We’ve pretty much decided now to get a cat of our own. The neighbourhood cat’s visits have convinced me. Ingrid has always wanted a cat, Adrian is generally positive to pets, and Eric doesn’t mind. So here we are.

It won’t be a kitten, though, despite Ingrid’s pleas. I don’t want a baby in the house again, regardless of species. I’d much rather skip the mess and chaos of a kitten and get a cat that’s had some time to settle in its character and find its footing in life.

As soon as we had decided, Ingrid went on a Blocket spree and came back with a shortlist of suggestions of cats she liked. I contacted a few of the sellers, and reached a tentative agreement with one. So we might be cat owners a week from now – if, after meeting the cat, we think he would be a good fit for us.

Today I went shopping for essential cat equipment: a litter box and a crate. Our potential adoptee cat lives in the countryside now and is used to being outdoors, and mostly doing its business outdoors. He will definitely be going outdoors here as well – with the way we keep our doors open in the summer, it would be impossible to keep an animal inside. (Sometimes it is impossible to keep them outside.) But for the first few weeks after moving, while he’s still settling in, he’ll have to remain inside.

The stacks of litter box pellets were quite unphotogenic. And the cat food and water bowls were downright tasteless – golden with little paw prints, or pink with cartoonish fish skeletons. I don’t want any of those in my kitchen. The most interesting-looking thing in the pet shop was this shelf of dead tree branches, for terrariums I guess. Of course there’s a market for pretty-looking dead branches.