Charis has some remarkable scales. Oddly enough, she keeps them in Gregory and Sally Peck’s bedroom….

“Well, I guess you do have to watch the weight of your pets,” I said to myself, “it’s so easy to overfeed them when you love them so much.”

All the same, I didn’t fancy risking the sharp beaks of my fine-feathered friends by getting them out of their cages and standing them on the scales – they would have to take a break from “Lorikeet Weight Watchers” this week while I’m house-sitting (after all, it is Christmas). And truthfully, the scales looked more appropriate for human use which is why I thought I would brace myself for any shock and stand on them myself.

Now we all know that most scales these days are so newfangled that you have to have a manual to work out how to use them (and even then you don’t believe they are correct) but these ones belonging to Charis take the cake. It’s not a case of first tapping twice with your foot to activate before standing on fully (then repeating it several times until it does work); no, Charis’s are much easier than that for they have a button to press – and you can’t miss it because the button is lit up with a picture of a house on it (maybe for people the size of a house?).

I stood beside the scales and pressed the start button. Hey presto! The scales began to move! The machine had a mind of its own. It dove under one bird cage, came out, went back in, then out again and under the other cage. Gregory and Sally Peck were as bemused as I was and squawked a bit but refrained from saying “Of course I love you” (as they did yesterday morning).

It seemed to us (I think I can safely speak for the Pecks, both cats – Archer and Sterling – and me) that the scales were starving hungry and searching for food. It made a beeline for the dried cat-food dispenser, tried to push it over, unsuccessfully, but succeeded only in pushing the fancy canister off its rubber mat and rejecting a few old morsels that had got away. A strip of magnetic tape prevented the scales making their escape from bedroom to kitchen and, none-the-less deterred in its quest for food, the keen machine set about mounting the cats’ wet-food bowls. The remnants of tinned cat food in the bowls were untouched (obviously the smell was enough to put off even a hungry set of bathroom scales from a bird bedroom) and the scales advanced towards me…

Of course they didn’t get me (I’ve always been rather good at avoiding bathroom scales) and now the scales have fallen from eyes I can tell you that the machine is actually a robot hoover. But where is the rubbish held? Now that’s a mystery on a different scale!