flossing the cat

OK. Here’s the problem. Every time I come back from a holiday, the house stinks. The porch and hallway smell like The Elephant House in high summer. The rest of the house also smells like The Elephant House in high summer, except one of the elephants has VAG ROT, and all the other elephants have died. The situation has gotten so bad I dread coming back. “Please god let the cats not have shit everywhere”, I whisper to my partner on the journey home from our most recent holiday. “I don’t think I can take it.” “Just relax”, says my partner. `’If they have, I’ll clear it up straightaway.” My partner doesn’t know me. If he did, he wouldn’t bandy around inflammatory words like ‘relax’. Conversely, I know him well enough to know that the very first thing he will do on arriving home will be to scroll through the list of recorded programmes on the Sky Plus Planner. He would do this even if he needed to pick the zapper out of a buzzing, twitching heap of cat shit as big