We got ready to go out and he happily played around, running behind the curtains out on the balcony, Ting Tong wasn't scared of anything. We finished our beers and it was time to go out. Ting Tong just followed us downstairs but there was someone at reception; I thought ‘oops, we've been caught’, but no reaction. I asked who's was the cat and they said it arrived at their hotel some weeks earlier, they thought he’d come from a cat in the hotel next door. They didn’t mind him being there, so that was it: his official home.
I would just like to add here that we did look into bringing Ting Tong home with us. I contacted KLM and they gave me details; it was all very reasonable except on checking through the Internet on Thai rules, it meant that he would need injections at least 21 days before travelling. Of course, we wouldn’t be there that long (who would?) So, after a lot of discussion and hard thinking in my head, we decided his life was there, not in the city that is Amsterdam. Rightly or wrongly, we will now never know but I wished him a nice long life when we left. I hope the staff in the hotel look after him. As a parting gift we gave them the largest bag of cat biscuits we could find.