Post Pirate Depression?

Pirate returned to his owners last night, leaving our home a little disheveled & emptier, but a lot more peaceful & quiet

In some kind of reverse-Pavlovian conditioning however, I woke at 6am ready to shamble out of bed, find his lead, frisbee & my trainers & head up to the park, waking up along the way. Even though today I wasn't greeted by his Orc-ish grunts & face licks (not sure if Orcs do those...), I'm now awake, around three hours earlier than I wanted to be - given that this is my first proper weekend off in quite a while & my first celebratory priority was to spend a fair portion of it asleep!

The cats forgave us pretty quickly for their unwelcome Christmas present - which was pretty much a two week eviction notice while Pirate dominated the house - both of them curled up in my lap at various times during a couple of episodes of Black Mirror's new season & are quite happy this morning that I was on hand to provide breakfast so early

For those of you curious about our semi-annual invader here's a little collection of photos - you'll see he's not the most co-operative subject, it's hard to keep him still long enough...