The cat and the hat.

But this is no story for children.

Many years ago I treated myself to a river cruise in Russia. It began in Moscow and ended in St Petersburg both of which were fascinating places which would take a blog each to describe, and about half way between the two we stopped at a very small village in the middle of nowhere and a forest where huge bears lived. We wanted to go exploring and find one, but our guide took us to the village inn and introduced us to the stuffed bear that was standing in the entrance, it was well over six feet tall and huge! We took a deep breath and decided that perhaps a bear hunt wasn’t such a good idea after all, so we went off to explore the tiny marketplace instead, where they had laid out stalls with all sorts of tourist attractions like matryoshka dolls standing in graded rows to tempt us and next door to the dolls was a stall selling all sorts of Russian hats.

One row of them was trimmed with thick white fur, crowned with white leather and padded. We tried then on and they were marvellously warm, like having a hot water bottle on your head, so having been deprived of the bear I treated myself to one of them.

From then on, I wore it every winter and was as snug as a bug in a rug, until one winter evening instead of putting it away at the end of the day, I left it on the baluster at the foot of the stairs. When I came down in the morning I found to my horror that Dixie had knocked it down and was ‘killing’ it in the hall, holding it firmly down with his front paws, while his back paws ripped it to shreds. By the time I went to rescue it, it was well and truly dead, as the pictures will show you.

My cat is remarkably thorough, and when I said in terms of sad rebuke ‘Oh Dixie what have you done?’ he looked as pleased with himself as though he’d just killed a rat.

Perhaps I should have bought the Russian dolls.