Phew

We thought our little Miss Kit was really taking a turn for the worse, and hauled her vet out to see her – she has been utterly miserable and run down for a few days, pulling bits out of her fur till she looked moth-eaten, with her skin twitching and shivering. His interim diagnosis was, to all our surprise, a flea. Miss Kit has never had fleas. I use a fine tooth comb on her regularly and there is not a sign, I protested. But, I am told, if a cat has never had fleas and one turns up, there can be a terrific allergic reaction. Anyway, Hamish said practically, start off by seeing if that’s it before getting into anything gloomier. He gave her an anti-inflammatory to deal with the itch on an immediate basis, and prescribed a back of the neck flea treatment. These I think are utterly no fun and irritate the skin, but once it dried, she was suddenly miles better, and is now scarfing down her food and generally cheerful again, enormously to our relief. Her large friend is not being entirely good at the moment - she has taken to plootering about in the mud on the edge of the pond and charging back in to distribute what seems unnatural quantities of mud about the house. Her feet are quite large, but there are only four of them, and somehow her mud-distributing capacity seems almost beyond the bounds of nature. She remains cheerful in herself. It was National Canine Naughtiness Day a while back, marked by a series of small crimes, most of which I now forget, but since then she has been really quite good. She is rather touchingly solicitous of Miss Kit's generally tottery state.