The Great Escape

It had to happen sooner or later.
Paddy's daily routine is as follows:
A walk with me in the morning, followed by cat duty, which involves staring fixedly through the window and, on spotting the Enemy, frantically pawing at the window, alternating with running agitatedly round the room and back to the window, all the time moaning plaintively. (Barks are few and far between and blessedly low in volume.)
At the approach of dusk, it is clocking off time and the rest of the evening is spent in a comatose state until bedtime. When in this state, a cat could come and sit on his head and he would barely notice...possibly.
This afternoon, the prowling and agitation became too annoying, so I opened the living room door to banish him to the hall to cool down. Unfortunately, Keith was working in his van and had a lead plugged into the hall socket and the front door had blown open.
The people who live opposite us, had they been at home, would have been entertained by the sight of a dog hurtling through said door at the speed of light in close pursuit of a very surprised black and white cat, whose thought bubble, had it been visible, would have read something along the lines of "Oh, s**t! He's OFF the lead this time!"
As it happened, the chase only lead to the garden next door and both cat and Paddy effortlessly scaled the five foot high side gate into their back garden. Keith went to politely ask the neighbour if he could please retrieve our dog, while I streaked through our house into our back garden in the hope that Paddy would find his way back that way.
I don't know why I thought he would manage to get himself over the six foot garden fence, even if he wanted to, but he did. Neatly avoiding me, he shot back through our house to do a repeat performance. Luckily, Keith was standing in his way and managed to grab him, leaving a bemused neighbour wondering if the last couple of minutes had really happened.
The best bit was glancing out of the kitchen window a couple of minutes later and seeing the neighbour's large ginger cat perched half way up a tree and glaring furiously into our garden.