Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

Oliver, the indoor outdoor cat, goes on an adventure on Chris’s watch…

Acatsitting client of mine has an indoor cat named Oliver who spends most of his time outside. He achieves this paradox through his owner’s imaginative use of sheds and chicken netting.

Oliver steps out of his catflap straight into a ten foot long chicken run in his back garden in the rolling Chiltern Hills. The chicken run leads into a giant pen complete with hanging tyres, wooden platforms and collection of cat toys. From here he steps into another stretch of netting and paces briskly into a small insulated shed adorned with a luxurious array of cushions. From here the netting system gets very clever indeed, leaving in three different directions – two running under a hedge into further sheds, while the other loops 30 feet through dense undergrowth.

It’s the most cleverly thought-out indoor cat outdoor containment system imaginable. Absolutely ingenious! But it’s totally useless, of course. Oliver escaped three days into my visits. Cats are good at that sort of thing.

Unfortunately Oliver didn’t just escape; he vanished – which is just about the worst scenario imaginable for a catsitter. Hours of calling yielded nothing. A torch-lit night search for those telltale reflections of green eyes in the undergrowth was to no avail. The next morning however, a neighbour reported that a cat they believed to be Oliver had been hanging around a tumbledown barn.

I rushed across the road to the barn, peering into splintering crevices and checking recesses beneath broken floorboards. I was about to give up when I heard a faint meow. But not any old meow, it was a distinctly aristocratic, country gentleman type meow. It was a meow I generally heard when taking too long serving dinner, but this time it sounded worried.

I found Oliver cowering beneath a raised oil container, fur dishevelled and matted with leaves, ears back, clearly shaken. As you’ll know, when a cat’s stressed they will rarely come to you. I was going to have to crawl under and get him. Why, oh why Oliver, did you have to choose the muddiest, dampest, most oil splattered hidey-hole in all of Buckinghamshire? And Oliver – did you really have to attempt to rip my hands off when all I was trying to do was help?

Five minutes later, arms bloodied, face scratched, jeans smothered in mud, covered in nettle stings, I staggered back across the road with the mottled and leaf-covered Oliver now nestling against my chest.

A passing postman took one horrified look at the pair of us and nearly rode his bike straight into a hedge.

In the early morning gloom, suddenly appearing from a wrecked barn, we must’ve looked like something out of The Walking Dead… with cats.

Oliver was as right as rain after a brush down and some cat treats. I wonder if the same could be said for the postman? Actually, do postmen even eat cat treats?

I found Oliver cowering beneath a raised oil container in a barn

Chris Pascoe is the author of A Cat Called Birmingham and You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough, and of Your Cat magazine’s column Confessions of a Cat Sitter.