Strange discovery this morning

The cat has been behaving more weirdly even than his usual self since coming back home. The day he got out of his 30 days' quarantine was particularly traumatic, because we had literally no furniture in the house and a cat's first instinct when it's in an unfamiliar place is to hide under something. I had to drop our car-share car back in its parking spot after getting him in the house, and when I came back he had completely vanished. After the usual frantic hunt through the house I realised that he had dragged a pillow from the end of the bed and squashed his entire oversized body underneath it.

This is how he spent most of that first day:



He's never been a cat for getting under the covers, but that night his fears got the better of him and, after a few fruitless attempts to tunnel under the pillows we were sleeping on, he slipped down under the blankets to the bottom of the bed. Now, whenever he gets the chance, he crawls into a little sausage-like parcel at the end of the bed and sits there very quietly. Especially if there's scary noises in the vicinity, such as children frolicking.

Anyway, I wasn't paying much attention to any of this until I was changing the sheets this morning and a little roll of paper dropped out. At first I thought it was just another bundle of receipts from furniture shops but on closer examination I found writing on the backs of the receipts, in a very small but rather elegant hand. I've spent a few hours trying to decipher it and at first I thought it was some sort of prison diary. But then I realised that the handwriting exactly matched Jasper's, and that it was describing not a spell in prison but a period in quarantine.

He's done this sort of thing before, so I wasn't overly surprised (while we were in Africa in 2005 he wrote a blog to keep us informed of his exploits). Anyway, I'm starting to transcribe it so I'll put up excerpts from time to time.