This isn't France!

As close as Salut! can get to another edition of What I Did On My Holidays. Pressure of work/packing/farewells limits me to this offering, from today's edition of The National, though Monette declined to pose for the paper.
Word from London is that our ungovernable French cat is content enough to be reacquainted with the world, any world, beyond closed doors and windows and therefore sees the move as a bit of a holiday - but also that she isn't taken in. Suburban London is not Provence, and she knows it...

The cat has flown. Monette’s expat experience, in the UAE at any rate, has proved shorter than mine.

One night last week, men arrived in a van to carry her off to the airport, from where she travelled to London, so expensively that I trust the inflight service included lavish helpings of the finest tiger prawns and a procession of catchable mice.

As usual, Monette had little say in the matter. Yet another move had been dictated by her owners just as her name was dictated by the identity of the man who made her place of birth famous.

In a short life that began in the grounds of Claude Monet’s home at Giverny, west of Paris, Monette has seen a lot.

First there was central Paris: the elegant rue de Rivoli beside the Place de la Concorde. This was an indoors existence, led in an enormous flat with the bonus of carefully controlled – meaning tethered – outings to the Bois de Boulogne and Tuileries, plus one flyaway holiday to the Côte d’Azur.

The Riviera, permanently this time, was next on the itinerary. For a cat banned from straying outside since the first fortnight of life, this was a revelation. Monette took happily to a new world involving other cats and the opportunity to torment crickets and lizards.

Ten months of Provencal sunshine was cruelly followed by London in winter. Monette fell grumpily into victimhood; the weather was hardly to her liking, and there was attention from loutish Anglo-Saxon cats, not to mention ferocious grey squirrels, to contend with.

But to that London Monette has now returned. The early reports suggest that she is purring contentedly at the change.

It was never likely to be otherwise. We were strongly advised on moving to Abu Dhabi that cats were best kept inside. In our case, “inside” is barely enough to, well, swing a cat, and Monette would spend her days sulking. She whined for food at meal times, whined for food between meals, whined to be picked up, whined to be put down. And whined, above all, with frustrated rage at the birds taunting her from branches that tapped on the dining room window.

With much less complaint about their present environment, Monette’s owners are about to follow her back to Europe. Our stay in Abu Dhabi is nearing its end.

More on this, and on a continuing association with The National and the UAE, will appear here a week today.

But today, quite rightly, is reserved for a Monette moment of celebrity.

Choices affecting her future have to be made. Should she remain in London and make the best of it? Or return to the joys of sunny southern France? At the grand old age of 30, on my calculation of the human equivalent, she is probably ready to settle down somewhere – whether or not she has the brain power to work out that the decision, once again, is out of her paws.