Confirmation: It is not possible to herd cats.

I don't care what the award-winning EDS ad says.  It can't be done.

While I was amusing myself with the morning mopping at 5.00am, the two cats decided to push open one of the screen doors and venture onto the balcony.  They had no inclination whatever to come back inside. They're not motivated by food, so treats were of no avail.  I saw Crumpet's black tail disappearing up the stairs to the rooftop, and Maneki tore around the corner to the front balcony.  I gave up and resumed mopping.

When she sensed that the whole house had clean, damp floors, Crumpet reappeared at the door just in time to leave grimy paw prints throughout the apartment. Bless her.

Maneki, however, was nowhere to be found.  I searched the whole wrap-around balcony and rooftop repeatedly.  I went downstairs and searched the back and front courtyards, calling.  I went out onto the street in my grubby, sweaty kaftan, looking like an asylum escapee, wandering up and down and calling.  My neighbours in Brickfields all knew me as the resident crazy cat lady, and it doesn't seem I'll be shedding that title here.

I called out to the neighbour on one side -- he was sweeping the courtyard at the Cambodia-Singapore import-export firm.  "Chhmaa bpoa-sor!"  White cat! I pointed to my eye to suggest I was looking for such a creature. He looked around his property in a vague way which suggested that he's not accustomed to looking for cats. Stray cats come, and they go, but why would anyone seek one?  A particular one, no less. While he was trying to discern what on earth I wanted of him, I heard a high-pitched yowl.

There she was!  She was on the front balcony of the adjoining house on the other side. To get there, she had to have run a gauntlet of wire mesh, iron spikes and razor wire.

If you look closely, you can see that my landlady has fastened a wire mesh  on the inside of this semicircular grille and strung coils of razor wire around the perimeter.  Her son told me that a burglar had climbed up onto the roof of the neighbours' car port (the corrugated metal below their balcony), and managed to scramble from there onto what is now my balcony.  That's when all this deterrent metalwork went up.  How Maneki got through the mesh and onto the other balcony, I don't know, but she appeared to have no clue how to get back.

This is how I met my neighbours.  At 6.00am, my landlady rang the next-door doorbell, and the husband of the house went out onto his balcony.  The cat panicked and scrambled to the next house's balcony.  (There are three connected houses in our little block.)  Yee rang the 3rd doorbell, and a young housekeeper tentatively led me to the upper storey, where Maneki was dashing around the balcony, panting and panicked. I approached her very slowly, speaking softly.  She hissed at me and scrambled back to the middle house. That's when I concluded that herding cats is indeed impossible, threw my hands up and came back downstairs, only to collide with the lady of the 3rd house, just coming back from the market on her moto. I pray she didn't punish the housekeeper for letting a stranger in.  A mad one, at that.

I went up to my own front balcony, and Maneki came over to the grille and looked at me mournfully from the wrong side.  I sat down and began to loosen one edge of the wire mesh. When she saw that opening -- not big enough for a burglar, but plenty adequate for a cat -- she dashed through.

She finally came into the kitchen, drank a half bowl of water and retired to her favourite windowsill to sleep it off. She's not moved since, as far as I can tell.

Me? I had to run off for my daily Khmer lesson without any coffee and then had to stop on the way home to buy a nice chocolate bar for Yee, who had graciously disrupted her morning routine to run around in a futile effort to capture my cat.

I'd cherished a daydream that the cats might safely be allowed onto the balcony one day, but I now see that it can't happen.  There are just too many irresistible opportunities for further exploration, way too many of which involve razor wire. I'm going to have to develop my cat-corralling skills, because herding them is out of the question.