The only time I have ever mentioned my bird-lover’s slight – slight! – ambivalence towards cats in a public forum, it brought me the angriest virtual postbag of my career, so I hesitate to even mention them again. Cats are great! I feed my neighbours’ cat! My niece is a cat! (By which I mean I view my best friend’s cat as a niece-like figure; she is not a child identifying as a cat, a phenomenon some highly suggestible sections of the media got overheated about several news cycles ago.)
But I’m daring to mention felines after reading an interview with a French veterinary psychiatrist in the New York Times. Over “aperitifs in a cafe not far from the Eiffel Tower” (you can see why he chose to specialise in psychiatry – kir royale with the NYT sounds nicer than expressing a pug’s anal glands), Claude Béata explained what cats, who “like to keep themselves to themselves”, went through during lockdown.
“Covid was hard for cats,” he said. “Cats, the first day they would say: ‘Wow, interesting.’ The second day, they say: ‘OK.’ The third day, they say: ‘When are you going back to work? I’d like my space, please.’”
People getting all up in their space is hardly new for cats, of course. There’s a lovely old Irish poem Pangur Bán (Leontyne Price sang Samuel Barber’s setting of it beautifully) that is basically a procrastinating monk sitting around in the ninth century, admiring his cat. “How happy we are, Alone together, scholar and cat,” WH Auden’s version of the text goes, but I bet the cat was thinking: “Christ, are you still illuminating that bloody T? Have you considered a walk?”
Oh, I relate, hard. Reading Béata ventriloquising this feline thought process, Doctor Dolittle style, was like reliving the thoughts that trotted through my own head in lockdown. As a long-time homeworker and person who, yes, likes to keep herself to herself, having other people around all the time was very much an “interesting”, “OK”, “I’d like my space, please” trajectory. Am I saying I identify as a cat? Someone call GB News.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
