Madame, in a rare charitable moment, initiated the following devastating sequence of events, changing our lives forever!

It all started because she was gabbling in the office to a colleague, probably boasting about Schröder's latest misdemeanour, instead of minding her own business and getting on with her work. The colleague then described a hyperactive feline that kept trying to break out of her apartment in the middle of town. This tomcat had already ripped most of the wallpaper from the walls and destroyed all of the wooden furniture. He pushed toilet rolls around with his nose and licked the glue off the backs of stamps. Basically, this guy was a dangerous, destructive, doped up delinquent.

'Gosh!' said Madame, ever the caring cat pschycologist, 'It just sounds like he needs to be able to go outside whenever he wants to. Then he wouldn't do all these terrible things.'

Before I knew it, we had adopted a second cat called Karl, who came with his own criminal record!

Karl was, to put it gently, a little plump and in need of exercise. He spent the first two days in abject terror behind the computer tower in the living room (yes, the one draped with the Union Jack flag) before coming out to eat something and suffer his first beating from Schröder, who has become a bit of a bruiser recently, and who disdainfully rated Karl as having all the potential of a punchbag.

Once he got a little bolder he decided to try out our wallpaper, so he got his rabies shot early and was ejected into the back garden to fend for himself.

Madame was right! He became a cutie. He lost some weight and gained some muscle, although he is still hyperactive. Schröder regularly beats him up for being so bloody cheerful all the time, but he puts up with it amiably. He likes to crawl under blankets, into filled drawers and fresh washing, and generally pop up in unexpected places to share his inevitably optimistic mood with you. He has got wise to a number of tricks fast: he simply eats out of Schröder's bowl when his is empty, assuming (usually correctly) that Schröder has helped himself to Karl's food first; we are now woken by two cats at 5am each morning baying for Whiskas; and, although he has not yet caught a mouse, he brings home dead leaves for Madame with all the pride of a real hunter.

Update!! At 17 minutes past 7am on 25th December Karl brought me a dead mouse. As I was asleep in bed at the time I found it difficult to be quite as uncritically enthusiastic as the situation perhaps warranted. After I had caught Karl, still playing euphorically on my sheets with his furry victim, and wrested its bleeding corpse from his little fangs, I ejected both dead rodent and live feline into the front garden. Madame slept, uninterrupted, throughout the bedlam. At 10am (during breakfast) he brought in his next still-bleeding catch. Since than, as far as we know, he has caught nothing more but leaves for us, for which we are truly thankful.