THE family having fled to the sun, I have been left to my own devices for a couple of weeks, one of them a short holiday at home with just two cats for company.

This was fairly relaxing, interrupted only by the occasional scuffle as one or other of my feline friends attempted to bring yet another just dead and usually headless creature into the house.

People often seem to think that their cats return home with a bloody corpse to leave as a gift for their owners. If it's true, I wish they wouldn't. I wish they'd eat their hedge kills in the shrubbery instead of carting the bits they don't want inside.

If they were more human I suppose they wouldn't just bring them home, they'd find some night school teaching taxidermy and before you knew it you would have a series of plaques on the wall bearing the stuffed and mounted heads of small rodents and surprised looking birds. 'Callington Summer 2001 - fieldmouse' or 'Front garden 2000 - juvenile common mole' the legends would read. So it could be worse.

I used to have a cat whose hunting abilities were fairly inadequate. The only things he ever dragged home were fairly obviously long dead and not caught by him. The only time he ever managed to catch anything was by sitting at the entrance to the chicken house waiting for the chicks to come home to roost, and even then most of them managed to jump over him.

I thought of this when Oscar came in the other day carrying a seagull feather. He gave me a look as if to say 'I've eaten the rest, this is all that's left', but not very convincingly.

Some birds are far more protective than others, and a family of blackbirds in the hawthorn tree are determined their fledglings are not going to become just another lunchtime snack. The whole week I was home they set about dive bombing the cats and making a terrible noise, so much so that both began to detour that part of the garden. They already avoid the big conifer, home to some members of the crow family, who are also aggressive and on one occasion caused TJ to fall off a branch.

Being in sole charge of the house I waited for a crisis. I had already been somewhat hurt to discover that the stick insects had been removed and sent to a friend's house to be looked after. What, can't I be trusted with three stick insects? Perhaps I shouldn't have made the jokes about stoking up the barbie with twigs.

The crisis happened on day three, when the freezer packed up, or rather indicated that it had packed up several hours ago by making some dreadful retching noises.

The contents were already soft, so I had to make a quick decision. Do I throw caution to the wind and invite the neighbours to a giant but slightly iffy curry party? Or do l chuck the lot out? Not wishing to cause a mass outbreak of Vindaloo poisoning I decided on the latter, and spent the rest of the week beating back two cats who just knew those thick black plastic bags contained something decidedly worth investigating.

We have a new addition to the garden, a delightful Wendy house, a gift from a friend who has just bought a house where it was originally installed in the corner of the garden and didn't want it.

The cats have made full use of it in the sunshine, laying out languorously on the little verandah, retreating inside when the sun is too hot. It's a perfect little miniature house and I envy it really, because as a child brought up on Enid Blyton I longed for a little house like it, or a tree house high in the timber tops, or just a secret little den.

All I had, deprived child that I was, was The Shed.

I use the capital letters deliberately because that was how we always thought of it. The Shed was small, dilapidated even when we moved in, and the receiver of all things unwanted, very much over-used, might come in handy or waiting to be thrown out. If there was something in the house which nobody could possibly find a use for, like gas masks, the cry went up 'put it in The Shed'. And similarly, if anything couldn't be found in the house it was automatically assumed that it was 'in The Shed' and it usually was.

The Shed must have had the proportions of a Tardis because it also housed my rabbits in the winter, making the atmosphere somewhat ripe; all the bikes, the mangle, several tin baths (brought from a previous cottage and which might come in handy should our indoor bath get stolen) the gardening tools and my grandmother's collection of hat boxes. The Shed was never locked because nobody in their right mind would ever have stolen anything out of it although they might have considered dumping something in it. The door was invariably left open and one year a robin nested in one of the bicycle baskets, producing several babies.

All this left little room for me to play, but I managed a small corner and could often be found there until the day my grandmother blew The Shed up.

She did this after following, probably not entirely accurately, a home-made ginger beer recipe and storing the bottles in the shed. One went up and the rest followed and the noise sounded like a small bomb exploding.

If that happened now a posse of police wearing black leather and balaclavas and clutching small machine guns would probably have descended en-masse and plug Granny where she stood.

All that happened then was the next door neighbour, who was partial to the use of foul language in every other sentence, rushed out shouting ' For C....sake, what the s...... h.... has the silly old c.. gone and b..... well done now?'

The Shed window was blown out and my mother told my grandmother that she could have killed me, or at the very least 'had my eye out', a fate which awaited any child in the vicinity of anything dangerous.

Somehow I never felt safe in The Shed again.

Footnote: Following last week's column I thank the gentleman in Looe who suggested that Cornwall's national bird should be the tit. Unfortunately, this being a family paper, I can't print his letter! And thanks to the person who pointed out that the American national bird is the bald eagle. Poor thing, being called baldy from day one. No wonder it hides itself away.