“Hello, emergency services. Fire, police or cat disentanglement?”

Kerry, Amy and I were having lunch with some friends and their son when my mother called.

“Could you come over, I need your help.”

Tobi, my mother’s kitten, had got herself tangled in a strip of fly paper. In scenes reminiscent of Brer Rabbit and the tar-baby, once it had got stuck its struggles had only worsened the situation until it ended up looking like something out of The Mummy.

I leapt in my car, cursing myself that I hadn’t brought the camera with me, and drove to her house. By the time I had arrived my mum had managed to get the actual paper off, but poor Tobi was liberally dotted with large patches of glue. Mum had already received some pretty heavy puncture marks from teeth and claws, and so my job was to hold Tobi still while she took the scissors to its fur and tried to hack the glue out.

We managed to remove most of it; it’s only left with a dollop on its ear where the hair was too short to cut. Thankfully the weather is getting a bit too cold for flies. If it had been earlier in the year mum may well have had to share her bed with kitten with a large clump of dead and dying insects stuck on the side of its head.