‘I had once been a cat’ – the feline fantasies of Caleb Carr

One of my favourite cartoons is of the owl and the pussycat going to sea in their pea-green boat. The caption is the owl’s guilty admission: ‘I’m afraid there have been… other cats.’ Caleb Carr, in this memoir of his own love affair with a pussycat, is straightfaced: ‘I should own up to the fact that I’d had similar relationships with other cats – even (and in some cases especially) cats who were not mine.’

I have a high tolerance for cat books, but after this one I turned in relief to a ‘Simon’s Cat’ animation on YouTube. There’s one in which a hapless man opens the door for a kitten who has spent hours scrabbling hysterically at the glass like a prisoner longing for escape. The animal then decides that, on reflection, outdoors is overrated. Carr, on the same situation: ‘The issue may not be the door: it may be the spaces either side of it, and the question of being able to access those spaces.’