8 out of 9 Lives Lost

Here's a little piece of advice from me to you: When a friend asks you to stay at their flat to look after their cat while they go on holiday, politely decline.

I failed to take my own advice and have been staying at Doormouse's Docklands flat since the weekend to make sure his cat, Bobby, doesn't go without food.

What makes this a bad story is that the poor cat is under house-arrest. Doormouse lives in a 1st floor flat and there's no cat flap for Bobby to come and go as he pleases. There is however a balcony which the cat is supposedly happy to sit on.

Well, last night Snow stayed with me (purely to look at Canary Wharf all lit up at night) and that was when the feline decided to have a spot of fun. We took our eyes off him for just one minute (too busy looking at Danny Dyer in last month's Attitude magazine), and before we knew it, he'd made his escape. We dashed to the balcony and there he was, bold as brass, on the roof of the porch, smirking back at us.

We were then caught in a 'what do we do?' situation; should we leave him to come in of his own accord or try and get him down? The problem was, as a cat that never ventures into the outside world, and being stuck on a roof with an angle that made jumping back in virtually impossible, we both felt that he was going to be stuck out there forever.

What ensued was almost two hours of us standing under the roof calling 'Bobby', snapping our fingers and trying to get him to jump down. At 11pm, the neighbours loved it. We had a chair from kitchen down there, attempting to reach up and grab him - all the while he merely looked at us like we were idiots. Then we changed our approach and went back into the flat and tried spraying water at him to make him jump down. He just looked at us with a 'you think that's going to work?' look on his face.

By midnight we'd agreed there wasn't much we could do and decided we'd have to leave him out there to fend for himself, and then we heard a crash and a bang and there was his head poking up through the rails on the balcony. It took about 20 seconds for him to get his balance and pull himself through, but all by himself he'd managed to get back in.

He's clearly nothing more than an Attention Whore and didn't like us doing anything other than watch him. Needless to say I'll be keeping the balcony doors shut for the rest of my stay. And I'll have to finish the article on Danny Dyer tonight.