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Friday night, maybe midnight or thereabouts, we were woken by mad scrabbling on the landing. Investigation revealed Ron with a new toy: another mouse was moments away from its end.

There was a degree of oh-buggrit-we-want-to-sleep-clean-up-the-bits-in-the-morning and we subsided; until, that is, Ron brought his prize into the bedroom. No way I wanted to risk the rodent being deposited in several bits on (or worse, in) the bed, so up I got and chased the PoD downstairs to grab hold of him at the foot of the stairs. For a brief moment.

Ron does not like to be thwarted.

He emitted his bloodfreezing scream of fury and slipped away (I wasn’t going to try and hold on anyways), but the scream necessitated the opening of the Maw, and the Fangs Therein, and thus the now dead and still miraculously intact rodent was left behind for me to grab - quickly! - to enbag and, given the hour and my naked body, be hurled outside the front door for attention come the dreadful light of day.

This was not the end of the story, for on Saturday Mac went out onto the patio, and lying there, still in its (admittedly slightly punctured) baggie was the mouse. How it got from front to back, given our home is mid-terrace, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Oh, and I promised death after: that came at around 6am this morning. Mac got up to go bathroomward and discovered a cloud of feathers, an observant Henry, and a Ron, who was whacking the very ex blackbird in his jaws against the banister rails. That murdered sleep (as well as the bird) quite effectively for both of us. By the time I got to gathering up the remains, the part-chewed, feather-denuded bird was in Henry’s jaws in the kitchen, being whacked against the floor and the fridge as H. leaped and swivelled in the air. I added the Bits to the bagged mouse from before, still awaiting final disposal, and vacuumed up feathers from the kitchen, hallway, stairs and landing.

Ron and Henry, or maybe Ron and Reggie, or possibly Doug and Dinsdale: I expect they were good to their mum

We know that you like to go hunting at night - we don’t like it, but we understand.  And we understand that you want to bring your kills home, although you don’t bring them to us to show them off.

However, the chirps and other general noise that ensues is starting to get us down.  Pete didn’t appreciate getting up at midnight on Saturday night to rescue a mouse - OK, rescue is the wrong word, as it was entirely deceased, but you and your brother seemed to be having some sort of party to celebrate, so Pete had to remove the unfortunate rodent.  He put it in a plastic bag outside the front door, and thus we were quite taken aback to find it, still in its bag, outside the *back* door on Sunday morning.

We had a word with you, and I thought you understood that this sort of behaviour is not encouraged. You may thus see why, when I was woken at 6 this morning by more shouts and chirps and growls to find the landing covered in feathers, and you tossing the body of an ex-blackbird around the stairs, closely watched by Henry; he clearly wanted to play too.

Please - no more of this.  There can’t be much wildlife left to kill, and I fully expect you to be dragging a buffalo in any day …

signed
your devoted (and exhausted) Blobs

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Temperatures here in North Somerset, in the UK, are at a very unseasonal 29° today - far too hot for us humans, and the cats are miserable.  They’re seeking out pockets of shade, and slumping all over the place.

Here’s Lilith, showing how to keep cool.

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Drumknott

Originally uploaded by ramtops

Drumknott, our melanistic black Bengal, went missing in November 2003, and I still think I hear him shouting with his distinctive voice from time to time … He was a dreadful cat, with a black coat, and a black heart, and we loved him to bits. He was generally known as PoD (an acronym for Prince of Darkness*).

Roll forward five years or so, and we have the arrival of Ron, who is turning out to be PoD’s heir, although he hasn’t yet developed the distinctive sound effects, nor yet the wonky tooth of his predecessor; both Pete and I refer to hims as PoD from time to time.

Last night, Pete was cooking dinner while I was watching an old Grand Designs, and I heard an “eek!” from the kitchen. It took me a moment to parse it, but then I realised that Kevin McLeod had just referred to a 60ft Pod. He then brought Ron through to demonstrate.

Nightmares will ensure, I know they will.

* I suppose we could consider calling him Mandelson now.  But I think we won’t, thanks all the same.

We think Lilith dropped it, and Ron picked it up, and he wasn’t about to give it up .. we chased him round the house, even resorting to the squirty water thing, but the unfortunate bird remained clamped firmly in his jaws.  In the end, we shut him in the garden, and then had to watch through the patio doors as he consumed it with remarkable efficiency, leaving just a neat pile of feathers.  Not even a beak to be seen.  Impressive.

Sitting on the worktop in the kitchen, wondering - as always - why there is nothing nice to eat.

Henry scruffed, I persuaded him to drop, and (just!) managed to gather up the traumatised amphibian before it either leapt away or - more likely - was recaptured.

Any neighbours who might have been observing were then treated to the unlikely sight of a naked man scuttling through the cold drizzle in the dark (thankfully the security light was switched off), frog cupped between his palms,  from the patio door to the pnod, to release the poor creature to a marginally safer environment.

Until the next time.