Monday January 13th 2014 - While I was camping something died

With my intended winter camping activities curtailed somewhat by the continued and extremely wet weather this country is currently experiencing I thought I would recount an amusing incident which occurred while I was camping on Anglesey three years ago. It didn't happen to me directly and I don't suppose it was funny at the time, but the more it gets mentioned the funnier it seems.

It was the third day of a week-long holiday and I was driving down a country lane on the way to Abersoch on the Lleyn Peninsula. My phone bleeped with a text message so finding a convenient lay-by I pulled up to read it. It was from my son - "Sorry if I spoil your holiday mum, the white cat's dead". Certainly short and to the point.

Now the cat in question was quite elderly and hadn't been in the best of health for a while so the news, although sad, didn't really come as a surprise, and considering I was 140 miles away from home there was nothing I could do about it anyway.  As I sat there contemplating the cat's demise and wishing it had waited until I got home before breathing its last, my phone bleeped again with another message - "What d'you want me to do with it?". So I rang my son - and got the whole graphic account.

Now to put you in the picture my cats are indoor ones, living in the utility room off the kitchen. Although they will eat any food from any bowl or dish put down for them, for some strange reason they won't drink water from a normal bowl so I leave a large rectangular dishwashing bowl full of fresh water in the utility sink; feeding-wise all my son has to do is put a scoopful of dry food in each food bowl daily and check the water supply every couple of days. Under normal circumstances none of this would be a problem, but these weren't normal circumstances. 

He'd cleaned out the litter boxes and filled the food bowls, then seeing a white dishcloth in the sink decided to give the worktops a wipe over - except the object in the sink wasn't a dishcloth. Partially submerged in the dishwashing bowl, and staring up at him with sightless blue eyes, head at an angle and a hideous grimace on its face, was one very dead white cat. Now my son is an adult and by no means a wimp, but according to him he jumped back at least 4ft and the scream could probably have been heard from the far end of the street. In trepidation, and with a pounding heart and a face almost as white as the cat, he took another look, and the sight was no less pretty the second time around - the cat was most definitely dead, and it didn't look very happy about being so either.

The first text message reached me a couple of minutes later and the second one came through after he'd had a nerve-calming cigarette. When I spoke to him he still sounded a bit shaken, though he agreed that there was no need for me to cut my holiday short and that he would bury the cat in the back garden. So out he went and dug the hole, then hauled the bedraggled body out of the dishwashing bowl, wrapped it in an old dog towel and dropped it into the hole, filling it in quickly in case the creature decided to somehow suddenly spring back to life and escape.

There was no way of knowing how or why the cat had got into the dishwashing bowl; had it fallen in and drowned, or had it suffered a heart attack and fallen in on the point of death? I rather hope it was the latter as the former scenario doesn't bear thinking about. The whole incident has come up in conversation several times over the last three years and though my son didn't find it funny at the time - and it certainly wasn't funny from the cat's point of view - the story always produces much hilarity. For a long while after that though, whenever I was away camping he would approach the utility room with great caution in case he got any more nasty surprises!