YVONNE and the case of the wrong staff

Yvonne and Nick in pensive mood.

Yvonne has been with us for nearly three years.  She is 12½ years old.  Some of you may remember her story.  She had been dumped with someone who never really wanted a cat but who agreed to look after her for two weeks while her owner went away.  He never came back.  She had been kept in a barn for two whole months, with occasional walks outside on a lead.  With winter coming word went round that Yvonne needed a new home.  We had just lost Daisy so we adopted her.

The herb bed is one of Yvonne's favourite hiding places.

She emerges smelling sweetly of tarragon.

She is officially a tortoiseshell cat.

Waiting for us to join her at apéro time.

6pm sharp.

Dreamy time again.

Always on the lookout for a passing mouse.

Another favourite hiding place.

Always the explorer.

And an opportunist.

She was terrified of Hugo at first.  He was, of course, the perfect gentleman.

He gave her space and now they get along fine.

Another favourite hiding place.

When I was in the UK recently, our lovely neighbour Malcolm passed away.  He was 92 and I'm glad I was around to be on hand for his wife Janet to help with preparations for him to spend his last days at home, where they both wanted him to be.  They didn't want him to end his days in a hospice but at home.  

All the time I was in the UK, two whole weeks, Nick reported that Yvonne was hardly eating anything.  She would go through the usual routine, waking him up early to demand breakfast, nudging him for more treats, but after a couple of nibbles wouldn't eat any more.  He threw away more food than she ate - it didn't keep well once opened in the tremendous heatwave.  He wondered if her appetite was affected by the heat.

When I got back to France she made up for it, tucking into each bowlful with gusto and demanding more.  It seems it was nothing to do with the heat, just the wrong staff feeding her! 

This made us realise that leaving her unattended with someone calling each day to feed her wouldn't work for Yvonne.  She likes company and is clearly out of sorts unless we are both at home.  This is the main reason that we now travel back to the UK one at a time.  One of us stays in France with Hugo and Yvonne while the other visits the UK for a week or so.  (There is also a huge difference in cost.  We can make three trips by air for one person for the cost of one round trip en famille by car.)

I returned to France for just four days before we set off back to the UK for the funeral, this time in the car with Hugo.  When Daisy was with us we would bring her too but Yvonne is not a good traveller so we can only travel by car if there is room for her in the cattery.  We were in luck this time, the holiday season not really in full swing yet in France - had it been August there would be no chance at such short notice.

When we got there we were amazed to find it had gone through a huge transformation.  It was previously a rather scruffy place but we were always happy to leave Yvonne there (and previously, on many occasions, Daisy) because the staff were lovely and we knew she would be safe and well cared for.  Now it is definitely five star accommodation.

Each pen has its own cat adventure playground and we left her there wondering where she would climb up to and hide first.

"Can I go with you?"

Leaving Yvonne in the cattery is always bitter sweet.  We are glad she is safe, comfortable and well cared for but know that she will miss us.  She's not one of those cats that plays hard to get for a few days when they get home.  She always gets straight back to normal, a quick sweep of the property to make sure all is well, a dish full of her favourite food with treats and she's ready to sit with us for cuddles.

Whenever I go away I am always glad to get back home and make our family complete again.

A NEW CAT FLAP

We have very few near neighbours.  The nearest is the house behind us where the recently new owner has only a dog.  However, over the years we have had a few visiting cats that must have travelled a fair distance to arrive chez nous.

The latest is a black cat who came into the house via the cat flap and cleared Yvonne’s food bowl at least twice.  So we decided to get a microchip operated cat flap.  

We already have one in our UK house which we installed for Daisy and it worked really well. The  house there is in a residential area where there are numerous other cats, several of which made their way into the house at one time or another until we got the new cat flap.  That stopped them from coming in completely.

The new cat flap is battery operated and works by somehow recognising Yvonne’s microchip.  It was easy to install and set up.  You set it to programme mode and push the cat into the tunnel on the outside just once and that’s all.  It can be programmed to recognise several different cats as long as they are microchipped.  There is a slight delay of about a second before the lock releases to allow the cat to push the flap open and Yvonne got the hang of it straight away.

We had Yvonne microchipped in the hope that one day we would be able to take her to the UK with us but that is very unlikely to ever happen as she doesn’t cope with car journeys at all well.  I suppose that's because she was already an old cat at nine years old (the vet’s word) when we got her and she was clearly not used to travelling in a car.  Each trip is traumatic for her and us.  The vet supplied some tablets to give her which might help but even that in itself is a trauma.  In fact we haven’t even been brave enough to try it.  How do you give a tablet to a struggling, fighting, hissing, biting and scratching  cat?  So the furthest she goes is to the vet or the cattery, a journey of thirty or forty minutes respectively, each one a miserable experience.

However, it was worth the trouble of getting her chipped so that we could keep her safe in her own home and keep other unwelcome cats out.  The new cat flap has four settings;  completely locked, fully open, in only and out only.  We keep it on fully open so that Yvonne can come and go as she pleases but we're sure there will be times when the other functions could come in handy.

You do have to remember to change the batteries occasionally - otherwise the cat can be left out in the cold unable to get inside (or vice versa).

A NEW WASHER, CHEESE, AND A VISITING CAT

Our washing machine had been on the blink for a long time.  Sometimes it would spin normally although noisily, sometimes it struggled and rattled like hell, and sometimes it just refused to spin at all.  It was a good quality Bosch machine but eleven years old and had been great until the last year.  So the question was, whether to try to get someone out to look at it and see if it could be repaired or whether to not risk spending good money on an old machine and buy a new one.  Plus the risk that one day it would simply conk out when full of wet washing, which has happened to other people I know and which complicates the problem no end.

The decision was made when I spotted a bargain in a local branch of SuperU.  700€ is a lot of money but 300€ off made it affordable.  We decided to go for it.  The old machine now resides forlornly at the corner of the déchetterie alongside other discarded machines.  Curiously, the man that mans the déchetterie seemed remarkably thrilled to take it, and didn't swipe our users card (twenty goes a year),  for which there must be an explanation but I can't imagine what.

I am very, very pleased with the new machine.  It hardly seems to use any water and washes things beautifully, spinning them much better than the old one.  RIP.

We recently discovered a number of previously unfamiliar cheeses at the cheese stall on the market.  We were having visitors and lashed out a ridiculous amount of money on an eclectic mix of hard and soft goat and cow's cheeses.  I took photos of them knowing I would never remember what they were otherwise

This one was my favourite.

They all went down well with our visitors who also were not familiar with any of them.

We couldn't resist this one, called Belper Knolle, because Belper is the name of a small town in Derbyshire close to where I grew up and a knowle is another word for a village or hamlet.  It was jolly expensive.  

I wondered how on earth cheese made in a Derbyshire town could end up on the market in the middle of France and was disappointed when the cheese lady told us it was Swiss.  However, it was worth buying as it's delicious.  The idea is to serve it grated like you would a parmesan, on salads, pasta dishes and in soups, and in fact it tastes much like parmesan only better.  I sprinkled it on the soup I served for dinner and it was much appreciated.  

We now covet the wooden cheese grating device that the cheese lady used to give us a taste.  

We have a visiting cat.  We had seen the cat in the field behind the house (once the farmer had cut down the triffid like weeds) occasionally over the last few months.  I wondered how long it would be before it ventured to our house and sure enough, I smelled the tell-tale odour of tomcat in the little barn.

Shortly after that Yvonne appeared one day without her collar and with a scratch on her face.  We found her collar (it's a quick release type) in a flower bed amongst a clump of flattened dahlias so we suppose that's where an encounter took place.  A few times she growled and hissed when looking out of the glass door and once she hurtled into the house via the cat flap and hid under the stairs, eyes like saucers, hissing and spitting.  Then we spotted the cat on the drive and found it on the beams in the little barn.  It's a handsome cat with a fluffy tail and looks nice and clean.

It is nothing like the vicious cat we had visiting before.  That one found its way into the house and terrorised Daisy, attacked both of us and would not go away, returning every night to take food.  This one seems much more friendly, is obviously well used to humans as it came towards us, purring and rolling over on the beams.  So far it has not attempted to get into the house and we therefore presume it's well fed and lives in one of the neighbouring farms, just doing the normal tomcat thing of wandering a fair distance from home every so often.  We haven't seen it for a few days now that the weather has turned and hope that it is in fact well cared for and has somewhere warm and cosy to spend the nights.  

DAISY'S STORY

In 2014 we downsized in the UK so that we could upsize in France and spend more time there.  Once we had decided to buy the house in the middle of a large field friends said "you will need a cat".  Will we, I thought?  Their ginger cat, Marmalade, was about to have kittens.

There were two kittens, a male ginger cat and a female calico or three coloured cat.  Our friends' daughters had decided they would like to keep the female and let us have the male but when the time came for us to have the cat they had changed their minds.  They kept the male, who they had called Pumpkin, and we were to have the female, who they had called Splodge.  Splodge didn't seem the right name for such a pretty cat so we called her Daisy.

The friends said we should keep Daisy outdoors.  She had never been allowed into their house and they always had outdoor cats, providing food and shelter in their barns.  We were not completely convinced but could see the logic so we decided to go along with it. 

We moved into our crumbling farmhouse in the middle of a field in the September and Daisy arrived four days later.  She was eleven weeks old.  Two weeks later she had disappeared.

We spent the first few days of her disappearance frantically calling for her, searching our outbuildings, also the roadside and ditches in case she had succumbed to a passing car.  There was no sign of her and she had vanished completely.

After ten days it occurred to us that she might have made her way to the neighbour's house although we thought this unlikely.  She was so tiny and to get there she would have had to navigate enormous ruts and deep puddles in the field in between, or made her way to the grassy track that led to his house.  He also had a dog.  

We had a dog, our then standard poodle Lulu.  After a tricky start they had learned to live happily together but the neighbour's dog was untrained and uncontrolled.  

After ten anxious days and sleepless nights we decided to speak to the neighbour’s carer.  She visited him every day so we watched for her car leaving his house and waited for her at the end of the lane.  When we asked whether she had seen a kitten anywhere she said "she’s on his bed".

It transpired that the neighbour had noticed the cat and decided he would like her for himself.  He was in the habit of walking to and fro across the front of our property to watch what we were doing, several times a day.  On that day we had to go out and leave the gate open as the electrician was coming in and out.  When we left the house Daisy was playing at chasing leaves in the garden.  By the time we returned, only twenty minutes later, she was gone.  The neighbour had been into the garden and taken her.

He kept her imprisoned in his bedroom so that she couldn't escape or come back home and where she no doubt had to endure goodness only knows what torment from him and the dog.  He had told the carer that he found her abandoned by the road, picked her up and took her home.  The carer’s opinion was that kittens were easily come by, that we should let him keep her and get ourselves another one.  We protested and said that if she didn’t bring Daisy back to us we would go and get her.

Daisy was returned to us the next day.  She was ill, bloated and riddled with worms and fleas. From that moment she became an indoor cat with outside options.  We got her treated for the parasites, fed her quality food, had her vaccinated and microchipped and installed a cat flap, keeping a close eye on her if she went out, in case the neighbour tried to steal her again.

Inevitably we had to take Daisy with us when we went back to the UK.  She had her own passport so the formalities were straightforward but she was not a good traveller.  We had to put up with hour after hour of operatic meowing and eventually we worked out that what she didn’t like was the noise.  Road noise, traffic noise, roadworks, sirens, music, radio, the tomtom and even conversation would cause her to wail inconsolably.  Gradually over the years we learned how to manage the twelve hour journey, travelling in complete silence while Daisy sat quietly in her cage.

She was not keen on cheap hotels either.  Overnight stays in places like an Ibis or Campanile would result in none of us getting any sleep as she scratched frantically at the door or window all night trying to escape.  In much posher hotels, with plush chairs, a big bed and a large bathroom where we could deposit her litter tray and feeding bowls she was happy.  She would settle down in a comfy spot and we all got a proper night's sleep.

Our overnighters in posh hotels were not without incident.  On one occasion Daisy launched herself at one of the very stylish standard lamps causing it to crash onto the tiled floor and shatter into a zillion pieces.  Nick was out walking the dog and I was in the shower.  I heard the crash and dashed into the bedroom in my birthday suit to find a sea of broken glass on the floor and Daisy on a comfy chair wearing her "nothing to do with me" look.

It turned out that we definitely did need a cat.  Over her short life Daisy caught hundreds of mice, along with other things.  Her repertoire included a mole, a stoat, luckily very few birds although a hapless moorhen, and a few bats who all lived to tell the tale.  Frogs, toads and lizards had to run for cover and the young snake she brought into the bedroom one morning was very cross.  

She was also a very mischievous little thing.  Cats will be cats and true to type she loved hiding in bags and boxes, climbing up high and pushing things off the edge.  One morning we sat up in bed with our mugs of tea and watched as a large holdall on top of the wardrobe gradually inched towards the front and finally dropped off.  Daisy looked down at it with huge satisfaction.  

One of her favourite games was to go out in the rain, come in and demand to be dried off then go straight out and do it all again.  She just loved getting a rub down with a fluffy towel.

She helped with household chores by getting in the way and was generally always around us.  Her favourite time of day was "apéro time" when we all sat together, preferably outdoors, for a drink and some treats.  Her treat of choice was Dreamies.

After Lulu died we got our standard poodle Hugo.  They got on famously from the very start and were best friends.  In reality he adored her and she teased him mercilessly.  Her favourite taunts were to run between his legs at speed from the other end of the garden, to sneak up on him when he was eating and biff his tail, to demand that he licked her ears (which, being the perfect gentleman, he was happy to do), and swipe at him when he stopped.

We didn’t settle in the UK house we had downsized to.  After only three years we were on the move again and one of the main reasons was undoubtedly Daisy.  The house was on a busy road, which didn’t seem to matter until we ended up spending more time there than we expected to.  We were terrified that Daisy would either get run over or run away so we decided to keep her in.  It was hard work so we moved to a quieter area where there was a wood at the back of the house.  We were much happier and Daisy enjoyed being allowed outdoors again.  She was thriving, having a great life in both countries.  In France she had fields, barns and roofs to explore.  In the UK gardens, ponds and the wood.  She would run along the top of the fence chasing squirrels, jump across the roofs of sheds and garages, climb up and demand to be let in through the bedroom window.  Then she would go out through the cat flap and do it all over again.

When she had just turned seven years old we noticed the appearance of a small berry like red lump in front of her left ear.  The UK vet suggested it was probably not serious but offered to do a biopsy if we wanted one.  I remember thinking that this could cause Daisy and us a lot of pain and cost a lot of money and how right I was.  The lump did not change for six months but once back in France the following spring we thought it might be getting bigger.  A biopsy revealed that it was a sarcoma.  

In 2022 she had two operations to remove the tumour, one in France in June and the second in the UK in December after it made a reappearance.  That second operation was a big job and afterwards she was unable to close her eye properly.  After a few months she ended up with a corneal ulcer requiring more treatment by the French vet.  There it was discovered that the tumour was back and was growing fast.  Another operation would have required the removal of the ear and eye and even then with no certainty that all the cancerous cells had been removed.  For us it was out of the question.

The eye was treated successfully but we were just waiting for the inevitable.  We gave her the best life we could for the last few months but finally she, and we, lost the battle on 12th October.  She was only nine years old and we are immensely sad that she didn't get the chance to live to a ripe old age.  She was unique, a joy to have around and we miss her enormously.  There will never be another Daisy.

Since I started writing this post we heard of a mature cat in need of a home, called Yvonne.  She now lives with us, is very different from Daisy and is settling in.