Free Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man by Tom Cox

impartial outsider would soon have worked out who was wearing the hair-flecked trousers in our relationship. As Dee and our friends Steve and Sue talked to Mick and John about the strength of the gay vote in Big Brother and their joy at the victory of BB2 ’s Brian Dowling, I strolled out into the garden and zoned in on the tiny, somewhat Yoda-like kitten leaping manically over the ornamental pond. We’d arrived with the intention of coming away with two new cats, at the most, and we’d already decided on Brian Two (black and white, fluffyish) and Brian Four (tabby, more fluffyish), but it was me who pushed for the ‘bonus ball’ inclusion of the sleek-furred, irrepressible Brian Seven (or, in Steve’s words, ‘the ugly black runty one’).
    A few weeks later, though, when Brian Two (now Prudence) began to soil the duvet and Brian Four (now Brewer) and Brian Seven (now Shipley) began a bout of skilfully timed tag team claw-sharpening, I realised it was time to get tough.
    ‘Now,’ I explained to Shipley. ‘That’s really not on. That’s a very old chair you’re tearing up there. It used to belong to Dee’s grandma.’
    ‘It’s much more effective if you just growl at them,’ said Dee.
    Dee and I had always laughed at the middle-class soft touch dads: the floppy men we used to see in shops in Blackheath Village, patiently asking little Sebastian or Ciabatta how they thought it made the octogenarian next to them feel when they stood on her bunions and didn’t say sorry. Was it my destiny to become one of these people? I hoped not. It would have been absurd to deny that my talents as a disciplinarian of small cats probably did provide a fairly good guide to my potential as a disciplinarian of small humans, but I was sure there was no affection being displaced or misplaced here.
    It riled me when acquaintances and family would suggest that my cats represented some kind of trial run for parenthood. What rankled most about this was the way it carried with it the implicit suggestion that, were Dee and I to procreate, we would happily change our tune and leave our moggies out with the following week’s recycling. I love elephants and donkeys too, and, in the unlikely event I had enough room to own one, I would feed it regularly, give it a nickname, and stroke and pat it, and indulge its every whim. Would that make that a child substitute too? No: it would make it a very big, lovable, overindulged animal, in much the same way my cats were smaller, lovable, overindulged animals. That said, I can understand the slight look of horror in the eyes of my mum – a person who’d obviously made up her mind that the primary reason her only son and his wife would have moved out of the big city was to immediately settle down and start a family – the day she arrived at our new cottage to find me waiting for her at the door with Shipley in my arms, fast asleep in an upside down ‘cradle’ position.
    I did manage to keep my soppiness hidden some of the time – sometimes without having to try too hard. If Surreal Ed had had any doubts that I was making a gradual exit from our 4 a.m. danceathons, I’m sure they were quashed during the sleepless night he spent on my sofa bed getting his ever-restless feet chased by Brewer, Shipley and Prudence, but I still got the sense there was a part of my home life about which Ed, never much of a cat fan, remained in denial. Call me presumptuous, but on certain occasions he just seemed to be missing something: one of these being the time, not long before we left London, when he sat in my living room and told me, in hopeful, sympathy stimulating tones, about the latest girl he’d dumped. ‘What went wrong?’ I asked him, as Shipley perched happily on my shoulder and began to lick my ear. ‘Oh,’ he replied. ‘She was too obsessed with her bloomin’ cats. What can blokes like us do, eh, Tom?’
    Even more oblivious to the situation were Dee’s parents. Every time they visited us,