Now you see it, now you don't

 Cats love to eat octopus. Raw, boiled, fried or baked.  

If K is going to grill an octopus as a meze (snack) with ouzo then it has to hang out in the sun and dry out slightly.  He has learnt to hang it well out of the way of chairs, walls or fences.  The local feral cats are champion pole vaulters and high jumpers. 

They have been known to grab a fish from searing hot oil in a frying pan and have appeared out of nowhere to steal one of the fish he was gutting and scaling in the outside sink.  

Smash and grab feline style

He was boiling a couple of octopus/ii for foreign guests to sample and was called away for an hour or so in the middle of cooking.  When he cooks on the outside gas stove he'll close the pot in the shed if he has to leave.  

But not this time

He put a couple of heavy bricks and a piece of marble on top to keep them from removing the lid or knocking over the, hot, pot.

These cats are canny. By the time he got back

The pot was empty

Only the bay leaf was left.

They pushed the bricks off, removed the lid and dived in. All their Christmases  come at once

Was it one cat or both of the wild cats we feed every day? 

 They're not starving 

They were very tidy and fortunately didn't push the pot and its contents onto the tiles below. It would have been one helluva mess. They obviously just stuck their heads in and gobbled it all on top of the stove

K was fuming of course. Fortunately he had another octopus in the freezer and managed to defrost and cook it in time.  

We have a big black rubbish bin out the front and they can lift the lid, jump in, investigate the contents, jump out and put the lid back on again. And no-one the wiser till I open it and find the contents shredded

Now I put a heavy roof tile on the lid if there's anything in there that the cats might enjoy

Considerate animals. But bloody annoying.