Where do I begin.

Chapters of my travels across Europe remain to be written, but I will reserve those for a 'slow news week'. Suffice to say I am now officially a French cat - my passport says so - and it didn't require any blood letting, or any extra nights in France, which is just as well because my obtaining dual nationality might have involved money changing hands. I certainly saw some money change hands, and that could have meant sleeping on a roadside if we had to stay any longer.

F assures me it didn't mean that but we got on a train anyway and went through a tunnel and just as it was getting dark my internal GPS started telling me I was close too somewhere I had been before, somewhere my humans call home; somewhere with a big green garden.

Thank you to everyone who commented and for our welcome home messages. We will try to catch up on the reading and replying next week.

Yellow. Mr B got the house insides painted. F picked yellow. It smells of paint and it's yellow. Hmmmm. The downstairs toilet wasn't included in the paint job. It's my indoor toilet now (I prefer outdoors but now that I am an old man cat I need to go in the night, and indoors is easier for everyone), and it's a disgusting grey shade of 'toilet blue'. (Good thing it's all black in the dark.)

(Why did a certain generation paint the lavvy blue? That shade of blue? You know the one.)

Mr B said the tenants had painted the whole place in vile shades of grey. F hates grey - with a passion, so he got it covered up before she saw it. Not sure how come my bathroom is still grey-blue.  Home is devoid of furniture and has no curtains (nothing to see here), so I reinspected the cupboards. Upstairs has slopy ceilings and cupboards along the sides. I can even get under the shower from one of them. That all checked out. Before long I could smell fish and chips and sauntered downstairs to find my humans sitting on the floor in the empty lounge eating food off cardboard.

I got some fish.

Wednesday dawned grey and threatening rain but that didn't deter my garden inspection. Within a few minutes my nose had led me to a monster catnip bush. It's all a bit overgrown out here but nothing that a human won't try to control. F picked up a huge bucket of quinces and gave the lawn a no 5 haircut. That produced enough clippings to half fill a big compost Dalek, and the grass is still really long.

Despite arrangements no furniture arrived on Wednesday, but at least a man came and connected up the internet.  No furniture arrived on Thursday either. F drafted a stroppy email on Friday and just before she sent it the phone rang and I heard her tell Mr B that the furniture won't be delivered until 3 November. There might have been a bad word. Meanwhile I'm working on flattening the catnip plant.

Time has not been wasted. The garage (Mr B's domain) has been cleared, sorted, arranged and lots of stuff 'earmarked' for freecycling.  I found my old basket that sits on the workbench and has a view up the garden.  I supervised from there.

The shed (F's freehold) has been emptied, birdfeeders re-erected and hung in various trees, paint tins thrown out, tool hooks moved, and contents put back in her prefered arrangement. I rediscovered the Tigger Shelf under the bench in the shed, also useful for supervision.

Undergrowth has been explored. I raced up the apple tree (almost like I used to) .....and then there's the getting down.... fortunately F was doing something to a nearby birdfeeder at the time and after letting her laugh a bit, I also let her lift my down. Jumping down hurts these days. I'd forgotten that bit when I had my funny 5 minutes.

Mr B has even put a new microchip cat flap in my garage door - exclusively mine. (The old plain cat flap is being installed on the door to the understairs cupboard, so that I will also have exclusivity in my bathroom. I hate sharing, even with my humans.)

Loads of other stuff has been done, lots of it something that F calls admin. I haven't supervised that, it's boring stuff involving phone calls and computer stuff. I have green space to explore, and part of the fence has been blown down into the jungle next door.  They think I haven't noticed. The neighbours yard is much worse than ours. About 7 years of overgrown, it is now one huge tangled mountain of brambles. Yes it is coming over the fences and it is part of what F has been making efforts to control, but I reckon she should simply ignore it and concentrate on growing more catnip.