The other day I found some nice cotton-knit (t-shirt material) trousers to wear at the gym and, since my old ones were looking a bit worse for wear, I bought two pairs and left them in a bag in the hallway on top of our mineral water bottles – I’d wanted to try them on before washing them in case I had to exchange them for a different size. But when I went to try them on yesterday morning the bag was gone. 😕

After searching the whole flat – and with neither of us remembering having moved or even having touched the bag – the only explanation we could come up with was that Nog must have absent-mindedly thrown it away thinking it was a bag of rubbish. So we went back to the shop yesterday evening and Nog bought me two more pairs of cotton trousers as a replacement, which was very kind of him, though the whole thing still felt like a complete mystery.

Then last night I was changing the sheets and moved the bed out from against the wall a bit . . . and there was the bag! In Azar’s lair, next to his little rug (the lair was one of Azar’s “safe places” during the cat fight era so I put a small rug there to make it more comfortable). I was totally gobsmacked and showed this new evidence to Nog and we ended up even more puzzled than when we’d both agreed he must have thrown the bag away. But we couldn’t argue with the evidence – one of the bag handles was broken (and was looking rather chewed) and the bag itself was covered in telltale claw holes.

For the record, Azar has always been a bit of a packrat and often when things go missing I’ll look either under the sofa or in his lair. But these are usually small items like scrabble tiles, earrings, etc, though he has also been known to pry open the plastic storage boxes that we have under the bed and take out a towel or other comfy article of clothing to lie on (this was before I got him his own rug). But to drag a whole plastic bag of clothes under the bed! We still can hardly believe it. But at least we’ve managed to clear Nog’s name and we’re still chuckling whenever we think of Azar dragging the bag under the bed, no doubt feeling very clever and sneaky indeed. 🙂

cat burglar pic from the Ernst Gallery