I WONDER if I'm the only person in Cornwall who has a suicidal dragonfly in the garden.

Five times on Saturday I saved this beautiful creature from the cats, or could I have saved five different dragonflies?

The first time I was sitting enjoying an early morning cup of coffee in the kitchen when I heard suspicious noises from the utility area.

This kind of noise is usually associated with one cat or other coming in with something, to them, alive and desirably edible but not yet ready to be dispatched.

Having banned any kind of game involving tormenting small creatures either furred or feathered I shot out there and found the grey cat batting a dragonfly into a corner. Checking it for damage I picked it up on a piece of tissue and carried it out to a bush, having firmly shut the door on the cause of this action. It immediately flew low over the grass in the direction of the back garden.

An hour later the ginger cat came in with something in its mouth and I re-rescued what was apparently the same dragonfly, and put it high into another bush.

This was repeated three more times, twice with ginger and once with the grey and all three times I could swear that neither cat could possibly have seen where I put the insect.

The last rescue of the by now slightly bedraggled dragonfly involved me placing it high up in a dense hydrangea and telling it firmly that if it didn't fly away swiftly I feared the next catnapping would mean curtains.

Unfortunately as I was doing this someone walked past on the pavement and spotted me apparently having a long conversation with a hydrangea bush and moved away rather rapidly. This is something neighbours tend to do nowadays ever since a group of them spotted me hacking at my granddaughter's bicycle tyre with a carving knife. I suppose they weren't to know my grandson had trapped his hand between the wheel and the top of the bike and I was trying to make the tyre go down quickly to get it out before his parents came home and I had to explain away a completely flat hand.

The cats were, of course, furious I had removed their plaything and let me know with a lot of tail lashing and the kind of pussy glares of the 'I'll get you later' variety.

I don't know if they would have eaten the dragonfly, but they do eat moths and Daddy Longlegs, apparently with relish and usually when I'm eating. There's something rather stomach churning in the sound of a crunchy moth or seeing a small waving leg sticking out between a set of whiskers.

Pussy revenge can take many forms but I am certain it is premeditated and carried out quite deliberately.

If we annoy Jefferson he walks out of the room and scratches hell out of the staircarpet or the doormat, looking over his shoulder to see what effect he is having. He also has the habit of standing behind you, rearing up on his back legs and digging his claws into a handy part of your anatomy. A punctured bottom is the price we all pay sooner or later for buying the wrong flavour cat food.

Oscar is far more subtle. Tell him off for sitting on the table and he leaps onto the very top of the kitchen units, which are home to three very tasteful dried flower arrangements put together by my daughter. Then he walks all the way round, just missing the flowers by a millimetre, but making them rock, all the while looking down with a smug expression on his face. We can't reach him and he knows it.

Last week, after being caught attempting to get his share of the uncooked Sunday joint, he actually laid his head in the middle of one lot of flowers, dangled his legs over the side and pretended to nod off to sleep.

My ex-husband wasn't overfond of cats and had a running battle with one of ours over his (my husband's) right to leave food on his plate while he went to answer the telephone and return to find it still there. He never could quite grasp that to a cat with an overactive hunting instinct a dead Wall's sausage was just as much fun as a live vole, and much easier to catch.

The battle of wills between them involved all kinds of food, worsening when the cat learned to hook open the larder door with his paws and was found actually sitting on a large turkey nibbling the parson's nose.

Each transgression meant the cat was chased out of the kitchen and usually put outside, which he didn't like because despite his hunting instinct he was a fireside cat at heart and never caught anything more challenging than slices of cold beef or the aforementioned sausages.

His revenge, when it came, was not sweet. I watched in amazement one day as he casually walked past my husband, stopped, aimed his rear quarters quite deliberately and sprayed onto dark blue suit trousers then walked away.

I then had a crisis of conscience as to whether I should mention this, but it was a short crisis and I didn't want to cause the cat any more grief so I didn't.

My husband looked a little bit puzzled for the next few days and sniffed a lot but then I suppose the scent wore off. I, on the other hand, had to watch the cat like a hawk in case it performed any more rearguard actions on the wrong trousers again.