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…”