Picture this: A vegetarian sister, her husband and two children move in temporarily with a bachelor brother, a keen meat eater, who loves fishing, ferreting and hunting for rabbits with his Harris Hawk…

Eddie and Henrietta

Caught in a house buying chain, and finding themselves homeless, Catherine and her family were kindly taken in for two weeks by Catherine's brother, Eddie Thorne. Two months later they moved out again. The intervening eight weeks were memorable for both parties. "It leads to one or two interesting conflicts of interest when you have a single meat-eating man and a squeamish vegetarian sister along with her children, in the house," admitted Eddie.

The main battleground was The Fridge. Eddie's hawk, Henrietta, was fed on a diet that made Catherine blanche. Opening the door to the fridge, she was greeted with the sight of a deep frozen massacre. Inside were quail, day old baby chicks, rabbits and rats all ready to be defrosted for Henrietta to enjoy. "It's perfectly natural!" explained Eddie. A vegetarian doesn't necessarily see it that way. But a compromise was found, "Catherine had to be warned when she could and couldn't enter the kitchen and containers in the fridge were sealed with "Hawk Food" written very clearly on them."

The sofa got in the firing line too. Within an hour of the Williams family arriving on Eddie's doorstep, felt tip pen marks appeared on Eddie's cream sofa. Desperately amassing half a dozen cleaning products, Catherine worked through them all to get the marks out before Eddie saw the damage. Her work was thorough; not only did she eradicate the stains, she also removed the original colour of the sofa.

But for Catherine the hardest moment was the hygiene. Permanently attached to an antiseptic wipe, it was her brother's preparation of meat that had her hair standing on end, "Eddie had this chopping board on which he cut up the dead animals. I think he washed it once a week - and that was a concession!"

Eddie's hardest moment came when he returned from holiday, "I came back to a house still full of kids, with no definite end in sight. All my beer had been drunk by my brother in law and replaced by my sister with - food!" But, before he'd left, he'd made Catherine responsible for his two ferrets, Lady and Butch. It gave her another of those moments. In spite of her protests, "They're vicious! They bite!" she coped so well that Eddie, who'd been a little concerned about the arrangement, came back to the "biggest, fattest, roundest, rolliest ferrets you've ever seen! They'd been well looked after."

Catherine and Eddie even survived the battleground that is Other People's Children. Eddie thought his sister's a bit soft ("She's a very liberal mother...") but was also finding out how demanding it was to be permanently responsible for children - all day, all night - no break - and no sloping off home to his bachelor pad when he'd had enough.

Eventually, the Williams' moved into their new house. Eddie was left alone in his home, "I took a deep breath. I looked around me, and even for a bachelor there was a fair amount of housework done that day."

It could have been disaster, but it wasn't. Eddie and Catherine got to know each other again, learn about each other's lives and as a result , it's brought them closer. Would Eddie repeat the experience, though? "I'd have no objections to doing it again," he said, "But I would point out that my brother has an equally large house."