The Unadulterated Cat

Types of cat

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

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.

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

Usually grey, and often seen in the newly seeded bit of the garden with a strained expression on their faces. Normally called Yaargeroffoutofityarbarstard (see “Naming 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.

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

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 have a nap.

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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 vegan4 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) Antarctica? Cats are quite happy to leave it alone.

Of course, they have their negative points:

a) All cats insist on wearing real fur coats…