I've been on holiday for the last week in Malta. I wasn't sure what to expect really. It was a timeshare hotel which craig's parents have. It was so touristy there, I've never been on a tourist holiday before. In the place we were staying it was all restuarants, bars, pools and coach tours. I'm a whiny git but I don't care. It was nice to have a break from everything.

I got really bad heat rash and soon my body was a mass of lumps and itchiness. I also got badly bitten by some insect or another and had a kinda allergic skin reaction to that. Even though I'm home now i still have the heat rash!

There are SO many stray cats in malta its just unbelieveble. I started carrying cat crunchies about with me to feed the strays and we did a sweep of the local area at night feeding the strays. We fed so many cats and kittens. I think several of them will stay in my mind for a long time. There was a mother cat in Mdina with a litter of about 4 kittens who were about 5weeks old. One of the kittens eyes were so badly infected, it's eyes were bulging out of its head and they were so swollen and infected i cant get the image out of my mind, it was the worse thing I have ever seen, worse still knowing I could do nothing to help it and that it would probably die soon. The mother cat was also pregnant again. There was also a pregnant fluffy ginger and white cat we saw outside a restaurant as we walked past. She was petrified of the traffic going past but knew she had to beg to be fed. I gave her a massive pile of crunchies and a cuddle, i wish I could have done more. There was also a little ginger and white kitten on its own in a car park. I gave him a tin of food and some crunchies but he was too scared of me to come and see me. We went looking for him the next night and found him with another cat who seemed to be looking after him, we fed them both lots and lots. In Mdina we also met a colony of cats. We had stopped to feed a black mother with her two kittens who were about 9weeks old. As soon as I opened the biscuits, cats just started appearing from bushes and coming over to feed, i think we were feeding about 8 cats in the end. I think the thing that made me the most sad was the tourists there. The island is swarming with tourists, i mean really swarming, they are all british or german and we were the only ones helping, everyone else jsut appeared to be completely ignoring the cats. i know i'm a fanatical cat lover but i couldnt believe the people there.

I guess I wrote that down for myself so i wont forget what i saw. One comforting thing was that quite often we would find that other people had put down piles of crunchies and we would find old margarine tubs and the bottoms cut off bottles filled with water. I didnt see any very very very skinny cats, but a lot were thin and had obvious medical problems, and every female we saw was pregnant.