AND NOW I'VE REMEMBERED...

... a horror story that happened inside Six Eagles.

We had a cat at that time!!

Our house was a three story open-plan town house. You could stand on the landing of the top floor and see right the way down to the hall on the ground floor, where there was also a cloakroom and bedroom. On the first floor were the kitchen and living room and upstairs were two more bedrooms and the bathroom.

Christina was tiny and fast asleep in her room and we were also asleep when I was woken by what I thought was the sound of an intruder. For some reason I decided to tiptoe to the top of the stairs and tried to peer over, listening out for someone rummaging through our stuff but not being able to see anything becuse I hadn't got my lenses in. When I heard distinct noises again, I tore back into the bedroom and woke Charles telling him that there was a burglar in the house and he needed to get up and sort it out.

By now the burglar was getting really agitated and had started to throw stuff around. It sounded like he was sweeping stuff off the dresser in disgust- presumably because it wasn't worth stealing.

As soon as Charles put the light on we could see (well, I couldn't make it out properly and it looked like blood to me) GREAT BIG PATCHES OF BLACK FEATHERS all over the carpet and as Charles made his way downstairs he found our cat sitting at the bottom of the dresser and a STARLING sitting on the top shelf having left a trail of blood, feathers, poop and broken crockery in it's wake.

As soon as he yelled up to me that it was a bird and that it was almost dead, I had an attack of hyseria and leapt back into bed, having shut the bedroom door to prevent this mortally wounded creature from flying up another flight of stairs and attacking ME, pulled the duvet over my head and assumed the foetal position. (Christina was still asleep through all of this horror, but to my shame I have to confess that once I was aware it was a bird, there is no way I could have left the room to go to her.)

Meanwhile Charles is downstairs trying to catch the wretched thing which was apparently terrified and had a broken neck so was pretty near death. He also had to cope with the bloody cat who was growling at the change of game plan and was less than impressed that Charles had joined the chase.

He somehow managed to get the bird down to the ground floor where he tried to put it out of it's misery by bashing it on the head with a book from the shelf in the spare bedroom. I can remember yelling 'Don't use the Bible Charles' and he shouted back, 'It's okay, I've got "The Teaching of PE in schools since 1945" and me saying, 'Oh good!'

He gave it a sharp smack on the head and it went down...

... and then got up again and started haring up and down the hallway only for Charles to have to rugby tackle it before it finally submitted to the inevitable.

There then followed the cleaning up process which took the rest of the night as we discovered that one starling has an awful lot of feathers, bleeds copiously when chewed by a cat and can produce more than twice it's body weight in poop.

And the very next morning we boarded up the cat flap!!