“There’s something wrong with your cat,” says my husband.

I’m sitting on the sofa on Sunday morning, reading Wolf Hall, the Man Booker prize winner which could double up as a door-stop or a seat for a small child, it’s so heavy.

By heavy, I mean weighs a lot, rather than massively intellectually taxing. It may turn out to be that as well, but it’s a bit early to tell.

I’ve been reading it for quite a while - I’ve read up to page 23 four or five times since I was given the book last October – but I’ve never managed to get any further because each time my train of thought has been interrupted by various global disasters.

These include the demise of our washing machine, poor performance by a truculent windscreen wiper and other life-changing events that have taken my attention away from the many characters involved in a compelling tale of Tudor history.

Still, I’m sorted this weekend. There’s snow on the ground, food in the freezer, a post-Christmas overdraft in the bank, but I can stay inside, read and spend nothing. Excellent.

I look at the cat. He looks fine. He’s drinking water out of the dish under the Christmas tree pot, which may be his way of saying, hey, didn’t Twelfth Night happen last week? … time to get this green thing out of my living room, methinks, but he looks fit and healthy. He jumps onto my lap and purrs. Well, says my husband, he’s been drinking an awful lot the last few days. I think he should see a vet.

I sigh and put down Wolf Hall, and go and Google “cat drinking”. There’s almost no point. Just as when I Google “neck ache” when I’ve slept awkwardly I get pages and pages on cardiac arrest and meningitis, I’m obviously going to get the worst case scenarios in the feline line.

Sure enough, if I have any sort of a conscience at all, I need to get the cat checked out right now, or he could soon be checking out permanently. Diabetes, kidney disease – I stop there and make the call.

The vet, who I suspect only opens on Sundays because we’re likely to turn up, can see us. My husband digs out the car, I dig out the cat basket, and half an hour later the cat and I are in the company of a rabbit with a suspected stroke and a dog that has swallowed a packet of painkillers.

The vet calls us in and I tell him we’ve noticed the cat is drinking a lot of water inside the house.

I don’t mention I haven’t got round to taking the tree down yet, but leave it hanging, as if we have installed a small ornamental pond in front of the telly.

That, he says, taking the cat out of the basket, could be because all the water outside is frozen.

But it could also be because of one of the ailments I’ve Googled. He takes the cat to another room for a few minutes, there are a couple of indignant miaows, and then he’s back. The blood and urine tests will be back very soon, he says.

As I’m closing the cat basket, I try to imagine how you’d take a urine sample from a cat.

You simple put a fine, sharp needle into the bladder, says the vet. A piece of…well, you get the picture.

The bill equates to a night for two, including breakfast, in a nice country hotel.

Not that I’m resentful. Still, when I get a call a few hours later from the vet later with the results (negative – the cat was just thirsty) - I’m pretty impressed. An appointment, consultation, tests and results all on a Sunday. Nye Bevan slipped up somewhere.

“What’s that bald patch on his throat?” asks my husband when I get back, pointing to the area where that was shaved for the blood sample.

Oh, I expect he’s been self-harming, I say, but not out loud.

Then I remember how queasy my husband is. Show him a hypodermic needle and watch him turn green before your eyes.

“It’s where they went in to take the urine sample,” I say.

“The needle goes right down past the heart and vital organs, and then they just hope they hit the bladder rather than anything else down there.”

It’s a very pale, greyish sort of green.

I ignore him and the cat, and turn to page 24 of Wolf Hall.