Anyone who has ever lived in a shared house knows this feeling well: wanting to move out. It's a feeling that has been growing in me for some months now. Sometimes I even find myself thinking that I may actually get around to it. In fact, I've even begun selling some of my CDs on Amazon, in the vain hope of downsizing my collection from 'unmanageable' to merely 'excessive'. So what has stirred me to such vertiginous heights of self-motivation?

A cat flap.

All was fine until that cat flap got installed.

I've put up with the mysteriously vanishing spoons (where they go, I have no idea). The alcoholic in the attic I've got used to - he's no trouble really, and so far he's only kicked people I don't like (and only while wearing flip-flops). The girl who sometimes takes ninety minutes in the bathroom merely acts as encouragement for me to get up earlier, if I don't want to waste half my morning. I can even just about tolerate the living room being on the other side of my bedroom door - it's so small (more of a barely alive room) that only one person ever uses it, and although her taste in TV is regrettable, she at least seems to have superhuman hearing (in other words, the contestants on Pop Idol can wail all they like, but I rarely hear them). As for the guy who keeps eating and replacing my frozen pizza, I'm just curious to see how many more times he'll do it - besides, who wouldn't want to own a self-replenishing pizza?

Then the cat flap was installed.

To give the handyman due credit, it takes a special kind of idiocy to put a cat flap in the precise place where it will blow open on a near constant basis - in the middle of winter. Why not the side door? Even now, in late-May, throughout the lower half of the house, an icy chill circulates constantly at ground level - and it's through my room that it tries to escape.

As for my housemate's cat, it might sound cruel, but I've never thought to describe a cat as miscast before. Sure, he looks the part, but I don't know, somehow the role just seems slightly beyond him.

Take string chasing: catching the string isn't the problem. But unless you remove it from his claws that's the end of the game. Not because of some characterful tug-of-war type tenacity, it's just that he can't work out how to let go.

My point?

Well, I'd resent the misplaced cat flap just a little less if there were something more resembling a cat to use it. The poor lost looking creature.

And the landlord?

Even if he agreed to have the flap moved, well, I'm not waiting until winter comes around again - if past form's anything to go by.

So, the joys of flat hunting await.

Then deposit finding, agent's fees, mail redirection, transferring home insurance, packing things, cleaning up? And the list goes on? and on? and on?

Bloody cat flap.
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Sarah Maple. To save money online try Confused.com with their range of home insurance comparison services.