These cats come with a selection of bowls, half a tin of the most expensive cat food on the market, a basket and a small woolly thing with a bell in it. They will then spend two weeks under the bed in the spare room. Try to get it out and it could be you in the hospital having skin from your buttocks grafted onto your arm.

Cats are not always inherited from dead people. If the previous owner is still alive, the Real cat will probably be accompanied by a list of its likes and dislikes. Throw it away. They're just fads anyway.

Try to avoid inheriting cats unless they come with a five-figure legacy, or at least the expectation of one.

Do you know where your cat spends its time when it's not at home? It's worth checking with more distant neighbours that they don't have a cat with the same size and colouring. It can happen. We once knew two households who for years both thought they owned the same cat, which spent its time commuting between food bowls. A sort of menagerie à trois.

An interesting fact about acquiring cats is that the things are, by and large, either virtually free or very expensive. It's as if the motor industry had nothing between the moped and the porsche.

Types of cat

Forget all the business about Blue Points and Persians. Real cats are likely to be:

1. Farm Cats

A dying breed. Once upon a time every decent barn supported a thriving, incestuous colony of them, depositing small nests of mewling kittens amongst the hay-bales, and there's still a few around. Worth getting if you can. They often look like flat-headed maniacs, but they've generally got a bit of sense. Not usually found on the kind of farms that are apparently made of extruded aluminium, but still scratching a living here and there.