The cat must have thought that the reason we were not happy with all the dead mice he brought home for us was that they were too small – so today he deposited a huge dead rat on the doorstep.

He probably tried to bring it indoors but found it too big to fit through the catflap. Jayne flipped and reminded me that although it is her cat it is my job to dispose of its little (and not so little) presents.

Although it was clean and newly dead, I wasn't going to touch it with my bare hands. Not after the last experience, where the rat turned out to have been lying on the lawn for a while and fell apart in a mass of maggots, while the tail almost came off in my hand.

So I used a surgical glove left over from Jayne's home care job and carried the rat through to the back garden to lob it over the fence and into the woods. The thing is I was still wearing my slippers so I didn't want to walk on the marshy grass, and the paving stones do not go all the way to the back fence.

As a result the rat got lodged in a tree about 3 metres off the ground, making an attractive ornament for the garden, and I had to put some shoes on after all and go back out to dislodge it with a handy street hockey stick. Maybe it would be less trouble all round if I just threw the cat over the fence…