Saturday was the day the cat had her annual check up. No problems. The vet said she’d gained a bit of weight, which she needed to do, and that her heart was strong. Apart from a hole in one of her teeth that needed sorting out, she was in fine shape. So she had her injections and came home.

By lunch time, we’d started to notice that the cat was behaving a bit out of character. She’s an old lady, so she doesn’t move about a lot at the best of times, but she does go outside occasionally and she does walk around pointing out the deficiencies in cat care of which we are guilty. “Why hasn’t the litter tray been cleaned?” “Surely you don’t expect me to eat cat food, again, do you?” The usual stuff: but Saturday afternoon and evening she was completely immobile in front of the living room radiator and nothing could stir her.

Both Carole and I had a lot of work to do this weekend. Carole’s working on a publication and I had some work to do on a couple of Web sites. So we made sure the cat had food and water, and basically got on with our lives. By 7:00 p.m., though, the cat had gone missing. She must just have gone for a prowl around, we thought; but it was very cold and when she hadn’t returned after an hour we started to worry. Neither of us had seen her go out, so we hunted around the house, in all the places she would normally go (under the sofa, on top of the wardrobes …). The cat was not to be found.

By 8:00 p.m. we were really worried that she’d done a Capt. Oates on us. We hunted around the garden. We knocked on the neighbours’ doors and hunted around their gardens. Nothing. We went around the block and found a number of other cats all of whom expressed a willingness to accompany us back into the warm, but Bitzi was not to be seen and we began to accept that the worst had happened.

So we sat a bit on the sofa feeling miserable and telling ourselves that this was the sort of thing that cats did when they heard the call of the great litter tray in the sky. She was an old cat after all and it was bound to happen sooner or later. It would have been better if we could have let her die peacefully in the warm, but with cats, well, they do what cats do.

By 10:00 p.m. Carole had roused herself a bit and decided that, despite everything, she just had to get some work done. So with a heavy heart she went upstairs to pull out some paper she had “filed” under the bed.

As she peered into the sub-duvetic gloom, she fancied that she saw a cat shape at the furthest corner of the bed. “No,” she told herself, “It’s just that I want to see a cat shape. My mind is playing tricks.” She did look again, though, and there did seem to be something vaguely cat-like, barely perceptible through the darkness. When the bed was moved, guess who was sitting there, sulking. You guessed it.

She was definitely not a happy cat, but we googled for feline reactions to vaccination and found that they could lead to up to 24 hours of lethargy and depression.

Yesterday morning after a night in which the cat moved just once from her nest (to go downstairs and use the litter tray) I was sent to Sainsbury’s for cat supplies. One tin of salmon and half a dozen Whiskas cat sweets later, the cat was back to normal.

Capt. Oates, indeed!