A few days ago I wrote about our cat dragging her water bowl around the kitchen floor. It’s a topic I never thought I would mention again.

However, last night when we were giving the cat a bit of supper, we suddenly noticed that her pottery drinking bowl had gone. It was simply not there. We’re used to finding it in funny places, so we looked all around the kitchen and then out into the hall. I wondered if perhaps I had absent-mindedly picked up the bowl earlier that day, intending to replenish it, and put it down somewhere silly. So I looked in the other rooms, and then I looked outside. I even looked in the tool cupboard and in the fridge, because in times of stress I have been known to put frozen peas in the tool cupboard and spanners in the fridge. But there was no sign of the bowl. For a mad moment I wondered if one of our local foxes had wandered in while the back door was open and pinched the bowl for his china collection.

The cat looked innocently up at me as I opened and shut cupboard doors. Bob says that in one of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, Holmes says that when you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever is left, however improbable, must hold the key to the explanation. I don’t know if we have eliminated the impossible yet, but we certainly explored the possible. So what’s left? Has the cat managed to drag her bowl into another dimension?