So, one evening last winter, I'm sitting in front of the tube in our living room. This room has a seldom-used natural fireplace which frequently serves as a portal of entry for the house's rodent population. On this particular night, I turned around during a commercial to find all four of our cats neatly arrayed in a semi-circle around the hearth with a solitary common house mouse standing on his hind legs in the corner of the fireplace looking nervously about. I returned to watching the TV with no more than a passing thought to the mouse's likely fate.

At the next commercial, I looked back again to find that the cats had broken their formation and taken up your basic "loungecat" sprawl in various places around the floor. What was most astounding, however, was that the mouse was leaning up against the oldest cat's back, completely unrestrained and apparently of his own free will. It was if some unseen referee had blown the whistle and called a time-out.

The following morning, there was ample evidence that the mouse was indeed, (with apologies to Monty Python) "bleeding demised" so the ref must have called time-in at some time during the night.