so far, a piece of bread, a dead baby blackbird and some kind of rodent (also pre-dead, thankfully). These are the presents of the last 24 hours. The last one arrived in the last 5 minutes.

The bread was amusing. We heard her do the victory blorp last night, and were worrying about what kind of animal she was going to present us with. So I switched the outside light on to have a look. She was crowing over a small white square. Closer inspection revealed that it was, in fact, a small white square of bread. We took that as a hint that she was hungry and put down some food.

This morning, a dead baby bird was noticed, on The Precious Rug. No sooner was this removed when she reappeared again, with some kind of rodent in her murdering mouth. It was too big to be a mouse, too small for a rat. I didn’t get a chance to count its toes, so uncertain if it was a shrew or not. It was dropped on the same square of The Precious Rug, that she’d dropped the bird on. Damnable creature!

I awoke to a great commotion outside the bedroom door - the Mogret was miowing/blorping/chirping excitedly and insistently.

Then we noticed the half-a-whateveritwas that she was consuming.

Well that’s nice, Cat: bring us a present and then get overexcited and eat it yourself. Thanks.

I guess it’s baby-bird season, and there’s no amount of beeping collars that will allow baby birds to escape from her. Which is sad, and makes me want to lock her inside. It’s a tricky one: I know she is obeying her nature, and the fact that she is the most efficient hunter that I’ve ever seen is something that nature rejoices in, but at the same time, I like birds, and the thought of any species losing a baby is anathema to me.

The solution is not to have a cat, I suppose, but she is such an important part of our lives that we would miss her terribly were we to give her away. She would make an excellent farm cat, and would thoroughly enjoy the experience, but we are too selfish for that. She’s *ours*!

So, I apologise to the bird population, but you are going to have to nest smarter. Admittedly quite a lot smarter, as Mogret’s pretty intelligent. Sorry.

We were starting to get a little concerned: she’s not allowed out at night, being nigh-on impossible to see, and it’s now dark. We’ve been calling and calling but no Mog.

Then, next door’s conservatory door opens just enough to allow a cat to leave, and then closes again. Suddenly the Mog appears at the end of next door’s garden.

We had assumed, all along, that she must visit other people, as I note the lady the other side installed a cat flap not long after Mogret arrived here. Apparently Mog used to wail outside their bathroom window (upstairs - she climbed on their extension roof to do so) until they let her in..

Our cat is a disgrace.

Tony, the guy whose house she has just left, lost a cat to a car before we moved in, and warned us about keeping her safe. I’m glad she has befriended him, as cat-people without cats are sad and lonely creatures, having lived without cats for a few years myself.

No sign of Random Cat tonight. Haven’t seen him since he wailed in the garden for Mogret to come out to play this morning. Honestly, it’s like a kid knocking on your door to ask if his friend can come out to play. Still, it’s cute.

For the last week or so, there has been a wailing, hungry young tom prowling round our neighbourhood. The Mogret is a bit bemused by this and hasn’t reacted with her normal anti-Other-Cat fury. I’d almost call her behaviour coquettish, if I didn’t know that she can read English and would skewer me for such cheek. It’s cute.

Random Cat was abducted by us last week, and trapped in the kitchen for several hours, whereupon he turned from a terrified, haunted-looking cat, into the most affectionate and friendly young cat I’ve ever met. He actually wailed when I stopped stroking him. Bless. But, as the evening wore on, I began to feel that maybe he wasn’t a stray: he was just too affectionate to be a truly random cat. So, I let him go.

I’ve been pining for him ever since, and subsequent attempts to entrap him again, have met with naught but bloodshed. Poor philb has some lacerations on his arm that will take a fair while to heal. But, my sympathy lies with Random Cat. He’s just too hungry to be being fed and adored on a regular basis. He’s so terrified of humans that you can actually see the internal battle between the hunger and the fear, and the hunger is powerful enough to let him come within a foot of a human, just to eat. That saddens me. All cats should have a human slave.

It’s so bitterly cold out there, that I worry about the poor mite. He doesn’t have the lush fur of the Mog and I bet he’s cold out there.

Hopefully, we will manage to bring him in and reassure him. In the meantime, he will continue to be fed by us. It would be so nice for Mog to have a friend to chase around. Us human creatures do try, but we can’t climb furniture and hide behind things in the same way that a cat can, so we let her down in the cat-entertainment department.

I’ve been at home all day; it’s a weird feeling - being off work and being alone in the house. Well, alone apart from the cat device.

The reason I’m off work is that I apparently have labyrinthitis. My husband says it’s caused by too much David Bowie, but I fear he is A Silly. I seem to be having dizzy spells at inconvenient moments. One such moment occurred yesterday at work, and unfortunately there were witnesses. I avoided being sent directly home, but did have to promise to see the GP at his earliest convenience. Which I did, and I now have a small heap of prochlorperazine tablets to stave off the nausea/dizzyness with. So far, they seem to be working.

I’ve been trying to keep as still as possible, to give my poor ears some rest. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite know how to explain this to poor Mogret: she wanted to play hide and seek and kept pouncing and dancing away. There weren’t really enough cars in the car park to make a convincing game of it anyway, and eventually she settled for playing with various catnip-infused fluffy devices.

I still haven’t quite figured the mog out: sometimes (usually when hungry) she is affectionate and soppy, but the greater part of her waking life is spent ignoring humans. She doesn’t encourage tactile interaction, but nor does she resent it, she’s just indifferent.

Her obvious lack of need-for-humans makes it even cuter that she is currently sitting on the gatepost in the dark, waiting for my husband to come home.

Mind you, I suspect she thinks he’s a big cat.

How does your cat wake you up? Assuming you have one, of course.

The Mogret has many tactics for awakening us; they vary in intensity and ignorability. Mostly she will start out with the typical greeting blorp, to let us know she has decided that it is Morning. If we fail to respond to this with the required action i.e. leaping out of bed at once to feed her and open the cat flap, she will progress to the next level. This usually involves some sort of physical violence. She punches, she pamples, she divebombs.

If this brute-force approach doesn’t work, it is time for the claws to come into play. Unfortunately she has learned about Under the Duvet, and the fact that a artfully-aimed swipe at the end of the bed will probably result in all sorts of interesting reactions from the taller of the two humans. How grateful I am to be short!

Sometimes, having attempted violence upon us with no results, she will then divert from shredding humans to shredding paper. She will search the house for paper or cardboard, bring it into the bedroom, and shred it loudly. She knows this will seldom fail to provoke a reaction, as one can never be sure exactly what it is that she has chosen to destroy.

If this is ignored, she will start on the non-feet end of the bed and attempt violence on arms or any other available flesh. Such was the impressive reaction she got this morning to a stealth attack on phil, that I fear we have taught her a new trick. Basically, she attempted to shred him, and he leapt upwards, creating enough of a gap under the duvet for an obstinate cat to gain entry. So she did, and sat under the duvet, staring at him.

Unfortunately, at this point he had decided to get up as the tea-indicator was flashing. I do hope there was enough time between the attack and the getting out of bed, for a connection not to have been made in the little cat-brain, but I doubt it.

I do worry that sooner or later she will learn the ultimate way of getting phil out of bed: making tea in the next room, so the smell will set off the tea-indicator and therefore cause the self-launch program to initiate. I do hope she can’t read this.

The mogret and I have been playing hide and seek in the car park. It’s quite a strange experience, to be chased around by a year-old cat. She seems to really enjoy the game. I’m not sure what our neighbours think of me dashing around madly and lurking behind their cars. I’m quite sure they are unable to see the cat from their windows, so it must appear that I’ve gone quite mad.