That darn cat! (Or.......return of the Tiger.....again!)

                                          

  It is a well-known fact in our house that Tiger always has some kind of sixth sense whenever we are off to other places for a few days, or a week or more......I don't even have to get out the cases for him to somehow know that things are afoot. All my best laid plans can come unstuck if I forget to make sure I cut off his escape routes, or his hiding places!   

Come the morning of  the day when I take him to Posh Paws Cattery, I sometimes 

have had to phone them and say " I will be coming later today, he has gone to ground" Then I attempt to coerce him back indoors with bribery and corruption! Tempting titbits, a rattle of a favourite cat biscuit packet, and even on one famous occasion I switched on our electric carving knife, leaving the back door open, and sure enough, he came hurtling down the garden path and into the kitchen, to come to a halt at his dish and find it empty......not replete with the remains of the Sunday roast!
Well, it worked didn't it! Just don't report me to the RSPCA!   
He has his various strategies for coping if I manage to close all the external doors before he can bolt outside and disappear over next door's hedge! Or on the garage roof! 

    

You can't catch me!

One of his best hiding places is under the pine stacker-beds in the loft!  He knows that I cannot lift them and fish him out at the same time! It takes two of us and Timelord being at work until the day of the holiday,I am the one who takes Tiger to his billet.  

Posh Paws itself is at the end of a rural country lane near Lichfield and as you can see in the  

 photo I took this morning, it consists of a number of pine chalets, enclosed with a fence, and the owner's housetop is peeping above the dense hedgerow.Each pen has an inside space and an outside "run" which Tiger likes.  He never makes a noise when we are making our way there in the car, enclosed in his cat basket. And goes straight into his pen. When I go to collect him, he is not really bothered about coming home! The owners look after their charges very well.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

An outside "run"

Tiger in his pen. Too cosy to move!

So, I was driving along earlier today, surrounded by the onset of the autumn colours, russet red berries now on the hawthorn, flame orange red on the rowan tree, lime tree leaves beginning to turn yellow, and bracken in the hedge going brown. I thought about all the miles we drove yesterday, home from a family wedding in Yorkshire. We passed through several English counties along the way, and rolling fields newly cropped, with their hay bales dotted about. Some fields have round ones, some rectangular, and others I saw had them stacked like a game of Jenga!  Novel!  But autumn is definately here to stay, and September around the corner....... a sense of summer finally beginning to fade..........and at least, I for one, feel as if we, at least here where we live, have enjoyed a bit of summer this year. So, Tiger is now home, having inspected all his favourite places in the garden, and  is curled up, completely oblivious, (yet!) of the fact that he will make the same journey again soon, when we take ourselves off to (hopefully!) autumn glory in the Lake District!