Living With Gladys Full Time

Well, I have to say what with one thing and another, you know a con man almost deceiving my  Mum and Dad out of £6k, a bullying family member hell-bent on being as spiteful and calculatingly cruel as possible, its been a bit of a week! I was already feeling quite rung out, so yesterday just about finished me!

What happened?

Nitten had to be re-homed 😢.

To be honest Alistair and I had mooted the idea a few weeks ago and Alistair’s sister Gillian found somewhere she could go. But I think Nitten got wind of the idea because as soon as we mentioned it to the rest of the family she started coming home like a good girl, every night, not going missing and staying away for a days at a time. Pippin wanted to take her when she moved into her own house too so we put the whole rehoming idea on the back burner and settled back into life with Nitten on the road with Gladys and the 2 dogs. Nittens sense of adventure though got the better of her attempts to be a stay at home cat! She started to wander, to where we shall never know, but the long days and nights of calling for her, shaking her food and looking hopefully out of the window willing her to just pop her head round the corner started again.

We are due to move on next week and the idea of leaving without her was unimaginable and the idea of having to stay in one place (lovely though it is here) because of Nitten sort of defeated the idea of selling up and travelling a bit! So yesterday having let her in a 2am we kept her in against her valiant attempts to get out, put her in her cat box and delivered her to her new home in Horesham. If a cat that loves the outdoors, micing, rabbiting and generally living the outdoor life of riley needed re-homing, then this is ‘the place’. It’s owned by a couple who are Olympian horse riders, the grooms are all animal mad and there are acres and acres of safe fields far away from the road for Nitten to roam in and play until her hearts content.

I sound very together about it today and as ever, a bit of good old fashioned time to adjust and allow for emotional catch up works wonders, but yesterday… the waaaaaaaaaaambulance was most definitely needed. I think poor Alistair wondered if I would ever stop crying ever again!

So, our menagerie has dwindled down to Laddie and Ebony, both of whom have settled brilliantly to life in Gladys. Laddie spends his whole day outside and literally has to be dragged in at bed time. Ebony by contrast spends her whole day inside sleeping in the warm and has to be literally dragged out at bedtime!

Talking of warm, bloody hell its been a bit nippy.

We made a rookie mistake and ran completely out of gas at the weekend and no back up, that won’t be happening again. The LPG ran out some time ago and its obviously not like just nipping t0 the garage in the C1 for a drop of petrol. Shifting  Gladys is a full on operation so we only move her when we are actually moving on. The temperature had dropped and for some reason our electric heaters had been tripping the fuse box so we ran the blown air gas heating instead, Yikes, 11kg of gas in 6 days! Expensive and totally impractical. Back to the electric heaters and fingers crossed no fuse box tripping ( we had an auto-electrician out and he’s done a bit of ‘overhead split giblet rewiring’ and it seems to have done the trick).

I think its going to be an interesting sort of winter in Gladys. Its lovely not to have that centrally heated feel, I always found that way too stuffy although I will miss the log burner.  I think it will be a bit like when I was young and lived at home, pre -central heating days, or come to think of it even when we did get central heating, if I was cold my dad would say ” put a cardi on”. Thats what we have started to do, more cardi’s, more socks, a couple of blankets at the ready, sounds fun doesn’t it😊. Although poor Alistair came back freezing from being on his Harley last friday in the wind and rain and all of the above and a couple of sheepskins had a hard job to warm him up!

So, we are heading into month 4 in our alternative lifestyle and it is still good. No regrets, even with having to re-home Nitten.