Dear Readers, I am sitting in the lounge at Heathrow Terminal Five, waiting for my 22.30 flight to Cape Town. I’ve paid 75 quid for the lounge, but it’s pretty poor to be honest – still, that’s what you get when you’ve delusions of grandeur. There’s some lumpy rice with chilli con carne, and the staff stick a reserved sign on any available chair, even when it’s half empty, so I’ve no idea what’s going on. There is a really splendid view of the run way, so it’s not all bad. And I do have a long wait until my flight, so it’s nice to have a comfy chair.

As I sit here, my thoughts turn to how on earth our cat Abbie is going to cope with just John in the house. As you can see, she likes to keep an eye on me by sitting on the back of the sofa and watching for any sudden movements. John, being a chap, is somewhat prone to sudden movements, which are greeted with a hearty hiss, and a look of utter contempt. But the cat will have to put up with John being her servant for the next twelve days. John already does most of the feeding, so hopefully by the time I retune, a rapprochement will have been reached.

In general, Abbie is settling in very nicely. Sometimes she runs around chasing one of her toy mouse (bought for her by the man next door who was trying to win her over), but then she just collapses, as in the photo above, as if the plug has been pulled out. And although  we’ve never fed her from the table, someone clearly has, as every time we sit down she appears, round-eyed with expectation.

Hey ho. I’m sure that cat and husband will do perfectly well without me to organise everything, and if nothing else, they’ll be glad when I return. In the meantime, there’s a ten and a half hour flight to look forward to, followed by customs/security/baggage retrieval, followed by piling into a mini bus and heading north from Cape Town to Worcester. We hope to go to the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden, which has lots of examples of the succulents that thrive in this habitat. Plus there are three tortoise species, and mongoose (or mongeese, I’m never sure). I’m so excited! Let’s see what we see. I do think by the time I get to Worcester I’m going to be well ready for a sleep.

Typical Robertson Karoo ecosystem (Photo By Abu Shawka – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36580561)

Angulate Tortoise

Leopard Tortoise (Photo By Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE – Leopard Tortoise (Stigmochelys pardalis), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40724152)

Parrot-beaked tortoise (Photo By frank wouters – originally posted to Flickr as Beaked cape tortoise, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3773517)