Last night I stayed in a house where there lives a three-legged cat. Tonight I’m with Londoners whose fridge has an enlarged prostate. I am on the road for a while, and it makes Jack Kerouac’s stuff read like Noddy in Toyland.

I awoke this morning in the early hours to the sound of thwat-thwat-thwat-slup along the hallway of my friends’ house. It turned out to be the sound a nocturnally wandering tri-legged feline of the species. It had the ability to strike terror into the heart of all those who have never heard a three-legged cat before, primarily me. If you’ve never witnessed the locomotion of a three-legged cat before, you could be forgiven for thinking it might be the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse out to avenge the missing Fourth.

This particular cat is also a ginger. That represents a set of disabilities no living thing deserves to suffer; but thankfully, owners Paul and Helga took pity on him. Of course, there are those who would tell you they amputated his fourth limb for the fun of it, but you shouldn’t pay them any heed: Paul and Helga are wonderful folks. When you get to know them.

So here I am during the evening of Tuesday, wrestling with Jon and Trina’s hitech fridge. It dispenses filtered water on tap, but in the manner of a man on the verge of an emergency uraemia condition. The ice dispenser, on the other hand, vomits ice with the abandon of an arctic form of incontinence. To stop it behaving like that, you have to open and close the left-hand fridge door. I don’t like to think about how long the trial and error took before my hosts discovered this.

I am taking an odd route to south west France, involving Dorset, London, Kent, Sussex, the Channel Tunnel and then a roughly diagonal line stretching from Calais via Le Mans to Bordeaux and finally Villeneuve-sur-Lot. My barely organised hope in doing so is not to arrive down there before the Spring, but it isn’t going to happen: the temperature is set to be four degrees centigrade for the next ten days. I do love Slogger’s Roost darn France, but it costs a tree a day to heat the bloody place at this time of year.

More episodes will appear as and when wifi cafes and tolerant protégeurs allow.