Mrs Down's Diary

He had been coughing and choking as though he had something stuck in his throat but we have learned now that in fact he was in distress and struggling to breathe.

A course of medication restored him to good health but he is now permanently on tablets, and although his lungs and liver are not compromised his heart is.

As a result, we have to go through an elaborate charade twice a day to get him to take his medicine. No chance here of merely offering the medication in your hand, as we could with our greedy Labrador and spaniel.

Those two, Meg and Holly, would eat poison with relish. Bud, however, regards everything as potentially toxic and injurious to his health.

Stick his tablets in a sausage and he will eat around said sausage and leave the bit with the capsule in.

Bowl of meat with cunningly disguised tablet? Everything gone but the chosen morsel.

Sprinkle and grind the tablet in his bowl and cover it with his food? Only the top layer is eaten.

We have taken to dissolving his medication in gravy then mixing it in with choice, premium-priced, cat food. Even then it is only eaten grudgingly because he has done a price check and knows he is bankrupting us with the cost of the vet's fees and the very very best cat food.

Dog food? Wash your mouth out. We are talking picky Jack Russell here.

Must be something in the cat food, I have decided. After my friend Fran's cat was killed in a road traffic accident, she went back to a rescue home for a cat to keep her remaining feline company. "They don't just give you the cat," she said. "You have to pay a sizeable donation to the cost of its keep."

Like my husband John, Fran's husband, Jo, does not entirely approve of cats.

John will tolerate them around the farm buildings, as they keep rats and vermin down, but as the biggest slaughterer of birds and small mammals in the countryside (I think the last calculation was around 25 million victims a year) he sees cats as a force for evil away from human habitation.

So while Fran was delighted to give another cat a home, Jo pretended to be a bit grumbly. However, being a good husband, keen to please his wife, he did as all husbands must do: he shut up, paid up and forgot about it.

Until, that is, the remaining cat in their household, the one who had stayed at home and been a good, faithful companion by the fireside, took umbrage at the newcomer.

He went off his food, started wandering because he did not like being at home and lost weight. Fran was worried and took him to a vet. One she had not been to before.

This vet was something of a cat therapist/counsellor/aromatherapist/reflexologist/reiki healer.

I jest. But she did suggest that along with pick-me-up treatments Fran should purchase an ioniser that should be plugged in close to where the cat slept so that pheromones (or something like that) would permeate the air around the cat and relieve any stress the cat was suffering.

All very holistic, etc. etc. Then the bill arrived. 270. "Stress? Stress?" her husband cried out when he saw the cost of the device. "Never mind the cat, plug it in by my bed. I need it now."

This feature was first published in the West Sussex Gazette June 11