Is it a burglar? Is it a ghost?

No, the horrendous crashing sound and the just plain weird scrabbling noises that woke us up in a bit of a panic last night were caused by Millie the cat.


Yes, that cat. The so-cute pretty little tabby who tries to convince visitors that we never feed her. The cat that usually sleeps at my feet like a little hot water bottle but sometimes decides to come up and sit on my pillow, virtually on top of my head. She may look like a sweet kitten but she'll be 10 this summer and she's getting to me a demanding old lady. I swear, if she were human she'd be wearing purple and doing more than just running her stick up and down the neighbours fences!

Anyway, the noise. This is what the air vent (is that the correct term?) cover used to look like in our bathroom.


And this is what it looks like now.


Over the last week Millie has taken to sitting on top of the cistern of the toilet. Heaven knows why. More of the demanding old lady issue I think. I don't particularly like it as the bathroom had, until then, been a cat hair free room. Last night, for some strange reason, she must have decided to reach up and start to try to pull the cover off to see what was behind it. She pulled it off the wall (the plaster's not wonderful on that wall), and the crashing sound was the cover and lumps of plaster falling into the bath. The scrabbling sound was her trying to climb into the vent. I kid you not. When I went into the bathroom to see what on earth was going on, she was halfway up the wall, holding onto the edge of the vent with her front paws, scrabbling with her back paws, with her head almost all the way inside the hole. Honestly.

She's sitting on my lap as I type this, purring and trying to convince me that I was dreaming and she's a well-behaved puss cat. But I know better - I have the scratch marks on and the hole in the wall to prove it!