Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
There were numerous shots of people filling animal feeding bowls, quickly edited together
to suggest that it was an endless routine. 'Ha!' Natalie snorted, 'it's just like here!' I think we'd
both assumed that it was an advertisement for cat or dog food or a new animal food dispenser
to save owners time. It wasn't. The camera pulled back to reveal a portly man in uniform who
began to tell us that at this time of year there were many animals in care, some would never
be re-homed but all of them needed feeding, that the system for care was under considerable
pressure and could we help? It was a charity appeal that could, albeit on a smaller scale, have
been made by Natalie. For Natalie. The look on her face said it all; it wasn't exactly an epi-
phany, more a confirmation of what she really already knew. Namely, that she was taking on
too much.
It's a stressful business being cooped up indoors; it's possible, almost inevitable, that a
group will turn on itself, or individuals on one another, and when that group consists of three
energy-sapping adolescent cats, a sexually depraved spaniel, the thickest dog in the world,
three boys under ten, a Cath Kidston-obsessed cushion-fetishist and an OCD-ridden mod with
the temper of a bag of hornets - then something has to give.
When I'm at home I practically live in the kitchen, which is part of a large kitchen/diner/
lounge area, and I'm separated from the chaos of the lounge by my 'Maginot Line' of a break-
fast bar. Like the real thing, this 'Maginot Line' worked for a while but the cats, no respecters
of boundaries, had started to jump on top of it. I'd be in the kitchen preparing lunch or dinner,
or boiling the goodness out of fruit for chutney purposes, and they'd take it in turns to leap
up on the thing. Cooking times have tripled since the cats came along because I'm constantly
batting them off the surface area and wiping the place down again. It's like an arcade game:
one of them may jump at first, then another, then two at a time, none for a minute or two,
then all three at once. It's exhausting, not to mention the hygiene consequences.
Occasionally we'll act as a family and round the cats and dogs up and put them outside, but
that just means that any innocent trip to the garden is fraught with anxiety, in the knowledge
that if you open the door even a fraction you'll be floored like a streaker under a gang of
stewards at a football match. Seriously, we stopped going outside for a bit, bins stopped being
emptied. For the sake of our sanity we just could not carry on as things stood. We were, in
modern parlance, going to have to make cutbacks in the cat department.
Natalie had made some tentative moves towards finding good homes for the two male cats;
she wanted to keep Vespa, partly because she was the first and partly because Natalie needs
more female company around the place. It wasn't going to be easy, though. The boys, Samuel
in particular, were obviously going to be very upset - however, we had recently made a point
of feeding and housing the cats in one of the barns and they hadn't even noticed their absence!
But at some point we had to sit down with the boys and try and explain our decision to them,
convince them that it was the right thing to do in the long run for everybody, including the
