I’m in love with my cat. He sleeps by my writing desk all day on the cotton lining of my inside-out parka. At the end of the day, I crash into the beanbag and he climbs up on my chest and we nap.

To be clear, this is our family cat, but yes, in an eye-rollingly predictable move, the cat gravitated to the person in the household who was least interested.

My now-disgruntled partner and our son campaigned for a cat for quite some time. My partner, let’s call her Cat Follower, is a cat follower (online and down the street). You can’t walk a block without her having to stop while she chases or coaxes a kitty from somewhere, eagle-eyed (is it wrong to mix in this bird metaphor?) and begins to smooch and trill and do whiskery tsks-tsks with her tongue. Ooh, you’re a feisty one, aren’t you, she whispers. They often are. They’re rarely morose chumps.

I do realise I fall into a lineage of pathetic males who claim........

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