Chris creates confusion when trying to rehome a pair of cats
Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
It’s been an exciting week, though it started sadly. The worst aspect of cat-sitting is that every now and then, one of them leaves us.
My old friend of many years, Oliver, passed away at the start of the week, and as Oliver has always been one of my all-time favourite cats (out of rather a lot), it was very sad.
The only consolation was that he’d enjoyed a long and good life, living in a giant house with a giant garden, next to open fields and miles from busy roads.
It made me smile, though, that one of his very last acts had been to deliberately go to the loo on a prickly and knobbly doormat that he’d resented all his life – mainly because it was positioned directly in front of his cat-flap. Way to go, Oliver!
So, it was a bad start to the week, and things got ever so slightly worse when another client rang to say that they were emigrating and had to leave their two cats Smithy and Charlie behind.
They’d been let down by prospective new owners at the last moment, and Smithy and Charlie were heading off to the RSPCA shelter that very evening.
Did I by chance know of anyone who could re-home them, the owners asked.
I was suddenly on a few hours’ deadline.
It was obviously much too early for Oliver’s cat-loving owner Lynne to consider adopting again, but I did vaguely recall one of my ex-customers saying that she was just about ready to take on a cat… or two… or three, again, after many years in a feline-free home.
I rang her straight away.
“Hi Kate, it’s Chris, your old cat-sitter. I’m trying to re-house a lovely pair of cats, and just wondered if you’d be interested?”
“Hi Chris, um, I’m not sure it’d be a good idea at all. He’s not very sociable, is he? He can get quite nasty.”
“Who?” I replied, wondering if there was perhaps an
