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A visit to The Menagerie or maybe a Private Zoo

All days have things which were not planned, but today there were long odds against visiting a house in Croydon crowded with animals. The story goes like this. A close relative was asked to house sit and then invited us around to sit in the garden on a nice sunny day. In fact a very nice sunny day. The house though cannot be described as average. A large house on four floors, including a basement that functioned as a room.

Around 7 cats roamed the house and the environs, all that i viewed being ginger or marmalade coloured. Some friendly and some not. What our relative had not been fully briefed on was that one of the cats was pregnant. So today when the cat was missing, she went searching for it and found it plus one kitten under the duvet in an upper floor room on the top of a bunk bed. The kitten and mother were doing just fine. I am not an expert on ageing kittens but guessed that this one was around 12 hours old, looked well, did some squeaking and was feeding from mother, so all was well. Photographs below. Mother did not object to the paparazzi there.

In the actual garden there was a rabbit run with two rabbits, each allowing folks to pick them up for 10 seconds before they engaged in a kind of rodeo effort to remove themselves from your arms. All fine, until they managed to escape. Now luckily a pair of Crocodile Dundee like 11 year olds were in attendance and caught the two miscreants before they run out of or burrow out of the garden and make a rapid escape from Croydon environs. Next entertainment was the chickens in a huge run who were making desperate attempts to escape, around 6 of them and not stupid either. Lastly, there were 3 hamster cages. One contained a tiny hamster that looked more like a field mouse , and was apparently a Chinese Crested Hamster/ Russian Dwarf. Another contained a hamster without exaggeration as large as a guinea pig, and the final cage seemed to contain nothing……….worrying. All good fun on a sunny afternoon.