This week is our lovely vet’s last week at work before she sets off on her travels, so yesterday I went to see her with some gifts: a Louis Catorze t-shirt so that she may remember her most troublesome patient, and a bottle of fizz to help her forget the yowls, hisses and kicks.

I very nearly took him along to bid her farewell, but then decided that he had already put her through quite enough.

We shall miss her tremendously, but she has excellent colleagues whom we know will give Le Roi nothing but the best treatment. We are VERY lucky indeed.

On my way back I bumped into notre cher ami Ginger Impinger, who was sporting a snazzy new collar and striding purposefully down the middle of the road. It was quite a shock to see him as we were a good few minutes’ walk from all the other areas where he has been spotted.

GI always enters and exits Le Jardin from Oscar the dog’s side (our left as you look out), so we imagined he would live that way. Cocoa the babysit cat’s family live in the same direction and GI has been caught napping on their furniture and even sitting on their glass conservatory roof, giving everyone below an uninterrupted eyeful of his ballons d’or. But he has also been spotted around our local pub, which is about 60 houses away from Cocoa’s place, and where I saw him today is another area entirely. (See below for my not-entirely-to-scale map of GI sightings.)

I am in complete disbelief that he would cover so much ground, let alone keep coming back to Le Château. After all, our cat flap is now inaccessible (not that it stops him from trying – Oscar the dog’s mamma has seen his ginger derrière reversing out after failed entry attempts), and it’s not as if Louis Catorze will be having relations with him anytime soon.

I really, really want to find out where the little sod might live and, somehow, broach the awkward subject of les ballons d’or with his people. But, given the enormous catchment area (that we know of) covered by GI, I have no idea where to begin.