Muffin is well - thanks for asking!

Muffin has been a bit more wobbly than usual lately. She has always been a bit wobbly but more so since she has reached her current vast age of nearly 19.

One of her not so endearing habits is to find socks or other furry objects and drag them around the house screaming like a Banshee. She always does this in the dead of night or very early morning.

We think this is in response to when she was only small and had two kittens and we continued to find where she had hidden them and take them away from her to play with them.

These two kittens were Bilbo and Baggins and this was 18 years ago - so she has a long memory. We kept them both but they have both since gone to meet the Cat God who lives in the sky and is waiting patiently for Muffin.

Anyway – one of the last jobs at night is to make sure there are no stray socks or furry objects lying about because this is not a sound you can ignore.

Lately she has been very restless and roams round the house meowing plaintively. She lies in the one spot staring into space for hours. She follows me round the house staring at me and whenever I sit down she wants to sit next to me. If I lie down she wants to sit on top of me - but she has always done that. She also dribbles on me a lot.

I think this is the same sort of stuff that happened to Mrs. Bush in George’s last year in the White House - but I thought I should take Muffin to the Vet to make sure that there was nothing wrong with her – apart from her significant age – which equates to about 90 in human years.

So the Vet had a good look and of course it was necessary to do X-rays and Blood tests. The verdict – after spending more than I did on my Eric Bompard Turtleneck Sweater – is that Muffin has some constipation and some arthritis but is otherwise in spectacularly good condition for a 19 year old cat.

I have to give her a daily does of stuff in her mouth with a syringe. This I have to do on my own as Cate is away. This is extraordinarily difficult to do if the cat does not want to take the dose – which Muffin does not.  

I do not expect that my arm and elbow – or most of the kitchen – will suffer from constipation in the near future.

There is nothing we can do about arthritis. Muffin and I will have to tough it out together.

The picture is of Muffin in sleeker times. She would not want me to show her in her current scruffy condition.