How a bird in the hand led to two in a cage

Many years ago, when my stepson David was barely a teenager, he was coming back into the house from the garden when he glanced up at the roof and stopped, frozen in his tracks. On the edge of the roof was perched a white dove.

He barely had time to think, “oh, how I wish he’d fly down to me,” before the dove granted his wish and came down to settle on his head.

By mutual consent of our family and the bird, he made his home with us for the rest of his life. He received a name, Fotzel. That’s a term of endearment for a mischievous little boy, in the dialect of Alsace, in Eastern France, which was the mother tongue of both David and his mother, my wife Danielle.

Fotzel on the wing

Danielle is good with birds, as she is with animals generally, or with plants, and indeed with us. She decided that what Fotzel needed was a companion. Or, more specifically, a mate.

She found one in a pub that had so many doves in an aviary at the back that they could spare one without noticing her absence. By this time, we’d built an aviary of our own, taller than a tall man and about as long on each side. It was enclosed with strong chicken wire but we’d made a hole in the top, big enough for the doves to fly in and out, but too small for any hawk to try flying in.

The female duly laid a clutch of eggs. But then, however, she decided that life in our garden was nothing like exciting enough. Maybe she’d got too used to the livelier atmosphere of a pub, though I couldn’t say. All I know is that she cleared off, abandoning her eggs in the dovecote we’d built.

Not a problem, it turned out. Fotzel took over, sat of the eggs till they hatched, and then looked after the hatchlings until they turned into healthy and happy adults. Well, I don’t know how to measure dove happiness, but at any rate they ate their feed with apparent enthusiasm and seemed disinclined to clear off, despite the hole in the roof which left them free to make their own choice on the matter.

I don’t, of course, want to condone incest, but I have to admit it worked for our dove community. Within a relatively short time, it had turned into a real colony, busy, lively and cheerful. And, naturally, Fotzel was its patriarch until he took his last flight, off into the unknown, at a ripe old age (as far as we could tell).

Fotzel surveying his domain

Some years later, David had ensconced himself firmly in Scotland, where he lives with his family to this day and their great satisfaction, while we had moved to Strasbourg in Eastern France. On our way to dinner with friends who lived in converted farmhouse in the nearby countryside, Danielle told me, “if they ask us to take a kitten, the answer is no. Got it?”

I got it. But that evening, when each of us in turn had the exquisite pain of having a tiny cat climbing our legs, using his claws for grip, we simply couldn’t resist the temptation – such as is the animal-lover’s perversity – and took him home. So started Misty’s fifteen-year stay with us, ended only by undiagnosable but disabling illness just last year. He followed us from France to Germany to England and finally to a well-deserved and apparently satisfactory retirement in Spain. 

Misty as a young lad
Always keen on choosing inappropriate receptacles to relax in

He did become a little cranky as an adult, something I put down to being dragged from France to Germany to England and finally to Spain. The crankiness left me scars which have now faded, but I clearly remember the scratches on my hands. They were often for unforgivable offences, such as stroking him without paying due attention to the process. I would make the mistake of thinking that I could watch TV and stroke Misty at the same time, a delusion from which he rapidly (and painfully) disabused me.

Still, he stayed with us, never showing any desire to clear off, right to the end of his life, nearly eighteen months ago.

Misty enjoying his retirement in Spain
and still as ready as ever to relax in odd places

Now fast forward to just last week. We had been invited to lunch with our excellent friends Pamela and Ian. When we stepped outside for some hors-d’oeuvre titbits and a glass of wine on their patio, they warned us, “oh, you might have to watch out. A bird showed up this morning and seems not to want to go. It was sitting on the edge of the sofa a short time ago.”

It was sitting there still. It was a budgie. She (for it turns out she was a she) was white with the faintest of faint blue on her back. She was dishevelled, not terribly clean and obviously not in the happiest of states.

Danielle, as I mentioned before, is good with birds. Pamela and Ian did have some seeds. In principle, they were for human consumption, but when Danielle gave her a handful, the bird hoovered them up with every sign of enjoyment. She also had some water. 

And after lunch (ours as well as hers), inevitably, we took her home.

That was something of a feat since we were on bikes. Fortunately, Pamela and Ian lent us a cat carrier. Danielle pulled off the remarkable trick of cycling with one hand on the handlebars while she clutched the carrier’s handle in the other.

By that evening, we had a cage. And as had happened with Fotzel, we even had a companion – or more than likely a mate – for the newcomer to our household. 

Our new resident, delicately attired in tasteful white,
and her new mate, dressed more flamboyantly
Keeping one beady eye each on my doings

I like birdsong, so it’s a pleasure to hear them tweeting in their cage outside our front door. A lot more pleasant than the social media activity that goes by the same name (or is it called X-ing now?) It's equally a pleasure to go out and see how they’re doing in the morning, even before I have my first cup of coffee. 

For the third time, simple serendipity has provided us with a new animal extension to our household which we’re happy about. Another unplanned pleasure, as I was celebrating in my last post.

By the way, since the second arrival’s a male, he’s inherited the name Fotzel. As for the lady in white, Danielle has named her Justine. That’s pronounced the French way, with the ‘u’ roughly rhyming with ‘oo’ in ‘boon’.

Danielle’s not certain how she came up with the name. I reckon it’s because the bird had clearly flown away from her original home and had probably been driven by the heavy winds we’ve been having lately, until she was completely lost. Then we luckily turned up and were able to save her from her difficulties, and Pamela and Ian from the problem of working out what to do with her.

Justine time.

Justine and Fotzel indoors
for a brief cage-cleaning operation

Refuge from toxicity

One of the great things about living in Spain is that the weather here is, generally, a lot better than anywhere else I’ve lived.

I say ‘generally’ because, around here in Valencia, when it rains it really chucks it down, for days at a time. But when it’s fine, it’s really fine.

Trouble with that is that it appeals to more than us humans. For instance, this is a nation in which there flourishes a particularly dynamic race of masonry ants. Now, I’m strongly in favour of learning to share our planet with other species. Call me prejudiced if you like, however, but I’m really not keen on having the bricks our house is built of reduced to long, thin trails of red dust.

This means getting the pest control man in. In what feels delightfully paradoxical, he helps keep our house free of pests by using thoroughly pestilential products. One of them, as well as being lethal to unwelcome creatures, would undoubtedly not do our health any good either. We had to get out of the place for a couple of hours.

Ah, this is the life.
Just the retirement earned by a long mousing career

That was no problem for Misty, the cat. Of the four countries we’ve obliged him to live in, Spain seems to be the one he likes best. A fine place for his retirement, he seems to feel. Especially in the summer, when he shows no reluctance at all to staying outside, even overnight. During the day’s even easier. He just had to choose which particular patch of sun he felt most comfortable lying down in.

That just left us and the dogs. What we needed, we felt, was a bar or café, with a garden where we could spend an hour or so, nursing a drink, in pleasant surroundings.

Not as simple as it sounds, though.  It was like when someone asks us to recommend a hotel near where we live. I don’t know any hotels where I live. I live there, after all.

When we were in town, with loads of cafés or restaurants nearby, we knew plenty of places to go to. But we moved out here to be somewhere quieter. There just aren’t any cafés around the corner, and we don’t know that many even a drive away. After all, being out here, and this was one of the aims of the move, means that if you want a drink in an attractive setting, you can have one at home.

Which, as I’ve explained, wasn’t on just then.

Fortunately, we did know one place not that far away, a restaurant with a bar and a garden. It’s lovely once you’ve arrived, but getting there’s not much fun. In particular, one of the places you have drive down is in a such a state that you have to worry whether your car’s axles will stand it. Or, even more worrying, your neck. Really, I think of that stretch as a series of potholes with a few bits of roadway mixed in.

Still, it was just the place for us. Except for the sign we saw as we drove in. “Strictly no dogs”.

I suggested we drive on, looking for somewhere else. But Danielle thought I should go in and ask first. I realised she was right – after all, the worst they could say was ‘no’, which would leave us no worse off than if we left.

And this is another thing I like about Spain.

It may be down to Catholicism. Or perhaps to the Mediterranean way. It’s an attitude I’ve met in Italy and France as well. Regulation is seen as a guideline. Something to be approached, but not to be adhered to slavishly.

It can be irritating, as when people don’t respect social distancing or drive down our street at twice the speed limit. But it can be a joy at other times. Especially as a contrast to the “more than my job’s worth, mate,” I’ve met all too often in England.

You see, Protestants, or possibly Northerners, follow a harsh, unforgiving God. The “vengeance is mine” kind of God. Not so much the more broadminded God of “why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

“Ah, yes,” they told me in the bar, “dogs are strictly not allowed. But that’s because the owner has a large dog that wanders around here off the lead. But he’s away right now. So, just for once, and on a completely exceptional basis, you can have your dogs here while your house is being fumigated.”

A pleasant place, good company, a large G&T
make for a fine place of temporary refuge

Given that on top of that, they poured the gin for Danielle’s gin and tonic by eye – none of those cheapskate measures or anything – this place turned out to be just what we needed to pass the time of our exclusion from home.

Luci found the place perfectly satisfactory

And the dogs liked it too.

A bunch of swallows may make the spring

With Spain moving into week 5 of the coronavirus lockdown, we’re counting our blessings here near Valencia. The chief of which is that spring seems to have come at last.

As the lockdown started, so the weather broke. For the first two or three weeks, Valencia seemed intent on making sure that the reservoirs were all full and the new growing plants well-watered. Hardly a day went by without some rain, and in many cases, several hours of the wearisome stuff.

It was as though the very heavens were weeping out of sympathy for our sad, locked-down state.

The reality, of course, is that nature is entirely indifferent to the disruption to our lives. The first hint of that was when we came downstairs one morning to a veritable racket of birdsong. Honestly, if it wasn’t deafening, it wasn’t far off.

“The housemartins are back!” I called to Danielle.

The housemartins return. And that's their nest under our porch

We went out to check, and there they were. Not just one pair, but two, apparently in some rivalry over the tidy little nest in the porch over our front door. By the end of the morning, one pair had established their property rights over it, though oddly enough they were the smaller birds of the four.

They, it seems, are going to be our guests this summer.

Well, I say our guests. I suspect from their point of view, we’re the lumbering irritants who keep coming out of the great unknown space behind their home, disturbing their peace of mind each time we do so. Still, we like to think of the nest as attached to our house, and of them as our housemartins.

They’d been there to greet us when we first moved in last year. We’d been anxiously awaiting them this year, since the beginning of March, wondering each day what had become of them. After all, the nest was right there where they’d left it, just as the architect who was overseeing the work we had done before we moved in had made clear to us.

“You can’t remove the nest,” he told us earnestly, “it’s against the law.”

We had no intention of removing it. The birds were more fun to watch than some of the TV series with which we fill our lockdown evenings. We saw the pair who were staying with us bring up not one, but two clutches of fledglings. Every time we came in, we’d see the heads sticking out of the nest, until eventually they flew off, only to be replaced within a couple of weeks by some more youngsters.

Eventually, they left us again in the autumn. Which, I feel, rather makes the point of their being guests. After all, we’re here the whole year around. They just turn up when it suits them, treating the place as a motel. I’m surprised they haven’t asked us to do their washing for them.

Anyway, they’re back. It’s said that one swallow – and housemartins are swallows – doesn’t make a summer. But there’s a whole bunch of them now, because it’s not just our house that’s received its visitors, but several of our neighbours too. And the warm weather turned up bang on cue right after them.

Which has come as a great pleasure not just to us, but to the other animals we share this house with.

Misty, now a venerable cat, who takes what pleasure he can from just watching birds and dreaming of the past when he would have quickly converted them into pleasant snacks, enjoys lying on the sun-warmed grass. Luci, the black toy poodle likes the sun too. But of all three, none is a more shining example of what it is to be a fully committed sun worshipper than the apricot toy poodle, Toffee.

She’ll share the pleasure willingly with either Misty or Luci if they care to join her. But if they don’t, that’s fine too. She just flops down on the grass in complete contentment, giving us all an object lesson in what it truly means to relax.

Toffee really understands what it is to bask in the spring sunshine
But she's happy to share it with others if they feel the inclination

Like the swallow, Toffee’s a true herald of the coming summer. Which is a welcome break from all that rain. Why, it may even make the lockdown bearable.

Cat flaps and tests of intelligence. Plus relaxation

Relaxation. So important. And so far beyond most of us. Though not beyond our non-human friends.

It’s been a pleasure to watch our pets settling in to our new home here. They certainly seem to like being in Valencia.

Valencia: having fun at the beach in December (Luci's the Luci-coloured one)
What’s not to like?

Luci and Toffee, the toy poodles, had been living with us in our flat, inside Valencia itself. That was fine, because we like the flat and we like Valencia; it was also just five minutes’ walk from the Turia river park, seven kilometres of former river bed now turned into an extraordinary park, with sports pitches and cycle tracks and just plain paths people can walk along, with or without their dogs.

Our two loved it, especially the lake at the end of the park, where they could go swimming after ducks. Well, Toffee would paddle, but Luci would duck hunt with serious intent. That was fun to watch, since Luci would put every ounce of her strength into swimming after them, while the ducks glided calmly across the water in a leisurely way, marginally increasing their speed if she ever showed any sign of getting close.

The flat had disadvantages, however. For instance, there were two flights of uneven stairs to reach it. Toffee struggled on them and put her back out. So then we found ourselves carrying both dogs (why risk Luci putting her back out too?) up and down, four times a day, since there was no easy way to let them out to do what pet owners euphemistically refer to as their “business”.

The other downside was that Valencia is the fiesta capital of Spain and walls tend to be thin. Danielle and I value our sleep and it was a relatively rare commodity where we were living.

Misty, our cat, hadn’t joined us. He’d stayed with the friends who bought our house in England. It would have been too painful to him to live in a flat with no easy access to anything like a garden. Everywhere we’d lived, we’d always provided cat flaps to allow him to slip in and out of doors whenever he wanted.

Then, eventually, we moved. The new place, in La Cañada which is away from the town centre, is much quieter, which suits us. The dogs can get out of the back into a garden, and beyond that, into a bit of a park. Which suits them and us. They can get in and out easily and we don’t have to carry them. There’s also woodland beyond the park, and they get a kick out of going there too.

They get a kick out of visiting the woods too

Just as soon as we’d installed cat flaps, I brought Misty over to join us. He made the trip with surprising good grace, only beginning to protest – with loud mewing – during the last couple of hours of a journey that lasted fourteen and included a fllght. And only once did he pee on me, and only on one of my legs. Excellent behaviour for a cat who’d been through so traumatic an experience.

Now, for what I’m going to say next, I have to choose my words with care. Misty once stalked off into the night and didn’t reappear for twelve hours when Danielle and I were so tactless as to comment unfavourably on his weight. So I’ll just say he’s a large cat. We had to put in a large cat flap.

Our dogs are each around half Misty’s weight. Let me hastily add that they’re unusually small, rather than Misty being unusually big. Consequently, they think of cat flaps as dog flaps.

Toffee has completely mastered the technique. These days, if we’ve been out, we’re generally met on our return by the clatter of a flap followed by Toffee jumping up and down as we come in through the gate.

Luci on the other hand, doesn’t seem always to be up to it. If she gets locked out, she’ll come back in through the flaps, but sometimes she doesn’t seem inclined to go out that way. When Toffee greets us home, Luci ends up scratching the front door from the inside. And whimpering pathetically

This is odd because Luci’s not unintelligent. For example, she’s worked out that we’ve left a gap in the front fence for Misty to use if he wants to get right outside the house. He doesn’t, as it happens. A couple of disagreeable incidents have persuaded us to give him a cat litter tray indoors, since Misty has clearly decided that, at fourteen, he’s sufficiently old not to be forced outside to do his ‘business’.

Instead it’s Luci who makes use of the fence gap. 

In Spain, the council doesn’t collect rubbish from individual houses. Instead, we take it down to the end of the road to throw it into large communal bins. This being the 21st century, they’re colour-coded for different categories of waste.

Imagine my shock when I’d finished carefully sorting a load of refuse and, turning around, discovered that Luci had followed me, leadless, the whole way. Which meant she’d walked independently down a road along which people drive like maniacs.

She occasionally seems unable to get from the house into the front yard. But once there, she knows how to go through the fence and into the road. This means she can follow us wherever we go, whatever the danger to which this exposes her.

Curious. One poodle can manage the cat flaps but not the fence gap. The other hangs back from the cat flaps but knows how to get out into the road.

Meanwhile Misty, for whom the whole setup was put in place, disdains to use any of them and instead takes advantage of his cat litter, without so much as a thank you for the unpleasant chore he leaves us.

Still. At least they’ve all three clearly settled in successfully and are enjoying their lives here. Something I observe from their capacity for total relaxation.

A model to emulate
Toffee and Luci show us what relaxation really means

However, when it comes to complete relaxation, nothing outdoes a cat
As Misty shows us

Emily, whose words speak to me still

One of the benefits of retiring is that I have, over the last few weeks, renewed my acquaintance with a fascinating woman.

Actually, I think it’s more than a mere acquaintance. I like to think of it much more as a friendship.

It’s a one-sided friendship, I grant you that. Well, it could hardly be any other way. Because Emily, as I like to think of her though she’d be more properly referred to as Emilie, does not include among her stellar qualities – brilliance, drive, generosity – the rather practical one of being alive. In fact, she died well over 250 years ago.

Emily at work

As it happens, even if we had been contemporaries, I doubt my friendship would have been reciprocated. As a member of the French aristocracy, and an outstanding intellectual, she would have been unaware of my existence.

Emily may be one of my friends, but I would not have been one of hers.

None of that stopped me working on a novel based on her life. It takes the form of a confession, from her death bed, in which she reflects on all she has done or failed to do, the things that might have gone better, the things that could have been or actually were disasters. I was fascinated by the subject and got the whole thing written bar perhaps twenty pages some three or four years ago.

Other things then got in the way. Work was one, but that has finished. A different novel also held me up: this is the one where I make space available for Misty, our cat, along with Luci, our first toy poodle, and Toffee, the second and the most turbulent of the three, to express their views. These I have stolen from their diaries, and I’m proud of all three for their achievement: after all, most peoples’ pets can barely hold a pen let alone keep a diary.

The first book of their diary extracts (wittily entitled Through a cat’s eyes and dogs’ tales) is now complete and is only looking for a publisher (I say ‘only’ but that’s a far bigger undertaking, it seems to me, than writing the dratted thing in the first place). 

All three animals with Danielle
One of the illustrations by my daughter-in-law Senada

So now I’ve been able to get back to Emily. 

One of the pleasurable aspects of the book is that I’ve used her voice wherever possible. We have a lot of her correspondence, so I know what she actually said about certain events and people (not necessarily what she thought about them: as the politics of today’s world show, what people say isn’t always what they think).

She also wrote a lot, though she didn’t always publish it. For instance, she kept her Discourse on Happiness strictly to herself in her life, though we’ve published it since.

The best way of making sure of happiness, she argued, was to make it depend entirely on yourself. Study, she says, is the best way to achieve that aim. And yet:

…the passion which can give us our greatest pleasure and make us happiest, leaves our happiness entirely dependent on others: you understand that I am talking about love. This passion is perhaps the only one that can make us desire life, and make us grateful to the creator of nature, whoever he might be, for giving us our existence.

Emily had such a passion. The one great love of her life, among many other lesser ones, was for the most celebrated wit and polemicist of their time, Voltaire. But:

I don’t know however whether love has ever brought together two people made for each other to such a point that they would never feel the surfeit of pleasure, or the cooling to which ease and security lead, nor the indolence and half-heartedness which arise from familiarity and the long continuance of a relationship

That was the fate of her bond with Voltaire. Towards the end of her life, they were both indulging in affairs with others. Indeed, she fell pregnant at 42, a dangerous age at that time, as a result of an infatuation for a much younger and entirely inappropriate man. She died as result of an infection associated with childbirth.

Hence the death bed with which my novel starts. But it’s striking that gathered around it, as well as the young man who’d fathered the newborn daughter, there were her husband, always a loyal and supportive friend to her, and, whatever cooling there may have been in their relations, Voltaire, grieving his coming loss.

They remained attached to the end, then. Though Emily was clear that it was she who ensured that was so. There are loves so great, she tells us, that there’s never more than one in a century. Hers was one of those. And it persisted, returned or not, and despite any side dalliances they may have had. The soul that loves, she tells us:

… has to love so much that it loves for two, and that the heat of its heart makes up for what is in fact missing from its happiness.

Across the centuries, I’m as moved as ever by those words from an exceptional friend, however remote she may be.

The cat who travelled to Spain

I thought it would be hell.

Back in March, when we moved from England to Spain, we took our dogs but not our cat Misty. We were moving into a flat and, the poor chap, he’d never lived in a place he couldn’t get in and out of easily – and boy he’s lived in a lot of places: as of today, eleven addresses in four countries, not the kind of existence a cat generally finds congenial.

Misty in Luton
where, sadly, we left him behind for far too long

Fortunately, we sold our house to friends and they agreed to look after him until we had a more suitable place for him. A great arrangement: he was with people he liked, in a house he knew, with the same easy garden access as ever.

But then the months rolled on. We began to feel guilty towards our friends – they said they were enjoying having Misty with them, but how long can you really demand that other people look after your cat? – and we began to feel guilty towards Misty himself, after losing contact with him so completely for such a time.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, all the circumstances aligned. We’d moved out of the flat and into a house, with a garden at the back and a bit of parkland beyond that – just the kind of place likely to appeal to Misty. We’d opened a gap in the fence at the front so he could get out easily and visit the neighbouring cats if he wanted. And I had a business trip to England which I could combine with fetching him.

That’s when I began to dread what I foresaw to be a likely trip from hell.

First, I had to get from London to Luton, where we used to live. That wasn’t a big deal and I completed that stage without much difficulty.

In the BA Lounge at Heathrow
Misty hates the carrier...

Second, I had to get Misty into a zippable pet carrier, which he loathes. The vet had given me something to calm him, which I had to scatter over some of his food, but he’s too savvy for that: he took one smell of the meat, realised it had been adulterated, and wouldn’t touch it. I also had some sprayable happy-cat pheromones with which I liberally anointed the inside of the carrier, and that may have worked: he didn’t complain too much once inside it.

Stage 3 was getting from Luton to the airport. That was OK because we went by cab, which cost a fortune but at least was comfortable and relatively quick. The good thing is that the driver asked whether I had his passport. He thought he was joking, but there really are pet passports, and other documents he needed to fly, and I had indeed forgotten them. The driver’s irony rather saved the day for me, or more to the point, saved the trip.

On the way to Heathrow, Misty peed on me, but I couldn’t hold that against him. He was, after all, badly pissed off so it was probably entirely appropriate. A little emergency washing in an airport toilet dealt with the worst of the problem.

Stage 4 started at check in. Carrier and pet together had to weigh under 8 kilos, but Iberia, one of the only airlines that allows pets in the cabin, has a beautifully Spanish view of that kind of regulation: “8.2 kg,” the man said, “that’s close enough,” and through I went.

Then came security which was where I was terrified that things would fall apart. Fortunately, thanks to the cab driver, I had all the papers. They checked them carefully. They had me take Misty out of the carrier while they searched it – he wasn’t pleased, because I held him firmly and he wanted to wander off – but at any rate, everything turned out to be in order. So I got to the other side of security, breathing a sigh of relief. The most worrying part of the trip was behind me.

I took him out in the plane, briefly
He wanted to go wandering, so had to go back in the carrier...

All that was left was stage 4, the two and a quarter hour flight to Madrid, followed by stage 5, the three and a half hour drive to Valencia. Which turned into something more like five hours because of the storm that lashed us nearly the whole way.

Taking a look around the new place and taking possession

But finally we were home. Misty explored the place with great enthusiasm and slept on our bed that night, since he had us to himself. The next day, we picked up the dogs from where they’d been looked after, and at last all the animals could get together again. There was some slight awkwardness as they got used to each other once more, but they knew each other at once and realised that they were going to be sharing a house again.

Reunited with Toffee and Luci

So the household was complete after a long gap. Misty has settled in straight away and seems to enjoy the place, just as we do. Cat, dogs, humans: we’re set for a life together in Valencia which I hope we’ll all enjoy.

Misty fully settled in

Getting him here hadn’t been anything like the hell I’d feared.

The Brexile starts: so far, so good.

“So far, so good” are the words of the man plunging past the 50th floor of the Empire State Building towards the ground. Which makes the expression a little limited in value. Still, with all the caveats that implies, I can say that our Brexile in Valencia has got off to a good start.

Not that getting here was all that easy. Blanche du Bois always relied on the kindness of strangers. We always rely on the kindness of friends. In this particular case, our thanks would go to our friends Bruno and Jose who provided us with breakfast before we left, after which Jose took us to Gatwick airport, supervised the process of getting our dogs through security and our luggage onto the plane, and then headed back so that he and Bruno could repair to our old house in Luton (which they are buying) to keep our cat Misty company.

Because Misty, sadly, has stayed behind for now. He’s a cat who’s always been used to going outdoors or coming back in when he pleases. But, until we can find a suitable house (where suitability is a compromise between desirability and our budget), we’re living in a flat. Misty’s 12 now and I think it would kill him to be locked in all day.

So he waits in his old home until we can provide him with a new one. With Bruno and Jose to look after him, he’ll do just fine. And we’ve tested to make sure that he gets on swimmingly with their dog Nina, too.

The dogs, on the other hand, came with us. Which wasn’t pleasant for them. They had to go into carry cases which they hated, and at the airport security officials took them away from us to put them through various checks before returning them to us at the departure gate. The dogs took a very dim view of that. Indeed, Toffee, the more devilish and nimble, went so far as to open one of the zipped-up ends of the case and get out, making a beeline for the baggage conveyor belts. Who knows where in the world she might have ended up had the border staff not caught her, stuffed her back and tied up the openings with string.

The dogs had to go into the cases in the plane, too, which they didn’t like either. I travelled with Toffee, Danielle with Luci. Toffee gave me such a pitiful look that I took her out and put her on my knees. But then I saw that Danielle had done the same thing with Luci, which made me feel less guilty. And the cabin crew, being Spanish and sharing the Latin sense that rules are merely guidelines, markers for aspirations rather than descriptions of behaviour, made no comment until we began to land at Madrid.

Toffee fed up in the plane

We were happy to take the dogs, because they can cope with apartment life for a few months, even if it means that we’re popping out with them four or five times a day. A small price to pay for the benefit of leaving Brexitland before the xenophobia there turns even more toxic. I hope Brexit may yet be avoided but, if it isn’t, I’m glad we got out when we did.

Not that we’re really refugees, here in our rather pleasant self-imposed exile. We didn’t have to pay money to people traffickers, unless you count the airlines. We didn’t have to climb onto overloaded inflatable boats and attempt a dangerous crossing with only an inadequate life jacket between us and drowning.

Why, we didn’t even face the same difficulties as my grandmother. Her father travelled from Vilnius to London in 1902, so he had a job and accommodation for them before she, her mother and brother followed him the next year. And we weren’t fleeing pogroms in the deeply anti-Semitic Russian Empire.

Instead, we were able to find a flat here, equip it properly, and even try it on for size last autumn, with the dogs, so that our departure into ‘exile’ felt more like a homecoming. Comfortable refugees rather than desperate ones.

All the more so as I’ve always preferred warm weather to cold. I was glad to cast aside last night the jumper I wore from London. And this afternoon, it was the long-sleeved shirt and cords. And that was after having breakfast out of doors this morning.

Breakfast out of doors

The dogs, too, seem to be doing well. Pretty much fully recovered from the trauma of the trip. But then, they’re back on the couch they came to know and love when we were last here.

Sofa so good, as I’m sure they’d say.

Toffee and Luci: sofa so good

The pets concur: a full house is a joyful house

Luci, our black toy poodle, was telling me the other day how much she and the other two pets liked having the house full of people over this weekend.

‘Six humans! It’s great. We can never miss out on a lap. If one’s not available, there’s always another we can occupy. And the walks! When there’s family around, friends come too, and they want to go out. Usually to the best places.’

It’s true that we took her and Toffee, the orange toy poodle, to one of their favourite places, which is also one of ours, Ashridge Forest. It’s wonderful any time of year, but particularly comfortable now in a real summer, though it was good to have a breeze blowing to take the edge off the heat during our walk.

Toffee and Luci leading the way through Ashridge

‘And one of the humans is sleeping in our favourite place – the couch,' Luci continued. 'What could be better than to sleep next to a human, except to sleep next to a human in our favourite place?’

A human to sleep next to on our favourite couch?
Very heaven

She and Toffee certainly took advantage of that opportunity. But Toffee just made a point of sleeping where the family was anyway, couch or no couch. They both spend the night on our bed, and in the morning Toffee and I have a ritual: I get up and start to go downstairs, and she follows, a couple of steps behind. In the kitchen I just get time to turn the coffee machine on before her expectant look gets too much for me and I find myself serving up her breakfast of dog biscuits.

But with the house full, the rite has changed. We got down to first floor where one of my sons had made the mistake – perhaps because of the heat – of leaving his bedroom door open. The notion of going down to the kitchen was driven right out of her head. Well, to be fair, she doesn’t like the biscuits that much anyway, and the open door was obviously a far greater temptation.

She shot in.

‘No, no,’ Toffee, I heard, ‘just lie down and keep quiet.’

Toffee likes licking faces. Unfortunately, not all owners of faces like to have Toffee licking them.

‘Down girl. Have a rest. I want to sleep.’

She must have done what she was told because it was a while before she came to sample the bowlful of biscuits I’d served up for her.

‘Even Misty likes it, you know,’ Luci assured me.

In the days when a basket was a snug resting place

Misty’s our cat, and no diminutive figure in our family. He doesn’t like to admit it, but he’s nearly twice Toffee’s weight. There was a time when he used to find a small shopping basket a wonderfully snug place for a siesta. These days, no basket would accommodate him, unless it was specifically designed to carry pineapples. Or possibly water melons.

‘He loves having all these people to stroke him,’ Luci went on.

‘Yes, he does seem to prefer their stroking to mine,’ I sadly replied.

‘Well,’ she said, rather more sternly, ‘they concentrate. They focus on him. When you stroke Misty, you always seem at least half distracted by the TV news or a book you’re reading.’

I have to confess that’s true, and I have the scratches on my hand to prove it.

‘As well as the better stroking, the other thing is that the guests have small suitcases and they leave them open. Now that shopping baskets are, well, just a bit too tight, a suitcase is, you know, a much better fit…’

A visitor's open suitcase
As if specifically designed as a siesta place

That’s true too. It seems the full house is a recipe for satisfaction for Misty as well.

All round, really. We’re all happy with the visit. Win-win-win: human residents, pets and visitors, everyone has enjoyed the bustle and the company.

Return to normality

It gets tiring being away from home a lot, even if some of the time it’s for pleasure – such as visiting our sons – rather than for business.

Putting it another way, it’s good to get home. You sleep better, it seems to me, in your own bed. It’s good to have the things you need close to hand. It’s good to get up in the morning and find a coffee machine you know how to use, and a fridge containing the things you want for breakfast.

That kind of normality is even more attractive for the non-human members of our household. Disruption of their accustomed lifestyle is something they find deeply disturbing. The sooner it’s over, the happier they are.

The problem with the disruption is that it recently became more radical than it used to be. Our good friend Suzanne used to move into our place, so the animals – Luci and Toffee, the toy poodles, and Misty the masterful cat – could stay in their normal environment while we were away and still enjoy the presence of someone they’d come to know and love.

In fact, I’d noticed that the poodles – the girls, as we like to think of them – made more of a joyful fuss about Suzanne’s arrival at our place than they ever did about mine, when I came back from a trip.

However, sadly for them though happily for her, Suzanne recently became a grandmother (congratulations, Suzanne, and even more to the new parents). This means that she’s still happy to look after Misty and the girls while we’re away, but she needs to do it at her place rather than ours. That’s fine, but moving somewhere else is always a bit more of a jarring experience to dogs than staying in the place they’re used to, and Misty of course, who stays at home, misses out on Suzanne’s company, as she only comes round to feed him and spend a little while talking to him and stroking him.

So our return now represents a much bigger change for them all than it once did.

What amazes me, though, isn’t the extent of the change, it’s the speed with which they adapt. Within minutes, Toffee had picked up her old habit of demanding that I throw a soft toy across the room for her in the evenings. The trick is that she drops it beside me while I’m trying to watch the TV and whines until I pick it up and throw it again. If I fail to, she scratches my arm in what she no doubt thinks is a gentle gesture to remind me of my duty, but in reality is pretty painful – those claws aren’t as sharp as Misty’s, but they’re quite sharp enough.

I can tell you, the gesture works. One scratch and I’m throwing the toy again. Anything to avoid another reminder, even though I know that I’m rewarding her for doing it and she’ll only be even more inclined to do it again.

What tells me even more powerfully that things have got back to normal is when I see the pets relaxing. They have a capacity for total resting that never ceases to amaze me. So I was delighted to see that Misty was once more in his favourite place for a morning snooze – the middle of our bed.

Nobody relaxes so well as a cat at peace

Meanwhile, Toffee and Luci had also settled straight back into their relaxing place of choice: next to each other at one end of our sofa.

Resting's even better when you can do it with a friend

Those pictures of domestic calm, bliss even, said more strongly than anything else could, that all was back to normal.

What I haven’t yet told them, though, is that we’re off again at the end of the month. For under a week, but still it’ll be another cycle of disruption. Poor things.

It’ll be good, though, to see them getting right back to normal again just as soon as we return home.

Pets and a crowded bed

Among many other aspects, the history of my marriage has been one of decreasing dog size.

When I first met Danielle, she had a couple of Borzois, Taiga and Sador. These Russian wolfhounds stood to well above our waists and covered territory with extraordinary speed in chase of prey, though they were also, as it happens, unusually gentle, even timid, creatures.

They slept on the other side of the bedroom from where we lay on a low bed – basically a mattress on the floor – but would come and flop onto the bed as soon as either of us showed the slightest sign of waking up. And when I say ‘flop’, I mean flop: they’d just let themselves fall sideways on top of their victim, and when a Borzoi flops on you, you’re left in no doubt it’s happened.

After our marriage, we had a border collie, Bess, we liked so much that we eventually added another, Floss. You think there was a pattern to our naming of them? You wouldn’t be wrong.

Border collies are brilliant and highly trainable, as well as strong-willed and devious enough to get their way when they set their mind to it. They stand about thigh height. Of all our dogs, they were the toughest and they got the toughest treatment: we built them a run outside the house and they slept there, with nothing better than a kennel to retreat to in the cold. But they flourished in that regime: they’re sheepdogs and don’t belong indoors.

Later on, while we were living in Strasbourg, we decided it was the moment to have a Puli. Well, to tell the truth, we decided we wanted a poodle, and travelled to Budapest where many are bred and, at the time at least, the prices were competitive. But when we got there, we found there were no puppies to be had so we settled for a Puli, Janka, instead – frankly, we fell for the dreadlocks and the beautiful disposition (though I have to say, that heavy pelt did occasionally reek just a bit…) She came about nearly to our knees.

Janka was an indoor dog, sleeping on a mat in our bedroom.

Janka was always good at making friends
In this case, with our granddaughter Aya

Now we do indeed have a couple of poodles, Luci and Toffee. That’s poodles of the toy variety: tiny little dogs that barely reach mid-calf (and even lower in Toffee’s case). And the inevitable has happened: they sleep on our bed.

This is, I admit, primarily my fault. I seem to have become remarkably soft-hearted towards our pets. ‘Oh, let them sleep there,’ I say, ‘they don’t take much space’.

That’s true enough. As Danielle points out, however, they chiefly like to feel the presence of both of us at the same time. That means that, even if she kicks them to the bottom of the bed where they really wouldn’t disturb us (yes, she’s the disciplinarian), they sneak back as soon as they think we won’t notice and lie between us or, often, on us. They may not weigh much, but after a while, even a small weight can get irritating if it’s right on top of you. And you’re trying to sleep.

The mornings are fun, too. The moment one of us stirs, they’re on to us like lightning. The right thing to do, they’ve calculated, once one of their humans wake, is to jump on top and start licking a face. Well, there’s only one of us whose face they lick: they know that Danielle would soon mete out terrible punishment if they tried that trick on her, so I’m the only one to get my face slobbered before I’ve even had coffee.

Conditions in bed become still worse if our cat, Misty, decides to join us, too. Then there’s a little competition between the three of them. Competition tends to be (a) noisy and (b) fidgety, making it a source of disturbance on both counts.

It got to the point that I began to feel a little guilty at having given in to the dogs’ obvious desire to sleep on our bed. Danielle was quite mocking, frankly. Especially when they refused even to make the effort to jump onto the bed and one or other of us had to get up to lift them onto it.

‘Perhaps I ought to get a bit tougher,’ I began to think, ‘and see if there’s any way of getting them to sleep somewhere else. Just for Danielle’s sake.’

But all such feelings of guilt evaporated when one day she revealed a new purchase she’d just made.

Staircase to heaven (or at least bed) for them
To something more like purgatory for us

A set of nice wool covered steps – ideal for a small dog to get up onto the bed.

She was encouraging them to join us!

And there was I feeling guilty. Wondering whether I owed it to her to put an end to this abuse of our sleeping arrangements. While all the time she was subverting them herself.

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘screw that for a game of soldiers,’ and rolled over on my side to enjoy my rest undisturbed by any pangs of conscience.

Having kicked the little ones out of my bit of the bed beforehand, of course.

Occupation forces. In full force.