Felix was up at the crack of noon* today, unusually. Here he was at 10am, still asleep on his rug on top of an old trunk and suitcase behind Mum’s chair – but looking warily as I took a photo..

Perhaps he wasn’t ready for his breakfast because he was still digesting the mouse he caught last evening. I was alerted to this when I went into my room to close the french doors and discovered a pile of books in disarray. After a long moment of ‘What the…?’ as my brain cogs engaged, I checked under the bed with a torch and found some bits and pieces, which turned out to be a little tail, two tiny paws and something else I couldn’t identify. I swept them up, along with pieces of a book which had somehow been chewed in the chase. Later, I found some clothes on the floor where they’d fallen from the bottom rung of a ladder shelf, and the shoes underneath upturned. I guess the battle was fought on several fronts. Just as well the poor wee mouse didn’t run up the Christmas tree.

*This expression has amused me since the 1970s when I read it in Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.