Fool for cats

IT'S widely regarded that cats are supremely intelligent creatures.

You can tell people believe this because they always call them creatures rather than animals.

Animals are regarded as dumb, hence the saying 'dumb animals'. But creatures are clever.

If these people are right, then how come our cat, Guinness, is sitting mewling outside on the windowsill, looking in on me, knowing full well that I'm in the bath, half a bottle of Radox frothing around my ears, and that I have no intention of getting out just to let her in?

But it hasn't always been that way.

Our first family cat was my Auntie San's and for years it has given me one of the best blue movie actor names (you know that game – take your first pet's name and your mother's maiden name?).

So my grindhouse flick name is Buttons Tostevin.

Buttons was one of those stripy ginger cats that people with a low creativity count name Chivers or Marmalade.

(By the way, the best-ever naming of a cat goes to Mrs Le Gallez who, in the 60s, called hers Pancho Gonzales. I don't think it was a particularly Mexicanish cat or had a penchant for tennis, but it beats the heck out of Tibbles.)

Buttons was run ragged all her life by the family dog, Nicky, which would chase her around the yard and fields and up into the greenhouse gutters.

Having to endure this on a daily basis was coupled with the fact that he had only one lung.

So it was a shock to everyone that he lived to the age of 24.

The next cat we had was in Yorkshire. That one – if cats can actually have it – had a huge amount of dignity.

Every day must have been a struggle against adversity for it, because we found out from the vet that the cat was male only after my dad had Christened him – and we had all got used to calling him Prudence.

I'm not one for thinking that cats and dogs have a fully functioning community away from the home (Disney films didn't brainwash me too much) but it must have been tough for a terrace street tomcat called Prudence.

Maybe he convinced other cats that it was Russian for 'he who murders silently all those who mock his name'.

I hope so.

I remember sitting on the back seat of my dad's Datsun Cherry, holding down the lid of a cardboard box with Prudence inside as we moved house three miles up the road.

His paw kept poking out and I could see one very annoyed eye under the flap.

Prudence ran off a couple of times and we'd get a phone call from one of our old neighbours reporting that he'd made his way back down to the old house. We'd get in the car and go fetch him.

It was like the Disney film, Fantastic Journey, but with Yorkshire accents, traffic islands and Vauxhall Vivas instead of canyons, pine forests and Pontiacs.

After Pru, it was nigh-on a catless life, except for a brief foray into joint ownership of Elvis with a girlfriend. But that unfortunate moggie was as doomed as our ill-starred relationship.

I think Elvis ended up with a guided coach tour operator. God knows who the ex ended up with.

Then, years later, when my wife and I moved to King's Mills, we were adopted by a cat.

We were watching telly one night when we saw a pair of eyes and some teeth looking at us through the dormer window.

It was a cat. But even though it was moving its mouth, we couldn't hear it mewling through the window.

We let it in and gave it some ham.

That was repeated for about a week and then the cat sort of moved in.

She was all black so we called her Tarmac. And the reason why we couldn't hear her mewling through the window was because she'd lost her voice. She just mimed.

Tarmac was a star. She was like the female Ernest Hemingway of the feline world.

Because King's Mills is such a bucolic paradise, it's abundant in wildlife, which for a cat means only one thing: prey.

We'd often see Tarmac in a nearby field, gambolling. We'd call her and she'd come bounding down like the kids in the opening sequence of Little House on the Prairie.

Except that she'd have a baby rabbit in her gob.

We'd then have to avert our sensitive human eyes while Tarmac toyed with the unfortunate lupine.

She would always devour everything but left us the fluffy white tail on the doormat.

(We collected enough for my wife to make a nice tabard out of them. That is a joke by the way. My way of dealing with the horror.)

After the Hemingway-like hunting came the drinking.

After a kill, Tarmac liked nothing better than to wash the rabbit down with a centimetre or two of VP Fine Ruby Port.

We eventually moved up to Maison du Pauvre and Tarmac came with us.

But she was a free spirit.

After a while we left the island and couldn't take her with us.

We went to live in Clapham and what would a Guernsey country cat do in south London?

The couple who took our flat also took her on. But they couldn't keep her. They told us in a letter that she had gone off. Then she came back again, just to check that we'd gone. Then disappeared again.

A year or so after we came back I was driving around St Peter's, near to where we had lived.

I stopped at a junction and to my right, sitting on a grassy knoll, was a black cat.

I looked at it and it looked at me. Its look seemed to say: 'Hey, I'm a Guernsey country cat. What the hell would I have done in Clapham, eh?'

I slipped Leonard Cohen into the cassette deck, fought back a sob and drove off.

Guinness followed me home from the pub one night.

She was a tiny kitten with huge ears.

I heard her mewling all the way from Town. When I got home, I watched the Evel Knievel Story on telly but even above the revving I could still hear the mewling outside.

I found her, frightened and wide-eyed, under our car across the road. My wife never believed that she'd followed me. I think she thinks I won her at cards.

Guinness (yep, black and white) wheedled her way into our lives 11 years ago.

And now she's mewling at the window.

I get out of the bath, slopping soapsuds and water everywhere, and let her in.

Then I get back in but it's never the same, is it?

So who really is the dumb animal and who is the intelligent creature?