Free at last

As I suspected, Chutney and I were taken to the cattery the week before last. (As I have no real concept of the passage of time, it may have been a month, a year or a decade. However when Annie paid the lady, it was £110, and I think that's about 10 days, including the VAT.)

But today we came home and said goodbye to our friends in the slammer. There was a friendly and beautiful blue-eyed rag-doll cat called Louis (I say beautiful in a purely aesthetic sense. I may have had my tackle removed at an early age, but I'm unambiguously heterosexual.) Then there was a rather miserable old black and white cat called Oscar who occasionally bites humans, and these two Russian kittens, Dimitri and Ivan, who kept referring to the cattery as "the Gulag" and who tried to smuggle in a file embedded in a tin of Whiskas. (OK, that's not really true. I found their picture on a Russian website. And we didn't really have to wear uniform.)

Although I joke about the cattery being a prison, it's really more like a holiday camp. When we're there we spend most of the day asleep in our rooms, because we're not very sociable. Later on, when we've had our dinner and most of the other cats have gone to bed, we come out and stretch our legs a bit. Chutney can even open her own cage, jump out, climb on the dead tree-trunk in the recreation area, return to her bed and lock the door after her, all without any human help. Not bad for an old lady.

I mustn't forget that this is a food blog, so here's a little write-up: our accommodation was all-inclusive, with all the water you wanted served in proper bowls (you didn't have to hold your head under the kitchen tap or jump in the toilet). My breakfast and dinner was steamed white fish fillet and a little crunchy Science Diet on the side - comfortingly like the food at home but with that certain je ne sais quoi one encounters when one travels. Chutney tried some of the more exotic local dishes, including a memorable Felix Senior Recipe With Rabbit in Jelly. She tells me she liked it, although she wouldn't go out of her way to get it at home.