This afternoon my parents tootled off to join my sister, brother-in-law and nephew in Robin Hood’s Bay, though not before my mum had stuck notes on everything in the house telling me how they work, given me a guided tour of the building showing me where everything is (having apparently forgotten that I lived here between the ages of seven and eighteen), and instructed me at length on the habits of her cats (having apparently forgotten that I lived with them for most of that same period).

The one cat she didn’t leave is Charlie. Charlie is ’special’. Special, in his case, means that he has more medical conditions than there are names for, and a regime of pill-taking so complex that if you wanted to colour code it you’d have to extend beyond the visible spectrum.

He has scabs. Also wounds, the result of his picking the aforementioned scabs. In an attempt to discourage this behaviour, and to give the scabs a chance to heal, he has spent the last year and a bit with various parts of his anatomy wrapped in bandages, and a bucket on his head.

He’s also hugely fat, to the extent that strangers meeting him for the first time tend to ask “When are they due?” His practice at mealtimes is to scoff down his own food as quickly as possible, then shove the other cats out of the way and eat their food too. He’s supposed to be on a diet, but short of subjecting all of the others to the same low-calorie food, this – like Charlie himself – is rather hard to carry off.

Due to his complex dietary needs, my mum, probably wisely, decided not to entrust him to my care. So Charlie has gone off to spend the week at the vet’s. Which won’t be much fun, but then ‘fun’ isn’t really an option when you spend your life wrapped in bandages with a bucket on your head.