if I tried to watch TV, and often sat on my head while I tried to sleep. He did a lot of sitting.

And he talked, Lord, did he talk, at all hours of the day and night! He was, in fact, quite a student of English, and could say “hello” with spooky clarity when he wanted to get your attention.

He could be naughty, annoying and utterly obnoxious at times – quite a lot, in fact – especially when I was tutoring. He would leap onto the table, sprawl over my students' books, and refuse to budge.

'Hey, kid, need help with your homework? You've come to the right place.'

As for keeping him neat and tidy – forget it! His luxurious coat was a nightmare. Go within three feet of him with a brush, and you risked losing an arm. So much easier (and safer!) to take him to the vet for a haircut every year when the warmer weather arrived. That cat simply would not be brushed. He could out-stubborn anyone I know, even as a kitten. He stood his ground against the dreaded 'get off the table' water-squirter from a young age, when the squirter bottle was twice his size. He just sat there with narrowed eyes, daring me to squirt him. One day he took a big swipe at the bottle, whacking it right out of my hand. Feisty little bugger.

But when I was going through some of the darkest days of my life, and couldn't get out of bed for days at a time, Oscar never left my side. He would curl up next to me, at neck level, and put his paw in the palm of my hand, or rest it on my cheek, and sit that way for hours. He loved human contact.

I'm going to miss him.

Intruder Kitty must GO!

Okay, I've been patient through the long winter. My house is Cat Pee Central. Miffy is a nervous wreck who pees on everything she sees. She's too scared to venture through the cat flap, and has made a pooing place behind one of the armchairs in the loungeroom (coincidentally next to – but not IN - the litter tray I was inspired to install there when she decided it was a safe and private peeing place. Omigod, my carpet will have to go... )

Oscar bin Laden is Intruder Kitty's best friend, apparently. He sat on the window sill one afternoon, blithely watching IK saunter past him up the back steps, in through the cat flap, back out through the cat flap in rather a hurry, and back down the steps, closely followed by Cranky Betty.

But my patience is at an end. A nasty, sleepless end.

There are no limits to the audacity of Intruder Kitty. He has begun toying with me – he has made me his mouse. He has more front than Dolly Parton, and I am over it.

After a 3am wake-up and a long day at school, followed by a long parent-teacher evening yesterday, I was falling over with tiredness by 9pm, and fast asleep by 9.30.

At 2.24am I was woken by the marauding monstrosity. It thundered through the cat flap, yowled loudly three times – a feline equivalent of “Nyah nyah, you can't catch me!” - and then thundered back out through the cat flap, to disappear into the night.

So much for my lovely deep sleep. My brain started ticking, whirring even – and I snatched a few brief moments of broken sleep filled with weird and tiring dreams that revolved around parent-teacher interviews and badly-behaved students, storms and wild weather, and a kindly giant. And then my alarm went off. Yay for caffeine – it's the only thing holding my eyes open, and I'm teaching a full day today with a playground duty chucked in just for fun – and tutoring after school.

Intruder Kitty is TOAST. Or at least, he will be if I can ever catch him.

The Ballad of Intruder Kitty

In a suburb of Canberra there's a chilly little house

Full of Betty and her family and a sometimes midnight mouse

The heating's really basic, nothing central, nothing ducted

And in a place like Canberra that's pretty bloody fuckeded.

It's messy and it's freezing and it has a tiny telly

And recently it's started to become a little smelly

The cause of the aroma (I confess it is a pity)

Is a fluffy Oscar lookalike who's called Intruder Kitty.

I don't know where he comes from and I don't know where he goes

But every time he visits us, my house is on the nose.

He sneaks in through the cat flap at odd hours of night and day

And steals the food from Betty's cats, then slyly sneaks away.

This fluffy little felon, this feline furry thief

Takes great delight in purloining their chicken and their beef

He gobbles all their bickies up, then leaves without a trace,

This bold Intruder Kitty is the scourge of Betty's place.

The thought of an intruder has made Oscar rather cross

He's gone all territorial to prove that he's the boss

But spraying all around the house has been to no avail

It hasn't stopped Intruder Cat, (but it has made Betty pale).

So clever vengeful Oscar did devise a cunning plot

To scare Intruder Kitty without fighting him a lot.

And poor unwitting Betty was a pawn in Oscar's scheme

Which involved the bathroom heater, and which turned poor Betty green.

Now, Canberra is chilly as I've told you all before

So there's a little heater that's on Betty's bathroom floor.

It makes the mornings bearable when temperatures are low

And to this very heater Oscar EvilCat did go.

He lifted up a fluffy leg and sprayed the heater well

So when poor Betty switched it on it amplified the smell

The pong of fan-forced Oscar piss is really rather whiffy

So Betty ran out screaming, closely followed by poor Miffy.

If you look closely you can see where Brave Sir Oscar sprayed all over my heater

Oh Oscar dear, your efforts to protect us are commended

But killing off my heater wasn't quite what you intended

Intruder Kitty wasn't fazed and came right back last night

And I'm now fifty bucks worse off, you dopey little shite.

Having said that, the new heater (placed up high, beyond the reach of territorial sprayings), puts out quite a decent amount of heat. The problem of Intruder Kitty, however, remains. Gas Mask, anyone?

Nine Lives Minus One

This is Miffy. She's a cranky, feisty old lady of 15, adept at mouse-tennis and bed-stealing, nemesis of Oscar Bin Laden, and Grand Master of the Dirty Look. Last Thursday night I thought I was about to lose her.

At about 11pm she suddenly got up from the spot on my bed she'd been hogging, and her rear left leg gave way. She kept trying to walk and eventually jumped off the bed, only to keel over, smashing gracelessly into the furniture. She careered down the hallway, listing badly to the left and using the wall for support. She lost control of her bowels, and left a nasty trail of poo through the house. I chased after her with toilet paper, picking up the lumps, then sat with her as she hid under a stool. There was much pitiful howling – some of it even came from Miffy. Her head shook from side to side, trying to keep up with her eyes, which were totally out of control. A stroke.

I felt so helpless. Was she about to die? I patted her gently, and for the first time in 15 years she didn't react angrily when I touched her back (there's a sore spot there which is the legacy of a dog attack when she was a tiny kitten). I guessed she couldn't feel her back.

What to do? If Miffy was human it would've been easy – dial 000 and ask for an ambulance.

Oscar Bin Laden was distressed, too. He's used to whacking Miffy, tormenting Miffy, pouncing on Miffy – but not protecting Miffy. He sat close by, very quietly, and didn't take his eyes off her. He's a fiendish little so-and-so, and he was probably calculating how much more food he would get if Miffy kicked the bucket – but it looked for all the world as if he was worried about her. Of course, while he was a comfort, he was no help.

I called my friend Mark – he's resourceful and unflappable. I was bawling. 'I think Miffy's dying and I don't know what to do...'

He arrived on the doorstep half an hour later after phoning his vet-friend Peter and putting him on stand-by. Miffy yowled and wobbled, and I sobbed and sniffled, and we began what I thought would be Miffy's Last Ride.

Not so – she's a tough old thing. By the time we arrived at Peter's she already seemed to be rallying. Still wobbly, she had regained enough sense of self to hobble away and hide, and to hiss at helping hands. Peter thought that was a pretty good sign. Rather than the fatal injection he'd expected she would need, he gave her a shot of cortisone, and cautiously suggested she might recover.

The next morning she was her old self again, albeit somewhat subdued. No sign of so much as a little limp – and she even managed to jump into the bath for a drink, because evidently the best water in the house comes out of the bathroom tap. Unbelievable. Look at this:

She ate, she drank, she pooed in my flowerbed again. Grrr. Oh, and the final proof of her full recovery? This morning she and Oscar were back to their bickering selves again: he torments, she reacts. Situation normal.

Thanks so much, Mark and Peter. And welcome back, Miffy!