Breeders seem to be invariably ladies and while totally mad are nevertheless entirely charming people, whose houses can be distinguished by the neat sheds in the garden and the fact that the cat food comes, not in tins, but in a lorry.

Most Real cat owners seldom if ever encounter them. It may occasionally happen that they come into possession of an animal whose looks and history suggest that she shouldn't be a candidate for the vet's attentions or those of the huge mad feral tom which hangs around the garden, and after the expenditure of a sum of money which makes male members of the family fantasise about the differences between the cat world and ours, you come back with figures chiming in your head—because you've been told how much the kittens should go for. Something like: X litters per year × £Y per kitten × save some females × X more litters = ££££1111

Real cat owners know that life isn't like that. Keeping pets for profit is never profitable, whatever the paperwork says. Life becomes full of rolls of wire netting, feed bills, alfresco carpentry and huge bills from unexpected sources, and your horizons become bounded by, well, the horizon. Who looks after the cattery so that the cattery owner can go on holiday, eh?

In fact, breeding has all been tremendously simplified these days by simply removing the option entirely, to the extent that the “Free to Good Home” signs seem a lot rarer and a good job too, and the cat population appears to be made up of big fat neutered toms and slim, sleek females whose liberation from the joys of motherhood appears to have come as a bit of a relief. Nevertheless, every neighbourhood still has what is delicately referred to as an Entire Tom.

It is very hard for this animal not to be a Real cat. Once upon a time it would have been a tom amongst toms, scrapping and yowling and generally being kept in line by slicer peer pressure.