As in cat-. We have paid for and have had installed a hi-tech cat-flap. All that remains is for the cat to understand its basic function. It is a garden interface, a toilet router. As yet this has not dawned on the furry-faced food remover, so at time of writing the device remains merely a -flap, a hole in the door, a small, floor-level, perspex window into or out of our lives.
I was against carving the large hole required in our back door, but my alternative strategy (leaving the door open) has proved unsatisfactory on two main counts. One, the intense cold flooding into the house ten months of the year, and two, the persistent raiding of another local cat, who has been eating about two meals a day at our expense over the summer months. We thought Lizzie was a little too hungry, amd we suspected worms for a while. But no. Repeated visual contact with an unknown tabby provided the answer. We have had visits over the years from the neglected orange tom who lives next door, but he never got as far as the kitchen. This intruder tabby has got the whole thing down to a fine art. Hence the collective flap that produced the hi-tech one.
And now there it sits. So does Lizzie, looking at it and haranguing us in her best 'I am the Queen' voice. "Open this door," she tells us. We simply pick her up and stuff her through the small hole in it. This we have mastered as a standard procedure and we seem agreed upon it as the way forward (or out). How she comes back in is not sorted yet, Someone will probably have to sit in a deck-chair out there and stuff her back through when she wants to come in after toilet/hunting/social duties are completed. So this is progress of a sort.
In other news. I came back from India after a week of five star luxury. The only blemish was on the drive back to the airport, when the driver cut out of a hideous traffic jam to go on an 'alternative' route. Alternative in this context is like comparing The Spice Girls to Cradle of Filth. The substitute road was competely clear and the villages looked beautiful with the early morning mist hanging in the air, dappled by a golden sun rise. Palm trees threw streaks of artful shade across the vivid green vegetation. There were small tea shops crammed with people on their way to work, and not a word of English to be seen on any street sign, signpost or billboard. Nor even standard Devnagri (Hindi) script), just the beautiful rounded, local Kanada lettering. Thre was even a magnificent black cockerel standing on a wall, proud and self-sufficient in his regional kngdom. What there wasn't was a yard of continuous flat road surface. After literally half an hour of being shaken up like a tin of white paint I called on the driver to stop. I got out and threw up spectacularly all over the verge, watched by a group of mildly curious locals. My driver meanwhile went to buy me a bottle of water from a nearby shop. All the good work done on the image of Englishmen by my ancestors, insouciantly shooting and taxing Indians for several centuries, was undone as this gora threw up his last night's kebab (goats's shin) in a faint parody of Empire, bringing his overfed habits and spraying bile in a quiet country corner unaccustomed to intrusion.
Yet other news. We bumped over our sixteenth wedding anniversary. We won at the school quiz night. We saw some fireworks at a safe distance. I painted some wardrobes.