v1.1

The Unadulterated Cat

1

IWE
(IJVAPULTEM~
4CAT
A Campaign for Real Cats

FACE

London

Victor Gollancz Ltd
1989

First published in Great Britain 1989
1)~, Victor Gollanez Ltd
14 liciirietta Street, Londoii WC2E 8QJ

A Gollancz paperback Original

Text (p Terry and Lyn Pratchett 1989
(',artoolis (D Grayjoliiffe 1989

British Libran, Cataloguing in Publication Data
llratcliett, Terry, 1948The
unadulterated cat.
1. Title 11. Jolliffe, Gray
823'.914 [1~'I

ISI3N 0-575-04628^7

Photoset in Great Britain by
Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
and printed by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Designed by Peter Guy

DEDICATION
All right, all right.
Time to come clean.
Despite the fact that
this book clearly states
that cats should have short names
you don't mind yelling
to the neighbourhood at midnight,
The Unadulterated Cat
is dedicated to:
Oedipuss
They don't come much realer.

Far too many people these days have grown
used to boring, mass-produced cats, which
may bounce with health and nourishing vitamins
but aren't a patch on the good old cats
you used to get. The Campaign for Real Cats
wants to change all that by helping people
recognise Real Cats when they see them.
Hence this book.
The Campaign for Real Cats is against fizzy
keg cats.
All right, How can I recognise a Real cat?
Simple. Nature has done a lot of the work for
you. Many Real cats are instantly recognisable.
For example, all cats with faces that look as
though they had been put in a vice and hit
repeatedly by a hammer with a sock round it
are Real cats. Cats with ears that look as though
they have been trimmed with pinking shears
are Real cats. Almost every non-pedigree unneutered
tom is not only Real, but as it hangs
around the house it gets Realer and Realer
until one of you is left in absolutely no doubt as
to its Realness.
Fluffy cats are not necessarily unreal, but if
they persist in putting on expressions of affronted
dignity for the camera while advertising
anything with the word 'purr-fect' in the
associated copy they are definitely bringing
their Realness into question.
Ab. So cats in adverts aren't Real?
Actually being in adverts doesn't make a cat
unreal - it can't help it if someone plonks it
down in some weird pyramid made of carpet
and takes pictures of it peeping anxiously out
of the hole - but its demeanour once there
is not.

For example, if you put an unreal cat down
in front of a row of bowls of catfood it will
obediently choose the one made by the sponsors
of the ad even if all the others haven't got
sump oil on them. A Real cat, on the other
hand, will head for the most expensive regardless,
pull it out onto the studio floor, eat it with
great pleasure, try some of the others, trip up
the cameraman and then get stuck behind the
newsreaders' podium. Where it will be sick.
And then, when its owners buy several large
tins of the wretched stuff, it'll refuse to touch it
again.
Real cats never wear bows (but sometimes they
do wear bow-ties; see 'Cartoon Cats').

Or appear on Christmas cards.

Or chase anything with a bell on it.

Real cats don't wear collars. But Real cats often
do wear dolls' clothes, and sit there also wearing
an expression of furry imbecility while
their brains do a complex radar scan of their
surroundings and then they take a special kind
of leap that gets them out of the mob cap, dress,
apron and doll's pram all in one move.
Real cats are not simply self-possessed. Nor are
they simply neurotic. They are both, at the
same time, just like real people.
Real cats do eat quiche. And giblets. And butter.
And anything else left on the table, if they think
they can get away with it. Real cats can hear a
fridge door opening two rooms away.
There is some dispute about this, but some of
the hardliners in the CRC say that Real cats
don't go to catteries when their owners go on
holiday, but are fed by a simple arrangement of
bowls and neighbours. it is also held that Real
cats don't go anywhere in neat wicker Nissen
huts with dinky little bars on the front. Now
look. Schism and debate are of course the
lifeblood of democracy, but I would just like to
remind some of our more enthusiastic members
of the great damage to the Campaign
caused by the Flea Collar Discussion (1985),
the Proprietary Cat Litter Row (1986) and what
became rather disgracefully reported as the
Great Bowl With Your Name On It Fracas
(1987). As I said at the time, while of course the
ideal Real cat eats its meals off an elderly
saucer with remnants of the last meal still
crusting the edge or, more typically, eats it off
the floor just beside it, a Real cat is what you
are, not what is done to you. Some of us may
very well feel happier carting our cats around
in a cardboard box with the name of a breakfast
food on the side, but Real cats have an inbuilt
distrust of white coats, can tell instantly when
the vet is in prospect, and can erupt from even
the stoutest cardboard box like a ICBM. This
generally happens in dense traffic or crowded
waiting rooms.

11

Despite the bad feeling caused by the Great
Bowl With Your Name On It Fracas mentioned
above, we should make it clear that Real cats do
eat out of bowls with PUSSY written on the
side. They'd eat out of them if they had the
word ARSENIC written on the side. They
eat out of anything.

Real cats catch things.

Real cats eat nearly all of everything they catch.
A Real cat's aim is to get through life peacefully,
with as little interference from human beings
as possible. Very much like real humans, in
fact.

Can I be pedigree and a Real cat too?

Of course you can't. You're a human.
The cat, I mean.

Ah. A thorny one, this. Logically, simply knowing
your great-granddad's name should not be
a bar to enjoying the full rich life, but some of
the Campaign's more committed members believe
that a true Real cat should be in some
doubt as to its own existence, let alone that of
its parents.
We feel that this is an extreme view. It is true
that many of us feel the quintessential Real cat
looks like the survivor of a bad mincer accident,
but if people are really going to go
around judging a cat's Realness by looks and
fur colour alone, then they must see that what
they are working towards is a Breed in its own
right ('And this Year's Supreme Champion is
Sooty, by "Thatdamngreythingfromnextdoorsonthebirdtableagain"
out of "We just Call Her Puss" of Bedwellty').
The point is that cats are different from dogs.

A certain amount of breeding was necessary to
refine dogs from the rough, tough, original
stock to the smelly, fawning, dribbling
morons* of uncertain temper that we see today.
After considerable heated debate, the Committee
wishes it to be made clear that this statement should not
be taken to include, in order, small white terriers with
an IQ of 150, faithful old mongrels who may be smelly
but apl)~irelitly we love him, and huge shaggy wheezing
St Bernards who consume more protein in a day than
some humans see in a year) but understand every word
we say, no, really, and are like one of the family.

The committee, failing despite tremendous pressure to have
this phrase removed, haha, have asked it to be amended to'has
a healthy appetite for a dog of his age'. This refers to the way
the huge snout drops like a bulldozer and pushes a bowl the
size of a washbasin clean across the kitchen, 1 sul)i)o,,,c.

The committee can say what they like, but the Chairman, who indeed
fully admits never to have experienced the joys and pleasures of dog
ownership, intends never to do so, and fully accepts that there are
lioti,,cs k~lic.ic (1()gs cits lik,e iii domestic harmony, has seen him

("11

. As they were turned into anything that
society felt at the time that it really wanted self-
powered earth-moving machines, for
example, or sleeve ornaments - so the basic
dogness was gradually diluted.
Thus, your Real dog is far more likely to be a
mongrel, except that the word is probably
illegal these days, whereas all cats are, well,
cats. More or less the same size, various
colours, some fat, some thin, but still recognisably
cats. Since the only thing they showed
any inclination to do was catch things and
sleep, no one ever bothered to tinker with
them to make them do anything else. It's interesting
to speculate on what they might have
become had history worked out differently,
though (see 'The Cats We Missed'). All that cats
were bred for, in fact, was general catness. All
cats are potentially Real. it's a way of life ...

What has the Campaign for Real Cats got
against dogs, then?

Nothing.

Oh, come on.

No, there are perfectly good, well-trained,
well-behaved dogs who do not bark like a
stuck record, or crap in the middle of footpaths,
sniff groins, act like everyone's favourite
on mere assumption, and generally whine,
steal and grovel in a way that would put a 14th
century professional mendicant to shame. We
recognise this.

("oo(l.

There are also forgiving traffic wardens, tarts
with hearts of gold, and solicitors that do not
go on holiday in the middle of your complicated
house purchase. You just don't meet
them every day.

1 1,
.................

Ante--c l~to .40C.Ors

Getting started

We got a cat because we didn't like them much.
Our garden was debated territory between
five local cats, and we'd heard that the best way
to keep other cats out of the garden was to have
one yourself.
A moment's rational thought here will spot
the slight flaw in this reasoning. However, if
you're predisposed to keep cats, rational
thought has nothing to do with it. We've never
met anyone who recalls waking up one day and
thinking:'This morning I will go shopping and
buy some sprouts, one of those blue things for
the lavatory, some baking foil - and, oh yes, a
cat would be nice.'
Cats have a way of always having been there
even if they've only just arrived. They move in
their own personal time. They act as if the
human world is one they just happened to have
stopped off in, on their way to somewhere that
is possibly a whole lot more interesting.
And what, when you come right down to it,
do we know about them? Where did they come
from? People say, well, evolution, it stands to
reason. Why? Look at dogs. Dogs descended
from wolves. You can tell. Some dogs are
alsatians, which is just a wolf in a collar, biding
its time. And then there's all these smaller
dogs, going down in size until you get the
weird little ones with lots of Zs in their name
which squeak and can get into pint mugs. The
point is, you can see the evolution happening,
all the way from hairy semi-wolves to bald
yappy things bred to go up Emperor's sleeves
or whatever.

You know that if civilisation suddenly stopped,
if great clanking things from Alpha Centauri
suddenly lurched out of the sky and
spirited mankind away, the dogs would be
about two meals away from becoming wolves.

Or look at us. Some of the details might be a
bit fiddly, but we - bright, civilised us, who
know all about mortgages and non-stick saucepans
and Verdi - can look back over our genetic
shoulders and see a queue of stumbling
fi(ytit-es going all the way back to little crouching
shapes with hairy chests, no forehead and
the intelligence of a gameshow audience.
Cats are different. On the one hand we have
these great tawny brutes that sit yawning under
the hot veldt sun or burning bright in jungles,
and on the other there's these little things that
know how to sleep on top of off-peak heaters
and use cat doors. Not much in between. is
there? A whole species divided, basically, between
500lbs of striped muscle that can bring
down a gnu, and ten pounds of purr. Nowhere
do we find the Piltdown Cat, the missing lynx.
All right, there's the wild cat, but that just looks
like your average domestic tabby who's been
hit on the head with a brick and got angry
about it. No, we must face it. Cats just turned
up. One minute nothing, next minute Egyptians
worshipping them, mummifying them,
building tombs for them. No messing around
with a spade in the sad bit of the garden behind
the toolshed for your Pharaohs, not when
20,000 men and a load of log rollers were
standing around idle.
Scientists working for the Campaign for Real
Cats believe that, because of the Schrodinger
experiments (qv)), the whole question of
where cats come from, and how, is now totally
meaningless, since there appear to be some
cats that can travel quite painlessly across time
and space, and therefore this means that the
only place time we can be sure cats come from
is

How to get a cat

1. Adverts in the Post Office

Five adorable tabby kittens, Just ready
to leave Mum, Free to Good Home, Please
Phone ...
Yes. Please, Please Phone, because they're
all big and fighting with one another and some
of the males are beginning to take a sophisticated
interest in Mum. Do not be fooled into
believing that you will need to turn up bearing
evidence of regular church-going and sober
habits; good home in this case means anyone
who doesn't actually arrive in a van marked
J Torquemada and Sons, Furriers.
if you answer the ad you'll find there's one
kitten left.
There's always one kitten left. You spend
ages trying to figure out what it was that made
the previous four purchasers leave it behind.
Eventually you will find out.
Nevertheless, Adverts in the Post Office are a
good way of acquiring your basic cat.

2. Adverts in posh cat magazines

Pretty much like (1.) except that the word
'adorable' probably won't be used and the
word 'free' certainly won't be used. Not to be
contemplated by anyone on a normal income.
The cats acquired in this way are often very
decorative, but if that's all you want a cat for
then a trip to the nearest urban motorway with
a paint scraper will do the business.
Pedigree cats talk a lot - catownerspeak for
yowling softly - and tend to rip curtains. Being
so highly bred, some of them are mentally
unstable. A friend had an Arch-Villains' cat (qv)
which thought it was a saucepan. But, because
it was very expensive and more highly bred
than Queen Victoria, it thought it was a saucepan
with style.

3. Buying a house in the Country

A very reliable way of acquiring a cat. It'll
normally turn up within the first year, with a
smug expression that suggests it is a little
surprised to see you here. It doesn't belong to
the previous occupants, none of the neighbours
recognise it, but it seems perfectly at
home. Why? It is very probably a Schrodinger
Cat (qv).

4. The Cats' Home

Another very popular source, especially just
after Christmas and the summer holiday
period, when their sales are on. Despite the
fact that you can barely hear her on the phone
for the background of yowling, the harassed
young lady will probably take rather more
pains than the average Post Office Advert cat
seller to ensure you haven't actually got skinning
knives in your pocket. Often no payment,
just a voluntary donation - made at pistol
point. You will be offered a variety of furry
kittens, but the cat for you is the one-year-old
spayed female lurking at the back of the cage
with a worried expression who will show her
appreciation by piddling in the car all the way
home.

5. Inheritance

These cats come with a selection of bowls, half
a tin of the most expensive cat food on the
market, a basket and a small woolly thing with a
bell in it. They will then spend two weeks
under the bed in the spare room. Try to get it
out and it could be you in the hospital having
skin from your buttocks grafted onto your arm.
Cats are not always inherited from dead
people. if the previous owner is still alive, the
Real cat will probably be accompanied by a list
of its likes and dislikes. Throw it away. They're
just fads anyway.
Try to avoid inheriting cats unless they come
with a five figure legacy, or at least the expectation
of one.

6. joint owners *

Do you know where your cat spends its time
when it's not at home? it's worth checking with
more distant neighbours that they don't have a
cat with the same size and colouring. It can
happen. We once knew two households who
for years both thought they owned the same
cat, which spent its time commuting between
food bowls. A sort of menagerie a trois.

An interesting fact about acquiring cats is
that the things are, by and large, either virtually
free or very expensive. It's as if the motor
industry had nothing between the moped and
the porsche.

types of cat

Forget all the business about Blue Points and
Persians. Real cats are likely to be:

1. Farm Cats

A dying breed. Once upon a time every decent
barn supported a thriving, incestuous colony
of them, depositing small nests of mewling
kittens amongst the hay-bales, and there's still
a few around. Worth getting if you can. They
often look like flat-headed maniacs, but they've
generally got a bit of sense. Not usually found
on the kind of farms that are apparently made
of extruded aluminium, but still scratching a
living here and there.

2. Black Cats with White Paws

There must be a breed of these. Most SupPost
Office cats (qv) are black cats with white paws.
They are always called Sooty.

3. Neighbours' Cats

Usually grey, and often seen in the newlyseeded
bit of the garden with a strained expression
on their faces. Normally called
Yaargeroffoutofityarbarstard (see 'Naming
Cats').

4. Boot-faced Cats

They have fangs, crossed eyes, enough scars to
play a noughts and crosses championship on,
and ears like old bus tickets. They're invariably
male. Boot-faced cats aren't born but made,
often because they've tried to outstare or occasionally 
rape a speeding car and have been
repaired by a vet who just pulled all the bits
together and stuck the stitches in where there
was room. Most Boot-faced cats are black.
Strange but true.

5. Sort o Tabby Cats with a Bit of
Ginger, But Sometimes In the
Right Light You Could Swear
There's a Hint of Siamese There

Your basic Real cat. Backbone of the country
cat population.

6 Factory Cats

Like farm cats, now ambling their way into
history. They were once kept because they did
a useful job of work, but now they're often the
subject of friction between management, who
want them out because they don't fit in with the
new streamlined image of United Holdings
(Holdings) plc, and staff, who don't. Usually
someone called Nobby or Dotinthecanteen
smuggles in food for them. Some factory cats
get to be quite famous and have their pictures
in the staff newspaper when they retire. The
picture always shows Nobby or Dotinthecanteen
holding a saggy black-and-white cat which
is staring at the camera with quiet, self-satisfied
malevolence.
On retirement, they set up home with Dotinthecanteen
but saunter down to the old firm
occasionally and hang around while the working
cats are going through a busy patch, telling
them how much better they feel these days,
wish they'd done it years ago, of course you
lads don't know what it was like when Mr
Morgan was manager, what a tartar he was, if he
saw so much as a mouse doodah he went spare,
you were kept at it in those days ...
... and then they saunter back home, and

7. Arch-villains' Cats

Always fluffy and white, with a diamond-encrusted
collar. Other qualifications include
the ability to yawn photogenically when the
camera is on them and complete unflappability
in the presence of people dropping through
the floor into the piranha tank. We've all seen
Arch-villains' cats. However, it's not the easy
life that it appears to be. For one thing, the
people who design the megamillion underground
yacht bunkers and missile bases in
which the arch-criminals live never think to
include a dirt box. If they did, it would be
surrounded by landmines and have ingenious
and unpleasant traps buried in it. And Archvillains'
cats never use a cat door. This is
because they know what happens to people
who go through doors.
Arch-villains' cats are not Real. This is obvious
to anyone who cares to examine the facts.
Next Christmas, when once again the TV reminds
you that a saviour was born on Earth and
his name is James Bond, look closely at the
sets. You will find there are no:
a) dead birds under the laser-driven spy
splitting table
b) scratch marks on the megamissile control
wheel
c) forlorn squeaky toys lying around
where people can trip over them
d) half-empty tins of suppurating cat food
in the cryogenic unit.

Somehow, it's hard to imagine your average
Arch-villain owning a Real cat (although some
members have pointed out that many Archvillains
have leather gloves on their hands,
and/or only one eye, so maybe they have Real
cats at home they try to fondle after another
hard day of holding the world to ransom.)

8. Cartoon Cats

Usually black and white. And they often have an
amusing speech impediment. If your cat can
read newspapers, it is a Cartoon cat. If it can get
hold of a stick of dynamite by simply reaching
off screen, it is a Cartoon cat. If it wears a bowtie,
it's a Cartoon cat. If, when it starts to run, its
legs pinwheel in the air for a humorous few
seconds making binka-binka-binka noises, it
is a Cartoon cat. if you are still uncertain, check
to see whether the people next door have a
bulldog called Butch who has spikes on his
collar and is usually to be found dozing outside
his kennel. If they have, you'll know what
kind of cat you've got.

9. The Sub-Post Office Cat

A sub-species of Factory cat. Can be any colour
in theory, are almost always black and white in
fact. The significant characteristic of this breed
is an ability to spread out when asleep, like a
rubber bag full of mercury. They're gradually
fading out, made redundant by the loss of the
very shops they tended to inhabit and also by
the Public Health laws, which are not drafted to
accommodate the kind of animal that considers 
its natural role in life to go to sleep on a
pile of sugar bags I used to be taken into a
shop where a Sub-Post Office cat used to sleep
in the dog biscuit sack. You'd reach in to pinch
a bikkie and there'd be all this fur. No one
seemed to mind. (Whatever happened to those
dog biscuits? They were real dog biscuits, not
the anaemic things you get in boxes today; they,
were red and green and black and came in
various interesting shapes. The black ones
tasted of charcoal. That's modern times for
you. Our grandparents had oil lamps and gas
lights to look back to, we've got dog biscuits.
Even the nostalgia isn't what it was.)

10. Travelling Cats

Oscar's 2,000 Mile Purr-fect Trip says the
heading in the local paper. Or something like
that. At least once every year. In every local
paper. It's a regular, like 'Row Over Civic Site'
or'Storm As Schools Probe Looms'.
So many stories like this have turned up that
researchers from the Campaign for Real Cats
have been, well, researching. The initial suspicion
was that here was a hitherto unknown
breed of Real cat, possibly a sideshoot of the
now almost extinct Railway cat. It'd be nice to
think that there was today an Airline cat,
although perhaps not, because warming
though the idea is, the thought is bound to
occur to you at 30,000 feet that it's probably got
a favourite sleeping area somewhere on the
plane and it is possibly somewhere in the
wiring. Or perhaps there is now a Lorry cat
undreamed of by T. S. Eliot. Felis Freubaf, an
international creature, loitering in the cabs of
the world and growing fat on Yorkie Bars. Or it
could be further proof of the Schrodinger
theory, since from a quantum point of view
distance cannot be said to exist and all this
apparent space between things is just the result
of random fluctuations in the matter matrix
and shouldn't be taken seriously.
The astonishing truth has not been suspected,
possibly because not many people in
this country have more than one local paper.
But, from hundreds of cuttings sent in by Campaign
members, it finally emerged.
They're all the same cat. Not the same type of
cat. The same cat.
It's a smallish black and white tom. Never
mind about the variety of names, which are
only of significance to humans, although interestingly
the name Oscar does seem to crop up
rather a lot. Careful analysis of dozens of pictures
of the Travelling cat blinking in the flashlight's 
glare have proved it.
it appeared to do a minimum of 15,000 miles
last year, much of it in car engine compartments,
where only its piteous mewling alerts
the driver when he stops off for a coffee.
Confirmation will not be achieved until
Oscar has been tracked down by researchers
armed with a truckload of painful equipment,
but the current, rather interesting, theory is
that what initially appears to be this piteous
mewling is in fact a stream of directions on the
lines of 'left here I said left, left you twerp, all
right, keep going until we get to the trading
estate and then you can pick up the A370 . . .'
Oscar is, in fact, trying to get somewhere.
The process is a bit hit and miss, and possibly
he has underestimated the size of the country
and the number of vehicles in it, but he's
keeping at it. Certainly, in the best tradition of
Real cats everywhere, he's doing anything
rather than get out and walk.
Incidentally, some recent press cuttings
suggest that Oscar has given birth to kittens in a
car engine compartment. This makes a tiny
hole in part of the theory - nothing that a
reasonable grant couldn't plug - but leads to
the intriguing thought that perhaps there will
be a new race of Travelling cats after all. And all
growing up believing that home is something
that you can only get to by climbing inside
noisy tin things that move at 70 mph.
Perhaps lemmings started out like this.
In the course of this work one researcher
did turn up a fascinating anecdote about St
Eric, the 4th-century Bishop of Smyrna, believed
by many to be the true patron saint of
Real cats. While on his way to deliver an epistle
he is said to have tripped over a cat and
shouted, 'In faith, I wysh that Damned Mogge
wode Goe Awae and Never Come Backe!'
it was a small black and white tom, according
to contemporary accounts.

11. The Green., Bio-Organic,
Wbole Eartbbox Cat

This type has been around since the Sixties at
least. You may recall stories about cats fed on
sweetcorn and avocados (no, really; a local pet
shop sells vegetarian dog food). And, indeed, if
the rest of the household is on the path of inner
wholeness it rather lets the whole holistic
business down to have tins of minced innards
in the fridge.
We had vegan* friends who handled the cat
food tin in the same way that people at Sellafield
handle something that's started to tick. in
the end, they worked out a vegetarian diet with
the occasional treat of fish. Their cat was a
young Siamese. it thrived on the stuff. Of
course it did. It used to go out and hang around
the organic goat shed, and ate more rats and
mice than its owners had hot dinners, which
wasn't hard. But it was very understanding
about it, and never let them know. We occasionally 
saw it trotting over the garden with
something fluffy in its mouth, and it used to
give us looks of conspiratorial embarrassment,
like a Methodist minister caught enjoying a
pint.

In fact cats are naturally Green animals. After
all:

a)No cats have ever used aerosol sprays.
Sprays, maybe, but not aerosol ones.
The ozone layer is perfectly safe from
cats.
b) Cats don't hunt seals. They would if
they knew what they were and where
to find them. but they don't, so that's all
right.
c)The same with whales. People might
have fed whales to cats, but the cats
didn't know. They'd have been just as
happy with minced harpooner.
d) Antartic? Cats are quite happy to
leave it alone.

Of course, they, have their negative points:
a) All cats insist on wearing real fur

Naming Cats

All cats, we know, have several names. T. S.
Eliot came nowhere near to exhausting the list,
though. A perfectly ordinary cat is likely to be
given different names for when:
a) you tread on it
b) it's the only animal apparently able to
help you in your enquiries as to the
mysterious damp patch on the carpet
and the distressing pungency around
the place
c) your offspring is giving it a third degree
cuddle
d) it climbed up the loft ladder Because it
Was There and then, for some reason,
decided to skulk right at the back of all
the old boxes, carpets, derelict Barbie
houses, etc, and won't be coaxed out,
and then when you finally drag it out by
the scruff of its neck it scratches your
arm in a friendly way and takes a
beautiful leap which drops it through
the open hatchway and onto the stepladder,
which then falls over, leaving
you poised above a deep stairwell on a
winter's afternoon while the rest of the
family are out.*

All right, not perhaps a name you'd use every, day, but
best to have one ready, just in case, because when you're
leaning against the freezing cold water tank trying to
staunch the blood with a priceless antique copy of biiiztl,
you don't want to have to tax the imagination.

It's an interesting fact that fewer than 17% of
Real cats end their lives with the same name
they started with. Much family effort goes into
selecting one at the start ('She looks like a
Winifred to me'), and then as the years roll by it
suddenly finds itself being called Meepo or
Ratbag.
Which brings us to the most important consideration
in the naming of cats: never give a
cat a name you wouldn't mind shouting out in a
strained, worried voice around midnight
while banging a tin bowl with a spoon. Stick to
something short.
That being said, most common names for
Real Cats are quite long and on the lines of
Yaargeroffoutofityarbarstard, Mumthere'ssomethingORRIBLEunderthebed,
and Wellyoushouldn'tofbinstandingthere. Real Cats don't have
names like Vincent Mountjoy Froufrou Poundstretcher
IV, at least for long.
The chosen name should also be selected
for maximum carrying power across a busy
kitchen when, eg, a bag full of prime steak
starts moving stealthily towards the edge of the
table. You need a word with a cutting edge.
Zut! is pretty good. The Egyptians had a catheaded
goddess called Bast. Now you know
why.

Illnesses

Real cats are subject to the same illnesses that
unReal cats get, although by and large Real cats
tend towards rude health - not counting, of
course, the occasional little intestinal problem
which could happen to anyone.
However, there are several specifically Real
cat ailments:

Impatient legs

Weird, this. We had a cat who suffered badly.
The vet couldn't explain it. The cat could climb
trees, ladders, anything, it was as agile as you
please, but when it tried to run fast it was all
okay until its back legs tried to pass. Then it'd
get so embarrassed at the sight of its own rear
end coming past on the fast lane it would stop
and wash its paws in shame. If it forgot itself
and really made a dash for it, it was likely to
end up facing the wrong way.

Well, okay. Not common. But one of the biggest
cat ailments we've ever faced. Ho - we said
- let's be ecological, remember the ozone
layer, have no truck with flysprays, whatever
happened to good old-fashioned flypaper. Finally
found some, after shopkeepers made
mad faces ('man here wants flypaper, keep
smiling, desperately signal assistant to call
police, will soon be asking for crinoline hoops
and a pound of carbide crystals'). Got it home,
hung it up in open window, bluebottles soon
stuck fast like small angry currants, hooray,
paper swayed in breeze, Real Cat leapt ...
Real Cat becomes spinning furry propeller.
Paper snaps, cat falls out of window, begins
massive chase across gardens as it tries to
escape from unwound paper trailing behind it,
finally brought to earth in distant shrubbery
because only one leg now capable of movement.

Panic, panic, where box flypaper came in?
This is 1980s, paper bound to be covered with
Polydibitrychloroethylene-345, oh god, cat
now immobile with terror inside kitchen
towel. Fill huge bowl with warm water, drop
cat in, swish it around, cat doesn't protest, oh
god, perhaps Polydibitrychloroethylene-345
already coursing through tiny veins. Change
water, rinse again, brisk towelling down, put
cat on path in sun.
Cat looks up, gives mildly dirty look, turns
and walks slowly up garden, lifting each paw
one at a time and giving it a shake, like C.
Chaplin.
After all that it was a bit of a let-down to find
the flypaper box at the bottom of the waste bin
and find that, far from being the complex
chemical trap we'd feared, it was just some
jolly ecological plain sticky paper.

Sitting and hiccupping gently
(with the occasional burp)
We've always put this down to voles.

Eating grass
Never been sure that this is a symptom of
illness. it probably comes under the heading
of Games: ('Hey, I'm being watched, let's eat
some grass, that'll worry them, they'll spend
half an hour turning the house upside down
looking for the cat book, haha.')

Lorries

Can be fatal. But not always. We knew a cat
who regarded motorised vehicles as sort of
wheeled mice, and leapt out on them. It had so
much scar tissue that its fur grew at all angles,
like a gooseberry. Even its stitches had stitches.
But it still lived to a ripe old age, terrorising
other cats with its one good eye and forever
jumping out at lorries in its sleep. It was probably
looking for one that squeaked.

However healthy the cat, there will come a
time when it needs a Pill. Oh, how we nod and
look like respectable, concerned cat owners as
the vet hands us the little packs (one grey one
every five days and then a brown one after ten
days, or was it the other way round?) And once
we were all innocent and thought, the cat food
smells like something off the bottom of a pond
anyway. Real cat can't possibly notice if we
crumble the damn things up a bit and mix them
in ...
As we get wiser, of course, we learn that the
average Real cat has taste buds that make the
most complex computer-driven sensory apparatus
look like a man with a cold. It can spot an
alien molecule a mile off (we tried halving the
suspect food and adding more from the tin,
and kept on doing it until it was like that
famous French chemical experiment with the
weird water and everything, there surely
couldn't have been any pill left, but Real cat
knew).
Next comes the realist phase ('after all, from
a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only
a tube with a door at the top.')
You take the pill in one hand and the cat in
the other ...
Er. .

You take the pill in one hand and in the other
you take a large kitchen towel with one angry
cat head poking out of the end. With your third
hand you prise open the tiny jaws, insert the
pill, clamp the jaws shut and, with your fourth
hand tickle the throat until a small gulping
noise indicates that pill has gone down.
You wish.
It hasn't gone down. Because it's just gone
sideways. Real cats have a secret pouch in their
cheeks for this sort of thing. A Real cat can take
a pill, eat a meal, and then spit out the slightly
damp pill with a noise which, if this was a
comic strip, would probably be represented as
ptooie.
It is important to avoid the third stage, which
basically consists of Man, Beast and Medicine
locked in dynamic struggle and ought to be
sculpted rather than described (as in Rodin's
'Man Giving Pill to Cat).
The fourth stage is up to you. Usually by now
the cat is displaying such a new lease of life that
the treatment might be said to have worked.
Grinding the pill up with a bit of water and
spooning it in sometimes does the trick. A
fellow Real cat owner says powdering the
wretched object - the pill, not the cat, although
by stage four you'll entertain any idea - mixing
it with a little butter and smearing it on a paw is
a sure-fire method, because the cat's ancient
instinct is to lick itself clean. Close questioning
suggested that he hadn't actually tried this, just
deduced it from theoretical studies (he's an
engineer, so that explains it). Our view is that
an animal that will starve and asphyxiate before
taking its medicine won't have any trouble
with a grubby paw.

M
Feeding Cats

For centuries the idea Of feeding cats was as
unbelievable as squaring the circle. So was
feeding chickens, for that matter. They just
hung around, making their own arrangements.
The whole Point about having them was to keep
down vermin and generally tidy up the place.
Dogs got fed, cats got scraps. If they were lucky.
We all know what it's like now.
Feeding Real cats follows a pattern as
changeless as the seasons.

1. Real cat turns up its nose at gold-plated
tinned stuff recommended by woman on television.

2. Out Of spite, You buy some down-marked
own-brand stuff whose contents you
wouldn't want to know about (after all, c really
cring what can be put         onsidin
beefburgers and
sausages ... no, You really wouldn't want to
know about it ... ) Cat wolfs it down, licks
empty plate across floor.

3. ozOeuiit tionf sreolfiethfenheuxtmsmh iongpisntug trip You buy a
4~ Cat turns up nose at it after one meal. This is
a cat, you understand, that will eat dragonflies
and frogs.

Having for some time watched what cats will
eat, then I can safely say that any enterprising
manufacturer who markets a cat food made of
steak, half-thawed turkey, grass, flies, crumbs
from under tables, frogs and voles will be on to
a winner. At least for one meal.
The alternative, of course, is hunting. The
theory is that a well-fed cat is better at hunting
than a hungry one. The reasoning is that a
plump and full cat will be more content to lie
in wait for the things that need guile and
patience to catch - dragonflies, frogs, robins,
that sort of thing - while a hungry one will
merely dash about the place filling up on
ordinary rats and mice. It's not certain who first
advanced this view, but it's an evens bet that
they probably had fur and whiskers.
Real cats don't hunt for food, but because
they love you. And, because they love you, they
realise that for some reason you have neglected
to include in your house all those little
personal touches that make it a home, and do
their best to provide them. Headless shrews
are always popular. For that extra splash of
colour, you can't beat miniature sets of innards.
For best effect such items should be left
somewhere where they won't be found for
some days, and can have a chance to develop a
personality of their own.

We had friends in an isolated cottage who
had one cat, a big fat boot-faced thing, which'd
never turn a paw to hunting despite the hordes
of rats that besieged the property on every
side. So they got another one, a sleek white
young female who strode off into the long
grass every day with a purposeful air. But,
strangely, never came back with anything.
Even odder, the resident huge cat began to
hunt and turned up every day with something
resembling a draught excluder in its mouth, or
was found sitting proudly beside a miniature
rodent Somme on the doorstep. Aha, they
thought, spurred on by competition he's finally
got cracking.
What they eventually found out, as any Real
cat owner would suspect, was that he was
waylaying the female as she approached the
house and glaring at her until she dropped the
booty, then picking it up and carrying it the rest
of the way. When it came to delegation, that
was a cat who got someone else to write the
book.

Training and
Disciplining the
Real Cat

Always a tricky one, this, for Real cat owners,
who tend to be the types to whom paradeground
shouting and the legendary rolled-up
newspaper does not come easily (if it did, they
would then be one of those people with huge
bounding dogs who do whatever they damn
well please in a huge, jolly way to distant
strains of 'Prince! NO! I said NO! PUT IT
DOWN! This minute! Prince! NO!'etc).
What it really boils down to is the difference
between Inside and Outside (cf. 'Hygiene').
Most Real cats cotton on to the idea fairly
quickly. Most Real cats, after all, are bright
enough to know that a dry box in a corner of
the kitchen is a better bet than a flower bed
when the wind is blowing straight from
Siberia. Their mothers apparently educate
them, though much attention paid to this has
been unable to fathom exactly how this is
done, apart from persistently moving them
around in a slightly neurotic game of kitten
chess. Possibly the kittens are taken to some
secret cat school where they are shown diagrams.
(it's amazing how self-possessed and
intelligent cats turn out to be when brought up
by their mothers. We've been brought up by
our mothers for millennia, and look at us. if
Romulus and Remus had been reared by a cat
instead of a wolf, Rome would be a different
place today*).

It'd have better lavatories, for a start.

Beyond that, you can't teach cats to do anything.
No, not a thing. You might think you can,
but that is because you've misunderstood
what's going on. You think it's the cat turning
up obediently at the back door at ten o'clock
on the dot for its dinner. From the cat's point, a
blob on legs has been trained to take a tin out
of the fridge every night.

Discipline - (once you get beyond all the
blanco and school traditions - means, If You
Don't Do What I Want I'll Hit You. One problem
here, of course, is that a cat is a hard animal
to hit. A dog is always amenable to the famous
rolled-up newspaper, whereupon it can go
into the sorrowful grovelling, whining and
sighing routine that would get a human actor
booed off the stage. Hitting a cat is like walloping
a furry glove full of pins, and doesn't make
a blind bit of difference anyway. A relative who
will remain unidentified until the RSPCA Statute
of Limitations runs out always reckoned
that a half-brick thrown the length of a garden
was necessary even to get a cat to pay attention.
Distasteful though it may seem, however, there
are times when even a Real cat owner feels it
necessary to Take Action. Here are some options:

The Great Ballistic Clod of Earth

... which is the first thing to hand when you're
diggingt and you see, out of the corner of your
eye, the guilty crouching shape as it sits among
the cabbages and peas. 
Aside from the garden fork, and this isn't that type of
book.
The GBCOE is the
rubber bullet of garden preservation, designed
to chastise without actual death. The
approved method is to hit ground zero about
eighteen inches from the culprit, the resultant
short sharp shower of shrapnel causing it to
leap two feet vertically and suffer acute intestinal
distress for the rest of the day.
The trouble is, though, that the cat soon
works out that you are a typical Real cat owner,
ie, a soft touch, and realises that if it calls your
bluff, your ferocious stance will melt and you'll
just run grumbling to the United Nations. The
four cats that turn our garden into a vegetable
jonestown every Spring have realised this, and
sit demurely among the whizzing clods visibly
thinking 'Why is the funny man jumping up and
down like that? And why is his aim so bad?'

Deep Pits with Spikes at the Bottom

Don't think this hasn't been discussed.

Pushing them into the Pond

just occasionally Life gets It Right, like the time
the sly alsatian from up the road decided to
crap in the middle of Real cat owner's driveway
just when Real cat owner was coming round
the corner with a large onion in his hand.
Even better, though, was Real cat owner
waking up from a doze on the lawn to find the
current incumbent of the local Mad Feral Tom
slot on the edge of the goldfish pond, staring
intently at what remained of the inhabitants.

Real cat owner quickly learns that it is, in fact,
possible to go from a recumbent position into
a full-length dive. But life's a strange thing. Cats
can walk on water. I'll - that is, Real cat owner'll
- swear cat leapt off the surface. Where was
Real cat, obtained you will remember in order
to keep other cats out of the garden, when this
was going on? Asleep on chair in kitchen, as is
always the case. Anyway, felt so bad about the
way he wandered off, gave him free meal of
sardines later.
Punishment has no effect on Real cats. This is
because Real cats don't associate the punishment
witb the crime. As far as they're concerned,
shouting, slippers on a low trajectory
and being talked to in a loud, patient voice are
all manifestations of the general weakness of
the blobs. All you have to do to survive it is
cower a wee bit and look big-eyed, and then
get on with your life.

Psychological Warfare

You might as well challenge a centipede to an
arse-kicking contest. You always start off ignoring
the animal, and end up treating it with
added kindness because it appears to be suffering
from something.

Calling in the Mafia

Only in the worst case. It's beset with difficulties
anyway, because:
1. They're not in the phone book.
2. it's expensive. Four small concrete boots
still cost twice as much as two large ones, it's a
bit like children's shoes.
3. It is almost impossible to get a horse's head
into a cat basket.

Games cats play

No, this isn't all that stuff with the bells and
catnip-filled calico mice. Cats only play with
special cat toys for about two minutes, when
you're around, in order that you don't get
depressed and stop buying them food.
The thing to remember here is that cats only
appear to be solitary animals, forever mooching
around the place by themselves. in fact all
cats are plugged into this sort of huge feline
consciousness which transcends time and
space and, in its own mind, a cat is constantly
competing and measuring itself against all cats
who have ever existed anywhere. It's as if Steve
Davis wasn't simply competing against another
man in a dicky bow, but against every snooker
player throughout history, right back to the
first proto-hominid who needed a really mindnumbing
way of spending his evenings.
Cats have subtle, intellectual games.

Cat chess

This needs, as the playing area, something the
size of a small village. Up to a dozen cats can
take part. Each cat selects a vantage point - a
roof, the coal house wall, a strategic corner or,
in quiet villages, the middle of the road - and
sits there. You think it's just found a nice spot to
sun itself until you realise that each cat can see
at least two other cats. Moves are made in a sort
of high-speed slink with the belly almost
touching the ground. The actual rules are a
little unclear to humans, but it would seem that
the object of the game is to see every other cat
while remaining unseen yourself. This is just
speculation, however, and it may well be that
the real game is going on at some mystically
higher level unobtainable by normal human
minds, as in cricket.

Wet cement
A popular and simple cat game which archaeologists
have found is as old as, well, wet
cement. It consists of finding some wet cement
and then running through it. There are degrees
of skill, of course. Most marks are scored
by running through cement which, while still
being wet enough to take a pretty pattern of
paw marks, is too far set for the builder to
sill()otli them out.

Offside

Offside is a cat game similar to Zen archery, in
that it is not what is actually done but the style
in which it is achieved that really matters. It
consists simply of persistently being on the
wrong side of a door, and goes on for as long as
human tolerance will stand and then a bit
longer. A straightforward little game, only marginally
more complex than the old favourite,
Staring at the fridge. However, there are degrees 
of complexity, and a skilled player of
Offside will naturally choose locations which,
while preternaturally difficult for humans to
get to, will be soup and nuts for the cat to get
away from.
Zbt totheb oberbit;fflp!gterp is a case in point.

Neighbour went away for holiday, leaving
complex instructions re watering of garden,
etc, but not to worry about the pullulating
colony of gerbils in the dining room because
distant relative Mrs Thing would drop in every
day, or two to keep an eye on them.
Night comes, but not accompanied by Real
cat. Familiar midnight performance, standing
outside back door banging plate with spoon
and calling out cat's name in squeaky voice,
you know how you do, in tones that you hope
will attract cat while not waking neighbours.
Fancy takes hold, fears of lorries, foxes, traps
float across mind.
Answer rises with dreadful inevitability, like
boiling milk. Take torch, put on dressing
gown, pad through dewy grass to picturewindow
of neighbour's house. Cat is sitting
dribbling on dining table, watching vibrating
gerbil colony, which is going mad. Treadmills
are squeaking frantically in the night.
Mrs Thing must have been and Real cat,
always on the look out for new experiences,
must have wandered into the house while the
door was open.
Do what any Real cat owner does in these
circumstances, but cat takes no notice of
shouts and threats. Run around house looking
for open window, but all has been sealed tight
against burglars, ie, self.
Run back home. Wasn't listening properly to
instructions, can't remember who Mrs Thing
really is or where she lives. Also, how long is a
day or two? Gerbils seem to live indefinitely in
Spaceship Gerbil, with huge food hopper and
nothing to do but make more gerbils. Whereas
cat eats with knife, fork and hammer and has
hair-trigger appetite. How long can it last? How
long can it last on gerbil?
Run back again, try garage door, miraculously
been left open, bang clong thud in the
misty dawn, Neighbourhood Watchers probably
already have digit poised to press the third
9, police will arrive deedabdeedah, pull the
other one, chummy, it's got bells on, neighbours 
summoned from hotel bed in Majorca,
may or may not corroborate story, will have
crime record, finally, shuiined iiistrect, We Are
All Guilty ...
Still door from garage into house itself.
locked. Wonder if situation justifies breaking
in, with neighbours away for fortnight, can't
leave house with broken door, will have to get
carpenter, etc, in, and he won't be able to come
along for probably three weeks.
look under door. See cat paws. Cat has
turned up to watch entertainment. Peer
through keyhole, all dark, key still in there ...
Sudden flashback. Eagle comic, c. 1958. Tips
for Boys No. 5: Beating the Burglar. Apparently
miscreants push newspaper under door,
twiddle key in lock with special key twiddler,
key drops down onto paper, paper pulled back

Home again, grab paper, tweezers, three-in-one
oil, run back, twiddle, twiddle, key drops
down, pull paper, there is key. Unbelievable
but true.
Unlock door. Cat no longer visible. Run
from room to room. Thousands of frightened
eyes stare from tower tenement block that is
gerbil colony, even sex isn't so interesting as
watching damp, crazed, dressing-gown wearer
charging around room. Search under beds.
Look out of window, see Real cat strolling
down drive.
Neighbour had turned water off before
going on holiday. This had meant lifting floorboard
in washroom. This had left easy access to
huge draughty space under bungalow, with
dozens of entry holes for inquisitive cats. Slam
board down, stamp heavily, break tap. .

Another old favourite among cat games is:

Being Good

Doesn't sound much like a game, but the most
important rule about Being Good is that the cat
should be good in such a way as to cause
maximum trouble to its owner who can't
howevergive it a tbump because it is manifestly
Being Good. We had a cat who would, very
occasionally, catch some small, inoffensive and
squeaky creature and leave it on the scraper
mat outside the door. You know - those flat
scrapers that are rather like a chip slicer, with
lots of little blades sticking up? And, of course,
first thing in the morning you don't look down
as you step out ... This might, of course, be a
real cat's way of food preparation. But we
knew, and it knew, that in reality it was Being
Good.

Schrodinger

And I say you must have
left a window open  Cats

All cats are now Schrodinger cats. once you
understand that, the whole cat business falls
into place.
The original Schrodinger cats were the offspring
of an infamous quantum mechanics
experiment of the 1930s (or possibly they
weren't the original ones. Possibly there were
no original ones.)

Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's
famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a
box with a bottle of poison, which many
people would suggest is about as far as you
need go. Then you add a little bottle-smashing
mechanism which may - or may not - smash
the bottle; it all depends on random nuclear
thingummies being given off by some radioactive
material. This is also in the box. It is a large
box. Now, according to quantum theory, the
cat in the box is both a wave and a particle ...
hang on, no. What it is, because of all these
quantums, is in a state of not actually being
either alive or dead,* 
ic, uncertain. Because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty
principle.

but both and neither at
the same time, until the observer lifts the lid
and, by the act of observation, sort of fixes the
cat in space/time etc. He's either looking at a
candidate for the sad patch, or a spitting ball of
mildly-radioactive hatred with bits of glass in
it. The weird part about it is that, before the lid
is lifted, not only the cat's future but also its
immediate past are both undecided. it might
have had been dead for five minutes, for
example.
That's the story that got into the textbooks,
anyway. 
If you can believe it. It's like the one about one twin
staying here and the other going off to Sirius at the speed
of light and coming back and finding his brother is now a
grandfather running a huge vegetable wholesale operation
in Bradford. How does anyone know? Has anyone
met them? What was it like on Sirius, anyway?

Less well known is the work by a
group of scientists who failed to realise that
Schrodinger was talking about a 'thought experiment'
*One that you can't do, and which won't work.
, and did it. Box, radioactive source,
bottle of poison, everything. And the cat, of
course.

They left out one important consideration,
though. While the observer might not know
what was going on, the cat in the box damn
well would. We can assume that if the prospect
of hanging concentrates the mind, then the
inkling that, any minute now, some guy in a
white coat is going to lift the lid and there's a
fifty-fifty chance that you are dead already,
does wonders for the brain. Spurred by this
knowledge, and perhaps by all the quantums
floating around the laboratory, the cat nipped
around a corner in space-time and was found,
slightly bewildered, in the janitor's cupboard.
Evolution is always quick to exploit a new
idea, however, and this novel way of getting
out of tricky situations was soon passed on
to its offspring. it had a large number of offspring.
Given its new-found talent, this is not
surprising.
The important gene was so incredibly dominant
that now many cats have a bit of
Schrodinger in them. It is characterised by the
ability to get in and out of locked boxes, such
as rooms, houses, fridges, the thing you swore
you put it in to take it to the vet, etc. If you
threw the cat out last night, and this morning
it's peacefully asleep under your bed, it's a
Schrodinger cat.
There is a school of thought which says there
is in fact a sort of negative Schrodinger gene.
Whereas your full-blown Schrodinger can get
in and out of the most unusual places there are
cats, it has been pointed out, that would find it
difficult to get out of a hoop with both ends
open. These are the cats that you normally see,
or rather, you normally hear behind fridges, in
those dead little areas behind kitchen storage
units, in locked garages and, in one case
known to us, inside the walls (dreadful Edgar
Allan Poetic visions led to a hole being
knocked into the cavity a little way from the
noise, which of course caused the cat definitely
a Real cat - to retreat further from
the noise; it came out 24 hours later, dragged
by the scent of a plate of food). But we are
inclined to believe that this is not so and that
these are merely examples of Offside (see 'Cat
Games').
However, this ability, which most Real cats'
owners will have noticed (and what about
when they're missing for a couple of days, eh,
and come back well fed? Have they just been
panhandling round the neighbours, or did
they nip along to next Wednesday to enjoy the
huge relieved 'welcome-back' meal you gave
them?), leads on to interesting speculation
about:

"-"1
-the Cat in History

The books will tell you that cats evolved from
civet ancestors about 45 million years ago,
which was definitely a good start. Get as much
distance between yourself and the civets as
possible, that was the motto of the early cats.
The civet cat has been a very nervous animal
ever since it discovered that you can, er, derive
civetone* from it and use it in scent. 

A 17-member ring ketone, according to my dictionary,
2is ol)l-)osed to the mere 15-membered muscone from
the musk deer. Does the civet feel any better for knowing
this?                      llot.

Exactly
how this is done I don't know and do not wish
to research. It's probably dreadful. Oh, all
right, I'll have a look.
It is.
*Who invents these scents, anyway? There's a girl walking
along the beach, hey, here's some whale vomit, I bet we
can make scent out of this. exactly how likely do you
think this is?

So, the story goes, the cat family pushed on
with the evolving as fast as possible, going in
for size, speed and ferocity. There's nothing
like the fear that you might be mistaken for a
civet for giving jets to your genes, especially
when you know it's only a matter of millennia
before your actual proto-hominids start wandering
around the Holocenic landscape with a
bottle, a knife and a speculative look in their
eyes.
They also spread out a bit but missed Australia,
which had just gone past on the Continental
Drift; this explains why the rats grew so
big. Some got stripes, some tried spots. One
well known early variety developed its very
own do-it-yourself can opener a hundred thousand
years before cat food came in tins, and
died of being too early to take advantage of
this.
And then, suddenly, small versions started to
turn up and go mee~owp, mee-owp at people.
Consider the situation. There you are, forehead
like a set of balconies, worrying about the
long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on
the environment, you're being chased and
eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and
suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of
them wanders into the cave and starts to purr.
More amazing yet, it didn't get et.
Dogs you can understand. They're pack
creatures, humans are just another, brighter,
pack leader. Dogs are handy for helping you
run down things that are faster than you are.
But cats - well, from Early Man's point of view,
cats are good for nothing.
The first cat to approach the cave survived, in
fact, on sheer surprise value. It was the first
animal the man had ever seen that wasn't
either running away or bounding towards him
and dribbling. It liked him.
And the reason it felt this way was that the cat
already knew that humans liked cats.
Here was a household in the country.
Households in the country attract cats. It's one
of the fundamental wossnames of Nature. See
the point? We know that Real cats can wander at
will through time and space, and this cat was
probably en route between feeding bowls before
it took a wrong turning.
After all, what's the alternative? That Early
Man had nothing better to do with his spare
time than look at a wild cat and spot that this
horizontal-headed, yellow-eyed, spitting menace
was just the thing the cave needed? No, our
theories demand that it went the other way,
that wild cats are domestic cats that went feral
thousands of years ago, probably because they
were upset about something, possibly the continued
non-invention of the fridge.
Cats make ideal time travellers because they
can't handle guns. This makes the major drawback
of time travel - that you might accidentally
shoot your own grandfather - extremely
unlikely. Of course, you might try to become
your own grandfather, but having watched a
family of farm cats, we can tell you that this is
perfectly normal behaviour for a cat.

Sex

is, ifyouseewhati mean ...
Ei-. . .
You see, if you have a gentleman cat and a
lady cat who ...
The point is ...
in short, pedigree cats breed, Real cats mate.
Breeding is best left to professionals. Mating,
on the other hand, is done by cats.
Breeders seem to be invariably ladies and
while totally mad are nevertheless entirely
charming people, whose houses can be distinguished 
by the neat sheds in the garden and
the fact that the cat food comes, not in tins, but
in a lorry.
Most Real cat owners seldom if ever encounter
them. It may occasionally happen that they
come into possession of an animal whose
looks and history suggest that she shouldn't be
a candidate for the vet's attentions or those of
the huge mad feral tom which hangs around
the garden, and after the expenditure of a sum
of money which makes male members of the
family fantasise about the differences between
the cat world and ours, you come back with
figures chiming in your head - because you've
been told how much the kittens should go for.
Something like: X litters per year X œY per
kitten X save some females X X more litters

Real cat owners know that life isn't like that.
Keeping pets for profit is never profitable, whatever
the paperwork says. Life becomes full of
rolls of wire netting, feed bills, alfresco carpentry
and huge bills from unexpected
sources, and your horizons become bounded
by, well, the horizon. Who looks after the
Cattery so that the cattery owner can go on vacation, eh?

In fact, breeding has all been tremendously
simplified these days by simply removing the
option entirely, to the extent that the 'Free to
Good Home' signs seem a lot rarer and a good
job too, and the cat population appears to be
made up of big fat neutered toms and slim,
sleek females whose liberation from the joys of
motherhood appears to have come as a bit of a
relief. Nevertheless, every neighbourhood still
has what is delicately referred to as an Entire
Tom.
it is very hard for this animal not to be a Real
cat. Once upon a time it would have been a tom
amongst toms, scrapping and yowling and generally
being kept in line by slicer peer pressure.
But now all its old mates are fat and lazy
and just want to kip all day, whilst the girls
don't seem to want to know. it stalks alone
through the shrubberies. The ground
trembles. Pet rabbits cower in their hutches.
Dogs - and, let's be honest, the average dog
can be out-thought by even an unreal cat - are
so unnerved by its air of make-my-day belligerence
that, when they see it coming, they
think of dozens of pressing reasons for trotting
nonchalantly away. Unpruned and yet unsitishe(-
1, its monstrous id prowls with it. The
milkman complains, the postman starts leaving
your letters with the house next door ...
There was one that took a fiendish delight in
fighting all the other local cats. Not over matters 
of territory, just for the hell of it. It'd creep
up while they dozed in the sun, and pitch in.
But we had just got a Real young female at
the time. Spayed and scarred, she came from a
thriving colony of farm cats so hulking great
toms with nothing on their mind except sex
and violence, possibly both together, were just
part of the scenery as far as she was concerned.
The first couple of times the crazed idiot
chased her she ran away out of sheer amazement.
Then we were privileged to watch the
showdown.
it started with the normal attempted mugging
and the usual chase and much skidding
round corners with binka-binka-binka leg
pedalling (see'Cartoon Cats'; every cat has a bit
of Cartoon cat in it). Then Real cat scrambled
on top of the waterbarrel, waited until the pursuer 
had his front claws on top and his back
legs scrabbling for the purchase necessary to
lever his trembling, pear-shaped body the rest
of the way, and then with great deliberation hit
him across the nose. it was the kind of blow a
Cartoon cat would have been proud of; it
travelled through 300 degrees, I swear, making
a noise like tearing silk.
Then she sat looking at his shocked face with
the expression that said he should ask himself
whether there was any more where that came
from, and was he feeling lucky?
Matters were eventually resolved quite amicably
by both animals pretending, as is so often
the case when you meet something you can't
do anything about, that the other one didn't
exist. This was quite a feat. The tom was a
Schrodinger cat who, before being adopted by
a neighbour, had come wandering in from
whatever hyperspace Schrodinger cats move
around in, and for some reason considered
that our house was his natural home. Real cat
was not going to hiss at him though, because
this meant recognising his existence and was
therefore against the rules. So the two of them,
by, some sort of telepathy, made certain that
they were never in the same room. It was like
those farces when one man is playing twin
brothers and is forever running out of the
French windows to look for himself just seconds
before he walks in via the library door, in
a different blazer, cursing at having missed
meeting him.

Hygiene

Cats have always had the same well-meaning
but shaky grasp of hygiene as humans, viz, if
you've covered it over, it isn't there. The important
thing is not actually to have achieved
Hygiene, but to have been seen to have made
the effort - as in, for example, trying to claw the
lino into the dirt box.
What's so hygienic about having a wash in
your own spit?
However, the Real cat scores over other
domestic pets in one unusual respect:
Real cats know what the bathroom is for.
We returned one day to find that the incumbent
Real cat, by means of the usual hyperspace
travel, had been in when we thought she was
Out. Thus no dirt box had been provided.
Real cat, we thought, had a rather shifty
expression, although this particular cat has a
shifty expression all the time and even
breathes as though it is stealing the air. A
perfunctory search of the usual resorts of desperation -
dark corners, the fireplace revealed
nothing unpleasant that wasn't nor
until, much later, we went to the bathroom
You get mixed feelings at a time like this.
There is, of course, the feeling of mild admiration
that, in a house full of carpets, Real cat has
chosen one of the few places that can easily be
cleaned by gallons of hot water and an escalation
of cleaning fluids (curiously, our book of
household hints is definitely reticent about the
whole, well, business of cats in the bath). On
the other hand, there's the feeling that this is
the bath, for God's sake, I was really looking
forward to a soak and now I will never ever
have a bath again as long as I live ...
What was intriguing was the reaction of
other Real cat owners. They said: oh, first time
it's happened to you, is it? And went on to tell
me about this cat someone heard about who
knows how to use the lavatory.
it's bluetits and milk-bottle tops all over
again, I tell you. Leave the lid down, that'll fox
em.

the Real Cat on Wheels

It's a simple choice. The cat travels either in:
a) a box, or
b) a stupor.
it's strange that dogs can take a car ride in their
stride and still bounce out at the other end,
more than ready to widdle, dribble, dig, bite
small children and all the other things dogs are
good at, while cats find the whole business
terribly trying.
Research indicates, however, that a small
proportion of Real cats actually like car travel,
provided it is on their terms. One of ours was
quite at home with the whole thing provided it
could sit on the driver's shoulder and watch
the road ahead, which is probably against the
law.
*it is: Cats Travelling on Shoulder (Prohibition) Order,
1949.

Animals loose in a car are never a good idea.
Goats are generally the worst, but until you
realise there's a tortoise stuck under your
brake pedal you've never known the meaning
of fear, and possibly not the meaning of 'old
age' either.
An object lesson in the perils of travelling
with a cat was provided by friends who took
theirs with them when they moved house. It
was the last journey - you know, the one where
you leave the final key with the neighbours,
promise to keep in touch, dig up a few prize
plants and set off up the road for the last time
with all the things the removal men couldn't or
didn't or wouldn't put in the van, like the kids,
strange items of kitchen ironmongery, and the
cat.
But this was all okay because as far as the cat
was concerned a car was just a load of sleeping
areas on wheels, and off they went up the
motorway, you know the sort of thing, 'Are we
nearly there yet?'; 'No you don't feel sick it's
just your imagination.'
And then they stopped at a service area.
Really, you don't need to know the rest of the
story. You can guess it. But for those who need
it spelled out ...
They forgot about the cat. They got out, they
got fed, they got in, they drove another seventy
miles, they got out, they started to unpack,
there was no cat. Cat must have got out.
Midnight. Car screams into service area car
park. Near-hysterical man staggers out with
plastic bowl, spoon, lurches around the car
park trying to look as nonchalant as is possible
concurrent with banging a bowl with a spoon
and shouting 'Pusspaws!' in a strained falsetto
(he was not, at that time, a paid-up member of
the Campaign; if he had been, he'd have been
wise to this sort of event and would have
changed the cat's name to something like 'Wat!'
or 'Zip!) An hour goes past. Leaves telephone
number with least unsympathetic of the waitresses,
drives back, visions of family pet laminated
to fast lane ...
Cat leaves it until he's almost home before
coming out onto the back seat and yawping for
food. With the elderly car so crowded, it'd
found a way via the arm-rest hole into the back
of the boot, where it had settled down comfortably
behind the spare tyre. But you knew
that, anyway.
The Campaign for Real Cats recommends a
way to cut through the whole problem of
taking cats with you to new homes. It gets rid of
all that business of hiding under the bed, peering
suspiciously out of the back door, looking
betrayed, etc.
The thing is, you see, that your average Real
cat becomes attached not to human beings but
to routines and territory. It's fashionable to
agonise about wives or husbands giving up
happy careers to follow the spouse across
country, but no one thinks twice about the fact
that the family cat may have spent years breaking
in dozens of sleeping nests, working out
best prowling routes, pouncing places, etc.
The human beings around the scene are
merely things provided by Nature for, eg,
opening fridges and tins. The cat becomes
quite attached to them, of course. You can
become quite attached to a pair of slippers, for
that matter. But it is much easier to become
attached to new blobs than new sleeping areas.
in short, the Campaign for Real Cats believes
that when you move house the kindest thing
you can do to the cat is leave it behind, where it
will grieve for .003 seconds before sucking up
shamefully to the new owners.
As for you, as a catless catlover you will find
that a stray turns up outside your new door
within days. We think some sort of agency
,sell(-Is theill.

-the Real Cat and
Other Animals

Remember. From the cat's instinctive point of
view, the animal world consists of
1) things that eat it
2) things it can eat
3) things it can eat but regret immediately.
ancl

But we then expect it to be perfectly at ease
when faced with:
a) Meals on Treadwheels
b) meals in cages (the Flying McNuggets)
c) mad quivering meals in hutches,
which in the worst cases may be forced
to join our Real cat, plus two dolls and a
teddy bear, for a back-lawn tea, party
consisting of water and crumbled
biscuits
d) feathery meals which are actually encouraged
to come onto the back lawn
for breadcrumbs
e) meals in ponds
f) large grubby barking things
g) miscellaneous.
It's a wonder they stay sane. In fact, as all Real
cat owners know, cats get around most problems
caused by all of the above by pretending
that they don't exist. Just like us, really.
The only household pet I have ever known
actually faze a Real cat is a tortoise. This may be
because a cat has problems coming to terms
with the fact that a tortoise is a fellow fauna. It
appears to be a small piece of scenery which
inexplicably moves about.
These days you don't shove a tortoise in a
box to tough it out for the winter, since no one
makes tortoises any more and they change
hands, people keep telling us, for zillions of
pounds. We used to let ours doze the winter
away in front of the fire, lurching awake every
day or two for a bit of lettuce. A peaceful,
untroubled existence, but one which did not
appeal to Real cat because a tortoise is impossible
to frighten. Tortoises don't know the
meaning of the word 'fear' or, indeed, any
other word. Oh, they nip into their shell at a
passing shadow out of common sense, but as
far as they are concerned the presence of a cat
in front of the fire just means that here's a pile
of fur that is nice and warm to burrow under.
They, sneak up on it, because for tortoises
there's no other way, and the first the cat knows
is when the edge of a shell is purposefully levering
it off the carpet. The cat goes and sits
in the corner and looks worried. And then one
of them develops an unnatural appetite for cat
food. The Real cat sits looking gnomically at a
shell seesawing madly on the edge of its dish,
and sighs deeply.

The Real Cat and
the Gardener

Peas, greens, parsnips, rhubarb ... these are,
the concerns of your average gardener.
Black thread, twigs, wire netting, incendiary
mines ... these are the concerns of your average
gardener who has a Real cat. Or, rather,
whose neighbour has a Real cat.
It is possible to cultivate your garden when
there are Real cats around, but the price of
celers, is eternal vigilance. As one exasperated
Real gardener* remarked, 'It's not just what
they Do, it's what they do afterwards', viz, the
conscientiously clawed conical heaps, out of
which the little yellow shoots of what would
have been beans poke pathetically.
*This is not the time and place for extensive definitions.
Let's just say that the Real gardener is not the same as the
Proper (or Radio) gardener. For example, when the
Proper Gardener has finished digging, harrowing, sifting,
aerating and raking, he has a tiltli, possibly even a
friable one; when the Real gardener has conscientiously
done all these things he has a large heap of stones, roots,
twigs and old seed row markers (Country folk used to
believe that certain types of stone were 'iiiothei. St(IICS',
which gave birth to new stones every year; under our
garden is a Plastic Seed Row Marker generator). A
Proper gardener has a lawn consisting of Chewings
Fescue, Red Bents and Rvegrass; a Real Gardener has
moss imbedded with dolls'legs, plastic alphabet characters
and clothes pegs. And large .ireas (.lowii to Cat.
1
The Great Ballistic Clod of Earth has already
been touched on. Other possible defences are:

1. The things that rattle, bang,
whizz and whirr:

Look, these don't scare anything. Well, all
right, maybe moles. Come to think of it, we
haven't had any moles since installing them.
We've never had any moles, actually.

2. The Wire Maze:

Real cats step over it.

3. Chemical warfare, including
the Mysterious Blobs, the Terrible
Dust and the Curious Gungy
Stuff.
Since it always rains incessantly imediately,
this barrage is laid down, we've never found
out if any of them work. Anyway, we always feel
vaguely uneasy about this sort of thing. Probably
there's some international Accord that no
one's bothered to tell us about.
The point is that the cat's desire to get onto
your pitiful plot is far greater, believe me, than
your desire to keep it off. When Nature calls, it
shouts. Which leads us on to:

4.
The Big Roll of Wire Netting:

The gardener's friend. Watch their Expressions
when They Find An Impenetrable
barrier of Steel laid Above Your Precious

You can make little wire bootees for the
beans, too, and encase the lower parts of your
iiioi-e \,alliable apple trees in demure corsets of
wire. The snags are 1) a garden that looks like
an MoD instalation, 2) a tendency to trip up,
and 3) the fact that plants grow through the
wire. This doesn't matter with things like
onions, but we left it too late with the potatoes
and tlic~, 1i2td to be dug up as a unit. But if you
can't tolerate this, your only recourse is:

5. The catapult..

But we're not that kind of people.*

The Real Cat and
Children

Ah. They can grow up together.
Well, not really. By the time the a~,era,,e
child is no longer doing Winston Churchill
impersonations the kitten has grown up and,
unless Measures have been Taken, has a family
of its own. Kittens and children get on like a
house on fire - and just think about what
actually like in a house on fire . .
A Real kitten in a Real household with a
junior member can expect to be:

1) pulled.

2) pushed.

3) Imprisoned in Cindy's bedroom with
Cindy, Mr T in one of Cind~,'s dresses*, ~i ()tiearmed
teddy bear, a fearsome kl,,i(leofplasticoid
with Lazer-zap cannon and a small
pink pony.

4) Fed unsuitable food. in this category can be
included peas, ghastly sweet pink goo, and a
fortnight's worth of kittytreats in three minutes.

5) Inserted into unsuitable clothing (cf. Cindy,
Barbie, Action Man, etc).) Carried by being he the
middle, so that large amounts of cat flop down
on either side. (Strangely enough, most cats
put up with this, even when they are great fat

This sort of thing used to happen all the time in o
house. I blame television.

unnuetered toms. It's like all that business with
unicorns. Only young maidens can get away
with it. The rest of us need stitches.)
it's not that children and young animals get
along especially well. It's just that young animals
aren't experienced enough to know
what's going to happen.
Stick to puppies. They're practically child proof. 

The Cats We Missed

As has been mentioned already, Man has
throughout history tried to overcome various
deficiencies - his inability to outrun a hare, dig
up a badger, bite lumps out of a burglar's
behind, carry brandy barrels through deep
Alpine snow, etc - by breeding a variety of dog
to do it for him. The dog, in fact, has been a
kind of handy Plasticine, rolled out thin or
squeezed up fat to suit the demands of the
time.
Since speculating on what things might be
like if history had been different is now
thoroughly acceptable in the best scientific
circles, the research branch of the Campaign
for Real Cats started to wonder what might
have happened if dogs hadn't been so handy.
Perhaps there was a great plague, for example,
or all dogs were wiped out by a series of
devastating but amazingly accurately pinpointed
meteor strikes back in the lower
Obscene Age. They also uncovered some early
experiments hitherto unheard of.
Winding forward to the new-look Present
Day, then, we would have seen:
The bullmog: Bred originally in the 14th century
for the purposes of bull-baiting. However,
this was not a very successful experiment and
led almost instantly to the virtual extinction of
the breed since it could not, when faced with
an irate bull, overcome the instinct to jump on
it, try to trap it on one paw, throw it in the air,
etc.

Smoocher: Something of a mongrel and a
favourite with poachers, the Smoocher combines 
elements of the Eeke, the Bullmog and
anything else that happened to be passing and
couldn't run away fast enough. it is renowned
for its intelligence and cunning. It is so intelligent
and cunning, actually, that it is very
difficult to get it to do any work at all. Its
preferred way of catching rabbits, for example,
is to send them a brief note consisting of letters
snipped out of newspapers, making them an
offer they can't refuse.

King Charles' Lapcat: Familiar to everyone.
Note length of ears.

The Eeke: The smallest cat in the world. The
Eeke was originally bred as a court pet of the
H'sing H'song emperors, and was not introduced
to occidental cat fanciers until the 17th
century. It was, initially, a toy for high-born
ladies but it was soon found to be extremely
useful since it was the same size as the mice,
and could go down their holes and mug them
on the corners. Mouse-baiting, using trained
Eekes, was a popular pastime among the sporting
classes for a while. This caused long-term
problems, however, since the more intelligent
Eekes realised that with the mice wiped out
and the walls of an entire manor house at their
disposal there was no need to come out. They
are still a nuisance in some parts of the country
where, apart from the theft of food, the purring
of an entire breeding colony can keep guests
awake at night.

The Tabby Retriever: Likely to be seen in the
back of the kind of cars that are driven by
people who wear green wellies and those
jerkin things apparently made out of flattened
mattresses. Originally a guncat, the Tabby Retriever 
was renowned for chasing the quarry,
letting it go, chasing it again, pouncing on it,
and bringing half of it back to the owner.

The Smog: A cat bred, quite simply, to fight
other cats. Owing to an unexplained occurrence
of Lamarckian heredity, the Smog lost its
ears in the 16th century, its tail - which opponents
could hang onto - in the 17th century,
and most of its hair in the ring, while its claws
and teeth lengthened and toughened. An ordinary
cat, going up against a Smog, might as well
run into an aeroplane propeller. Good with
children.

Dachskatz: An affectionate pet, often referred
to as the 'sausage mog'. Popular in the home
that can't afford draught excluders. Also, the
only cat that can brush up against the front and
the back of your legs at the same time.

The St Eric: Many a weary traveller, half-buried
in the snow, has hauled himself out and kept
himself warm at the sheer rage of seeing a St
Eric curl up and go to sleep twenty yards away.
They were never a great success, since they
depended on a cat's natural sense of charity
and benevolence.

The Pussky: Much used by lazy Eskimos, trappers,
Mounties, etc. Refuses to go out in cold
weather.

The Snufflecat: This breed came into its own
in the American South, when it was used to
track escaped slaves and convicts, who were
very lucky escaped convicts and slaves indeed
because, although the Snufflecat has a superb
sense of smell, it doesn't know what to do
with it.

The German Sheepcat: Never very good with
sheep, actually, but a great favourite with
police departments across the world. The cat's
natural tendency to rub up against people has,
in these 150 lb specimens, become a desire to
smash open doors and knock people to the
floor, where they are drooled on.
(The most famous German Sheepcat was the
film star RanCanCan, who had a spectacular if
somewhat brief career in the 1940s. Faced with
bridges being washed away ahead of speeding
express trains, or fire breaking out in tall
orphanages, or people being lost in ancient
mine workings, RanCanCan could be relied
upon to wander off and look for something to
eat. But very, very photogenically.)

The Future of the
Real Cat

If you're prepared to accept the Schrodinger
theory, then it is rosy - in fact, the last man on
Earth will probably look out of his bunker and
find a cat sitting there patiently waiting for the
fridge to be opened.
Actually, theories don't come into it. Real
cats are survivalists. They've got it down to a
fine art. What other animal gets fed, not because
it's useful, or guards the house, or sings,
but because when it does get fed it looks
pleased? And purrs. The purr is very important.
it's the purr that does it every time. It's the purr
that makes up for the Things Under the Bed,
the occasional pungency, the 4 a.m. yowl.
Other creatures went in for big teeth, long legs
or over-active brains, while cats just settled for
a noise that tells the world they're feeling
happy. The purr ought to have been a pair of
concrete running shoes in the great race of
evolution; instead, it gave cats a rather better
deal than most animals can expect, given Mankind's 
fairly unhappy record in his dealings
with his fellow creatures. Cats learned to
evolve in a world designed initially by nature
but in practice by humans, and have got damn
good at it. The purr means 'make me happy and
I'll make you happy'. The advertising industry
took centuries to cotton on to that beguiling
truth, but when it did, it sold an awful lot of
Cabbage Patch dolls.
You've got to hand it to Real cats.
If you don't, they wait until your back is
turned and take it anyway.
It's nice to think, though, that if the future
turns out to be not as bad as people forecast, ie,
if it actually even exists, then among the domes
and tubes of some orbiting colony, hundreds
of years from now, dynamic people with sturdy
chins, people who know all about mining
asteroids and stuff like that, will still be standing
outside their biomodule banging a plastic
plate with a spoon.
And yelling 'Zut!' or 'Wip!', if they've got any
sense.