@Buraakucat - indeed, you have a good memory - Orange and his tiny brother Aonghus Dubh who was indeed all black, were in a rabbit hutch with five other cats, so seven cats in total - the guinea pigs were of course rehoused temporarily. All in the back of an enormous Luton box truck. The worst mistake ever, moving ourselves, took three runs, in fact - two truck loads and a car load as well which all cost a fortune in one-way rental and fuel. It would definitely have been cheaper and a whole lot less stress getting a Skye or Orkney-based removal company who do these all the time.
In April, during the first run, we brought a huge Rayburn kitchen range-type stove from Janet’s folks in Staffordshire. Got to the house and had a genius plan about tying a rope around a tree and driving the truck forwards, to inch the stove, which was on pallets, out onto the lifting platform at the back of the truck. I stood at the front of the truck telling Janet how far forwards she could safely go before the front wheels went off the edge of the drive and down the bank, as the whole thing was sideways across the drive. So there was no one at the back of the truck. Suddenly there was a thunderclap because the stove had come flying out of the truck and had landed on its face on the lifting platform. Apparently its pallet must have stuck on a slight lip at the edge of the truck’s bed, so then the rope turned the whole pallet into a lever.
Help came from next door in the form of one of my neighbours, Rob - that was the first time we met him, and was I ever glad for some reinforcements as we had no idea how we were going to shift this massive things. Janet drove the truck slowly with stove still balanced on the platform round to next door's garages where Niall put pipes under it and rolled it on them inside.