But now all its old mates are fat and lazy and just want to kip all day, whilst the girls don't seem to want to know. It stalks alone through the shrubberies. The ground trembles. Pet rabbits cower in their hutches.

Dogs—and, let's be honest, the average dog can be out-thought by even an unReal cat—are so unnerved by its air of make-my-day belligerence that, when they see it coming, they think of dozens of pressing reasons for trotting nonchalantly away. Unpruned and yet unsatisfied, its monstrous Id prowls with it. The milkman complains, the postman starts leaving your letters with the house next door…

There was one that took a fiendish delight in fighting all the other local cats. Not over matters of territory, just for the hell of it. It'd creep up while they dozed in the sun, and pitch in. But we had just got a Real young female at the time. Spayed and scarred, she came from a thriving colony of farm cats so hulking great toms with nothing on their mind except sex and violence, possibly both together, were just part of the scenery as far as she was concerned.

The first couple of times the crazed idiot chased her she ran away out of sheer amazement.

Then we were privileged to watch the showdown.

It started with the normal attempted mugging and the usual chase and much skidding round corners with binka-binka-binka leg pedalling (see “Cartoon Cats”; every cat has a bit of Cartoon cat in it). Then Real cat scrambled on top of the waterbarrel, waited until the pursuer had his front claws on top and his back legs scrabbling for the purchase necessary to lever his trembling, pear-shaped body the rest of the way, and then with great deliberation hit him across the nose. It was the kind of blow a Cartoon cat would have been proud of; it travelled through 300 degrees, I swear, making a noise like tearing silk.

Then she sat looking at his shocked face with the expression that said he should ask himself whether there was any more where that came from, and was he feeling lucky? Matters were eventually resolved quite amicably by both animals pretending, as is so often the case when you meet something you can't do anything about, that the other one didn't exist.