We have done something we said we would never do, and admitted luxury cat food on to the premises. With five cats to support, whose combined weight must be pushing 30 kilos, we had been concealing the existence of Sheba from them. It's bad enough buying that amount of ordinary cat food. Only our ginger is really overweight, and the grey tabby is borderline skinny. They are all large cats. A fully grown Maine Coon tom can stand on his hind legs and comfortably rest his chin on a normal height table, when he has the mind to do so.
The luxury cat food purchase came about to tempt the invalid to eat. As it has been hot, and all he has to do all day is lie around the study or, for a change of scene, lie about the sitting room, he doesn't have much of an appetite. It doesn't help that all of them decided to go off fish flavours, especially haddock, just as we'd bought two dozen tins of it. So the black cat was shut in the privacy of the study and a special pouch of luxury food opened for him, which it turned out he liked very much. The other cats knew something better than tinned haddock was in the offing and queued outside the study door. When they manage to get in before the invalid has finished they polish it off, so now they have all had a taste of the stuff. If the big tabby were a human being he would definitely be one of those hospital visitors who while they are there absent-mindedly finishes off the patient's grapes. However, I don't think luxury cat food is simply a con to play on the sensibilities of owners who want to pamper their pets. It does actually seem to taste nicer to cats, alas.
Sometimes I feel guilty about the environmental impact of having so many cats, but not very guilty and not very often. I don't suppose the bits of haddock that end up in a tin of cat food are from any part of the fish that a human being in the developed world would consent to eat.
For human consumption I have just finished making blackcurrant jelly, but the jam thermometer seems to have broken, because I boiled it until it looked and behaved like jelly and it never got to within five degrees of jam temperature according to the thermomemeter. As downbeat starts to a day go, having to tip half a dozen jars of fruit soup back into the jam pan that you washed once already after making the fruit soup, then wash all the jars again, before reboiling and rebottling it and washing the pan again, scores quite highly on the pointless scale, so I hope it has set. Besides, we have other plans for tomorrow morning. Somebody from the lettuce farm called round this afternoon to say that bees had taken up residence in the loft over their office and could I remove them? I was not able to help at that minute, because I had an appointment elsewhere in an hour's time, and anyway didn't think the middle of a thunderstorm was a good moment to disturb them, but I promised to ring in the morning. He said they were flying in and out through the light fittings, and mentioned a lot of insulation. I am not optimistic that this will be straightforward. They could be my bees. I was planning on inspecting mine tomorrow once the thunderstorms had blown through. If neither hive has managed to smuggle a queen cell through my last inspections and abscond since last week then I shall be very pleasantly surprised.
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