Tuesday 14 February 2017

twice bitten

Mr Fidget has taken to scrabbling at the bedroom door and wailing pathetically in the corridor in the mornings.  He knows that we are in there with Our Ginger, and feels left out.  Or something. The first time we let him in did not end well when he peed on my bedside rug.  I was amazed at how well it washed out and that the rug did not smell of cat pee afterwards, but it wasn't something I wanted to make a habit of.  After that the bedroom was strictly out of bounds to Mr Fidget.  Mr Fluffy was included in the ban, despite not having done anything wrong, while Mr Cool never showed any signs of wanting to join in.

This morning we felt sorry for Mr Fidget, sounding so desperate and so left out, and let him in, closely followed by Mr Fluffy who thought it was wonderful and galloped around the bedroom.  Our Ginger thought it was a terrible idea and sulked furiously, in between bouts of thumping poor Mr Fluffy.  Mr Fidget peed on the bed.

The Systems Administrator was remarkably restrained on emerging from the shower to find piles of bed linen plus the duvet dumped in the upstairs corridor.  I took the question What happened? to be rhetorical since it was not hard to guess what had happened.  I put the duvet cover and sheet on to wash and investigated whether and how you could wash an electric blanket.  Ours has instructions on it, and the answer is that you can.  Meanwhile the SA had Googled How to wash an electric blanket and came up with what I was already doing, which was to hand wash the affected area and run it a great deal under the tap.  Then I had to go out, having draped the electric blanket over the kitchen table and blotted it as dry as I could with a towel.  Do Not Use When Wet, said the instructions.

When I got back the SA had turned it over a couple of times and it was almost dry.  I hung the duvet cover and sheet on the rack in the laundry room to dry and put the mattress cover on to wash, then set off out again with the duvet stuffed into a bin bag in search of somewhere to wash it. Originally I was going to try a launderette in Clacton I found on Google, but a friend at this morning's meeting told me there was one in Manningtree that did service washes.  Reader, I succumbed to temptation and left the duvet to be cared for by experts at vast expense rather than sitting watching it go round for an hour or two.  Once I'd given my details and booked the duvet in I did confess that the reason why I'd brought it now was that the cat had had an accident on it.  The woman in the laundry just looked at me.  England must be full of duvets that could probably do with a wash if only it wasn't such a hassle, and only finally make it to the launderette when something sordid happens.

When I got home the mattress cover had finished washing, and I had to drape it over two chairs in front of the Aga to start drying since there didn't seem any point in piling things three deep on the laundry room rack.  We do not have a tumble drier.

I grumbled about Mr Fidget's unpleasant behaviour to a friend who used to keep pugs, and she said yes, her pugs had to be kept out of her bedroom because they wanted to pee on her pillow.  It seems it is not just us and Mr Fidget, then, but something about their owners' beds that gets some animals thoroughly over-excited.  After two mishaps in the bedroom Mr Fidget is not going the given a third chance, pathetic scrabbling and wailing notwithstanding.  Our Ginger will be delighted.

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