THIS week's column is proving painful for me to write. Writer's block is not the problem - at least, no more than usual.

No, it's just difficult to get at your computer keyboard when you have a large and miserable tom cat on your lap, claws digging remorselessly into your skin if you should try to type at more than ten words a minute.

It's been that kind of a week, really, ever since we came home and gave our two resident moggies their usual tummy-tickle greetings and discovered A Lump on the chest of our tom, Fergus.

The discovery, and the sudden panic that came with it, plunged us straight into a voyage of discovery into exactly how far we have gone down the child substitute road with our pets.

We conferred anxiously. Fergus was not in any apparent pain; but then again, when he had his ear half torn off by a love rival a couple of years ago he was bounding around the room and purring like the cat that got the cream rather than the one that had just got a pasting.

Was it the Big C, or just a concentrated bit of fat? Fergus likes his grub, and has the upholstery to prove it, so this was a plausible theory - but what did we laymen know of such things? Not a lot.

Hypochondriacs by proxy, we spent the evening scouring the internet for information (Google Search: cats and their lumps).

The results were not reassuring, and by the time we took Fergus to the vet's the following day, we were convinced his nine lives were up.

Typically, he yowled all the way to the surgery, then flirted outrageously with the vet, who pronounced him a honey-bunny (I think this means fat, but cute).

She couldn't put our mind at rest about Fergus's mystery ailment, though, until she shaved his chest for surgery and saw two telltale claw marks. It looks as if The Lump is the result of yet another tempestuous love affair for Fergus, but until the tests come back later this week, we won't know for certain.

In the meantime, we probably do not have a gravely ill patient on our hands. Rather, we have a bare-chested Lothario who's cost us £300 in lab tests and surgery and who is now less than graciously confined to barracks.

I wouldn't care, but Fergus was spayed years ago.

We've also had a series of sleepless nights, not so much through worry as through having to let him kip with us.

Well, he looked so pathetic when we tried to shut him downstairs and we couldn't bear to hear him trying to bash his head through the cat flap, only to be jarred to a halt by the white plastic bucket the veterinary nurse had tied around his neck to stop him licking his wounds.

We've hardly been able to go out because he makes a suicidal lunge for the door every time we half-open it, and he spends the rest of the day staring longingly over his bucket and out of the window upon the great outdoors.

At least, that's what he does when he's not staring accusingly at us, the source of all his woes, or twisting the knife in our wounds by refusing to touch our guilt gifts of cream and wild Atlantic salmon (Marks & Spencer, £1.79 a throw, thank you very much).

I know there are greater tragedies in the world than the spot of bother that Fergus is going through. But you try to tell him, and see how far you get.

Updated: 11:34 Wednesday, October 13, 2004