Doors!

What is it with cats and doors? I think Austin is a bright lad on the whole - after all he was valedictorian of his basic training class (2007). He knows where his food is kept and he knows what he likes. There's no messing about with the hard stuff that breaks your canines (or is that felines?), or chunks of decomposed rabbit or the ambiguously named "poultry"! It's the chicken he's after. So much so that when I sling a couple of breasts into the oven for dinner, he's there with his knife and fork and napkin tucked in ready. But doors? I think he definitely has areas of his brain which need jump starting?

There are three doors to the outside in this house - and I will just take a moment here to give some architectural detail. In this house the downstairs is upstairs and the upstairs is downstairs and the back garden is upstairs and the front garden is downstairs. The back door is at the side, the conservatory is upstairs behind the kitchen and the front door is, surprisingly, at the front! If you stand at the end of the back garden, you can look down over the top of the house. Are you keeping up? Yesss! we live on a hill. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Doors.

Like all cats he has to check every door when it's raining - fine. He has also decided that each door serves a different purpose. So if he wants to attend to his important little private matters it's the conservatory door. If he wants to play hide and seek with the eleven dogs that live within spitting distance, he goes out the back door (which is at the side). If he wants to play in the traffic he goes out the front door (which is at the front). As he has only just come to terms with the fact that I don't do mornings and the evenings are getting lighter - and I don't do them either, he has become very, very brave. He now goes out on his own in the daylight! Yeah!

Of course this conundrum of the doors puts him bang straight on the horns of a dilemma when he's nipped out the conservatory door for a pee and crafty fag to discover that he's needed round the front for a traffic update. Does he run the gauntlet of Big Ginge and the eleven spitting dogs by creeping round the side, or worse, the wrath of his human by demanding to be let in and out a dozen times? I must admit he's always very apologetic as he slinks through the kitchen.

Note to self. Put catflap feasibility study on the agenda.