Even bigger, even more like a puppy. Whenever the mail or newspapers come through the letterbox, he races from wherever he is to watch them drop. One day he was given a little too much advance notice by the paper boy, with the result that the extremely bulky paper, rolled up to be pushed through the letterbox, landed on his head, but he didn’t let that put him off.

He chases his tail from time to time – it follows him around, and sometimes he’d rather it didn’t. I found him the other day with the end of it in his mouth, while he worked out if he could perhaps eat it. He’s so gentle that he didn’t even hurt himself, but he was a bit disappointed in it as a foodstuff.

He does have a tendency to play with what he should be eating and eat what he should be playing with. His favourite toy – a foam rubber ball – eventually gets so that it won’t roll, because bits of it have disappeared.

This is because he habitually carries it in his mouth, and because one of his favourite games is to send it under my desk and then try to bring it out again by spearing it with his claw. His claws get clogged up with bright pink and yellow foam rubber, which has to be removed for him, because if he removes it, he eats it. He keeps having to be issued with new balls like a tennis player.

But give him a treat – a prawn, say, or a piece of chicken – and he chases it all over the floor, throwing it into the air and running after it. Eating it is the last thing on his mind. And since no one has any desire to discover the hard way where exactly he left it, he doesn’t get many treats, I’m afraid.

His current favourite toy is one that he acquired himself – a large black feather. (That’s what he’s got in the photographs.) He chases it, and chews it, and carries it about in his mouth. As with the balls, he plays complicated games involving chair legs, an invention of his own. With the balls, he bats them in and out of the legs, with himself on one side and the ball on the other. With the feather, the game seems to be pushing it over the wooden spar joining the legs, and catching it when it falls.

He continues to try to tunnel under closed doors, with detrimental results to the carpet. And now he’s discovered a bit of wallpaper at the foot of the stairs which presumably got torn when some furniture was brought down recently, and has stripped a fair bit of it from the wall. You only know he’s done it again when he comes in with a prize bit of wallpaper in his mouth.

Someone who calls on us regularly said ‘Oh, I see he isn’t just a carpet-fitter – he does a bit of wallpapering too.’ He went on to say that his own cat had done much the same with the soft furnishings when he was a kitten, but had eventually grown out of it. I hope George does, because he’s getting taller every day, and will be able to strip whole rooms if he doesn’t!

Hope you like this month’s photographs. It’s very difficult to get photographs of George, for two reasons. One, every time he sees the camera he walks right up to it and then starts playing with the strap, and two – I can’t get the hang of the digital camera. It seems to take the photograph a moment or two after I press the shutter. So the photograph of George’s tail – while demonstrating its true magnificence – was actually meant to be a photograph of George himself.