No time for a cat nap when under attack

THESE burglaries in Toowoomba are really getting out of hand.

Not a night goes by that I don’t have to jump out of bed to ward off an intruder who has sneaked into my home in the ghetto.

And, it’s the same intruder every night.

A mongrel dark grey cat has discovered a breach in our drawbridge – the cat flap.

It seems every morning around 1am I’m woken by the whining meowing of my second-hand cat either with its face, or more disturbingly, its bum in my face.

When he was younger and fitter, before he became a fat cat, the second-hand cat would battle with the best of them and ward off any intruding moggy which had wandered onto our property, which, as anyone with a cat would understand, he owns.

Not now, it’s fighting days long behind him, he expects me – in the middle of the night – to get out of bed and repel the uninvited and unwelcome feline which at that moment is munching on the secondhand cat’s tucker at the back door.

One of the only reasons I get out of bed to scat the cat is that I can’t stand loud chewing from humans, so I’m not about to put up with it from a cat.

And, it is loud chewing.

From the moment I’m woken by a 10kg-plus cat jumping on my bed, I can hear this other fiendish feline chomping down on the second-hand cat’s dry food from my bedroom.

However, as if being woken in the middle of the night by a 10kg moggy missile isn’t scary enough, now I’ve got to tip-toe in the dark out the back in the hope of catching the dark grey burglar in the act.

But he’s always gone by the time I arrive at the food bowls, though he stands not far away as if to gloat.

To be accurate, when I say “tiptoe”, with me that’s more like “plod, plod, knock chair over, plod, kick toe on table leg, swear loudly and plod”.

So, it’s no wonder the burglar has scarpered by the time I get to the scene of the crime.

He’s a persistent criminal cat, and up until recently, he has watched from afar as I shine the torch around the crime scene looking for him, and when I give up and go back to bed, he returns to the trough to munch until I jump out of bed again.

This had been going on almost every night for the past three weeks, and it got to the point I had strategically positioned weaponry with which to make a pre-emptive strike.

I had tennis balls, golf balls and other such weapons placed on the route from my bedroom to the cat kitchen ready to grab-and-chuck at the fiendish feline but, as usual, by the time I’d plodded and plonked my way to the kitchen and fumbled the ammunition, he got away again.

I can only imagine what my neighbours must have thought of these nocturnal episodes.

They would be lying in bed, woken by shouts of “Get out of here, you mongrel!” or words to that effect.

Of course, this night fighting had taken a toll.

I was turning up at work dead tired to the point I think my colleagues must have thought I had sleep apnoea.

Sleep apnoea?

I wasn’t getting enough sleep to qualify for sleep apnoea.

This couldn’t go on so I changed tactics.

I thought it better to go for a scorched earth policy and, instead of two or three battles a night, rack him off with one protracted attack.

So, there I was at 2.30 in the morning, yelling abuse while chasing up the street a dark grey cat who had crossed my path.

And, you know the old saying about a black cat crossing one’s path?

Well, this was a dark grey cat who’d crossed my path, reminding me that I couldn’t even do bad luck properly.

But it crossed my path once too often and as of the past two nights I can report that the dark grey intruder hasn’t been back.

Now, if I could just stop the 10kgplus second-hand cat from jumping on my bed, I might get a good night’s sleep.

I wasn’t getting enough sleep to qualify for sleep apnoea.