In-truder alert!*

MBP phoned me a few days ago and was complaining that he hadn’t had much sleep the night before and so I asked him what the problem was. He started to tell me that it was the SIL, but not quite in the way that you might think....

The SIL was woken at about 2.30 in the morning by a strange noise and she told me she thought it was a large moth. In the way that you do, she lay awake for a bit in the dark, straining to hear what was happening and then heard more noise and began to wonder if it was a mouse. It did seem odd that a mouse might have got in and climbed the stairs just to leap up and down on the spare bedroom bed in order to wake her up, but it's true that odd things do go through your mind at that time in the morning. Added to the mouse theory, was the possibility of revenge, as after mice getting into the garage and munching their way through a spare duvet that had been stored there, traps had been set...I will say no more...!

After a bit more clattering and what sounded distinctly like a meow, the SIL bravely got up to investigate and on opening the door of the spare room spotted a cat who immediately ran under the bed! Now, MBP and the SIL don’t own a cat and it wasn’t one of ours that had smuggled its way home in one of my brother’s shoes so she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. She got down on her knees and peered under the bed and yes, it really was a cat! It was back to the bedroom to wake MBP who so far was oblivious to all this excitement.

“Wake up”, she said, “we have an intruder – there’s a cat under the bed...”
“Grummph, blurgle” he mumbled “do you want a hand?” – he said in a tone of voice that really meant ‘please say no and let me get back to sleep....’

The SIL is made of stronger stuff than that and so he got up to give her a hand! They both peered under the bed and she was right – there really was a cat under there. Thus ensued a certain amount of time playing ‘catch the cat’, which as any cat owner who has ever wanted to take their pet to the vet will tell you is lots of fun^*2....and eventually, the cat was outside the front door.

First a frog , next a cat ...let’s just hope they’re not working their way up to bigger animals....

^* Danger Will Robinson!
^*2 ...and is something akin to how to give your cat a pill...