LIFE'S a lot more interesting when you have a cat flap on your door. It's like a letter-box - you never know what will drop through it.

We live on the edge of a village, with plenty of fields around us, which might make you feel a little insecure if you are used to city life.

But when things go bump in the night at our house it tends not to be a poltergeist, but some specimen of wildlife being dragged through the flap to its doom.

It's our butter-wouldn't-melt she-cat, Molly. By day she's a soft, shy slip of a thing, but by night she's a pitiless predator at the top of her local food chain.

I've lost count of the times I've traipsed blearily downstairs at 3.13am in the faint hope of rescuing some small, grey creature from certain death.

I secretly hope I'm too late, because when the poor things are alive and hiding, me and the Other Half have to spend hours heaving sofas, bookshelves and nests of electrical wiring around the living room in an effort to corner them and give them back their freedom.

By the time we've caught them, they're either dead of shock, half-mad with a fear that will haunt them for the rest of their natural lives or, worst of all, nearly dead and needing to be dispatched.

It's funny, but when I get downstairs to find they're already dead, they're always lying in exactly the same spot. I'm thinking of drawing a pentangle on the carpet, because there's clearly some dark ritual at work.

Over the years, there have been some interesting deaths. Rats. Bats. Mice. Field mice, voles, and on one occasion even a mole, which is an interesting animal when you get to see it up close.

But Molly excelled herself last week, and I actually missed her finest hour. I got to work and soon had a phone call from the O.H. asking if I'd noticed anything unusual before leaving the house.

Because when he got up there was a rabbit in the kitchen. Quite a big rabbit, shocked, but apparently uninjured and still well able to scuttle around to escape a single pair of hands.

Now, the O.H. wasn't quite awake after a late night the night before, so he didn't quite know what to do with Bunny until his eyes fell on to the kitchen counter and he spied the brown paper bag in which his take-away curry had arrived the previous evening.

Quick as a flash, he upended it to trap the rabbit - then realised that half his prawn madras was still inside the bag.

Bunny was now wearing a thick tandoori coating, but was at least still in captivity. The O.H. debated the idea of washing it down, but wasn't sure how to go about it and was a bit concerned about what would happen if Bunny got away and hopped all over the house with heavily curry-stained feet.

Eventually he just took it outside and Bunny legged it off to an uncertain future. I wonder what its rabbity mates made of it, back in the warren, stinking the place out with curry.

I just hope some fox didn't catch it and get hooked on rabbit madras. Otherwise, goodness knows what will be coming through that cat flap next.

Updated: 09:30 Wednesday, April 05, 2006