1st June

As regular readers will know my blog was interrupted by the sudden, unexpected and sad death of our beloved cat Chivers, who has been with us throughout our journey here in Droushia as he appeared in the garden next door shortly after we arrived.  He was gentle and loving and a stunningly beautiful animal.  He was John's buddy and he will be missed.  We have buried him in our peace garden, we will no longer need to call for him and search the streets for him if he was not at home.  We are sad that even though we were here at home we were unable to protect him from whatever it is that he ingested.  We think it was a dreadful accident and not malicious.  RIP Chivers.

The blog will continue with the posts that I had already prepared.  They will inevitably mention or feature Chivs as he was such an integral part of our family. 


Monday - the start of a new week and a new month and it didn't go quite to plan.

This morning we had planned to go down to Polis for a bit of food shopping but first we had to go to ACS to pick up the jigsaw I had ordered for Mum from a shop in Nicosia - I had ordered it online on Thursday and it had arrived at the office on Saturday and I hadn't paid for it at that point - they allowed me to do cash on delivery.  It is exactly the sort of thing she has been looking for because she needs to have good strong, large, tactile pieces and this fitted the bill perfectly.

John popped in to the pet shop next door to see if we could get any fish food and oxygenating plants to keep our new water lily company.  The girl he spoke to said that they had what we needed in their shop in Chloraka and she would ring through and ask them to sent up what they had.

As it happens we ended up going to Chloraka and got what we wanted ourselves and fingers crossed this will mean that, providing the cats don't eat the fish first, we can provide a reasonable environment for the newbies in the garden so that they will survive.  We can but hope but at least we are doing all the right things - having said that the two oxygenating plants we got had definitely seen better days but we were assured they would 'come back'.

So the reason the day didn't pan out as expected was that we got a frantic phone call from Mum to say that Fred had escaped - apparently she had opened one of the patio doors a little way to get some air and he had managed to push his way through.  He had run across the road and was in the garden of a house opposite so at least he hadn't gone far.  I really didn't know what to say to Mum although I was pretty sure that, as he hadn't run too far, he would return when he was hungry - the only problem was he would have to come back over a road and he was close to another busy road which leads down to Paps in Chloraka.  We decided that we should go down and see if there was anything we could do and to give Mum a bit of support as we knew she would find this so distressing.  So we shot off down to Mums and located Fred pretty easily as he was sitting on the roof of a shed or something across the road from Mums but behind some high railings.  John climbed up onto the wall which supported the railings but Fred was out of reach and I had visions of John impaling himself on the Fleur de Lys on top of the railings.  He patiently kept dropping some cat biscuits and retreating until eventually Fred came close enough for John to grab him.  Amazingly Fred never struggled and never hissed or scratched he just allowed John to carry him all the way back home and back into the house.  I wonder if he had shot out, found himself on top of the shed and then wondered what the hell he should do next.  He certainly didn't seem stressed by any of it.  Needless to say that Mum was so relieved to have him back home safe and sound.

That was how we came to go to the pet shop in Chloraka as it was a stone's throw from Mums!!

On our way back home we stopped at the nursery just down the road from Paps to get a couple of plants and pots to put in the hanger which was a gift from Di and Rob.

I wanted to find something a bit different so the two plants we chose have pinky purple leaves and I think they are some sort of Lysimachia.

We had to find somewhere to hang it where John would not hit his head so temporarily it is at the end of the pump house - I don't think it will stay there long as I do believe he had a coming together with it about five minutes after it had been put up.

With our unplanned trip to Emba our plans for this afternoon went out the window but we didn't mind because the outcome had been successful and we had been able to leave mum happy that she and Fred were reunited and that she, and we, would sleep tonight knowing that Fred was home safe and sound.  In fact Mum text me during the course of the evening to say you wouldn't know anything had happened and that Freddo was acting completely normally - thank goodness for that.