On one side, we have lovely neighbours who have been in the village forever, but on the other side, we get a new set of neighbours every year, normally in late April/early May, after the previous lot have been evicted for non-payment of rent due to the disgusting state of the house. It is a real peasant dwelling - at the back there are no windows and the house is half buried in the garden. In summer it is a picture of quaintness, in the winter it is a festering hole with rising damp, falling damp, condensation and just a couple of convector heaters to keep you warm. Naturally with something built directly onto the earth, there is no damp proof course.
The current neighbour, J, is nice enough, but a bit scary looking and with some strange friends. Last Sunday, one of them brought J a large rabbit that they had trapped, but he was out. Could we look after it for him? No, the cats would go mad - the thought of Poirot clamped to it for the next week while she tried to eat it all didn't bear thinking about!! But we did say he could leave the rabbit on our cellar steps until J got home, and while we went out for a walk.
We got home again three quarters of an hour later, and J was back and the rabbit was gone so we thought no more about it until Wednesday, when P, one of J's strange friends popped in to see us about something. At the end of the conversation, he got a bit embarrassed and asked about the rabbit. We said we thought J had taken it when he got in. No, J hadn't, and didn't like to ask us himself - perhaps a passing stranger had made off with it. We didn't think that likely, we don't get passing strangers in our courtyard, apart from J and his strange friends like P!!
As a last resort, we said maybe it had been moved into the cellar, so John dragged P down into the cellar with him to look. Behind the hot water cylinder were the head, paws and spine of the rabbit - everything else had been eaten by a cat or two. We knew it wasn't our two, as they still don't go out, so J's two cats were in the frame.
So never underestimate what a cat will walk off with!!
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