And a less Merry Christmas to one in particular

Just at the moment, the milk of human kindness is not flowing through my veins. Or perhaps I mean the milk of feline kindness. IdiotCat is Not My Favourite Cat at the moment.

Over Christmas we went to visit GrannyBear, and LocalFriend kindly came in to feed and cuddle IdiotCat. He appears to have been mostly well-behaved and delighted to see LocalFriend when she came.

For the past two nights, we have visited GrandmaBear and GrandadBear in The North. Two nights is generally enough for IdiotCat to cope on his own, with full water and food bowls. Naturally, he's always delighted to see us come home, but doesn't otherwise appear to suffer any ill-effects from being temporarily abandoned. The trauma of the building work appears to have rendered this no longer true.

We arrived home today to find the house utterly reeking of cat wee.

IdiotCat had not only relieved himself in his favourite corner, behind the living room door, but all the way along the edge of the door. Some of it was still nauseatingly damp, and some of it was dry, stale and acrid. Hooray.

Which is how it came to pass that I dispatched BigBear and LittleBear upstairs to build a hydraulic robot arm, while I took the door off its hinges, lifted the carpet; prised carpet staples out of the floor and took a stanley knife to the underlay to remove a section of it. I then got down on hands and knees and scrubbed the (reeking) floorboards with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. And then I washed and rinsed, and washed and rinsed, and washed and rinsed the (reeking) underlay. And finally, despairingly, I washed, rinsed, scrubbed, vinegared, washed, rinsed, scrubbed and vinegared the (reeking) carpet.

To survive the night, without IdiotCat marauding into our bedrooms and keeping us awake, I have (temporarily) re-hung the door, replaced the underlay with old towels, and semi re-fitted the carpet. It certainly looks considerably fluffier and cleaner and fresher than it did before. However, I am now sitting, watching television and sniffing the suspicious waft of stale cat urine that I am convinced is still emanating from the carpet nearby.

Merry Bloody Christmas.