The Unadulterated Cat

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 figures 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 now.