Writers, apparently, have a tendency to fall for cats, and having fallen then to love them to distraction.

Either that, or cat lovers with a dormant literary streak are so confounded by the impenetrable felinity of their companion(s), so baffled by the shifts from affection to indifference, by the pendular swings from purring, kneading lap-lover, to taloned, carpet-clawing, furniture-gouging devil(s), that the only sense they can make of their animal’s character is to anthropomorphize the beast with a literary eloquence they didn’t know they possessed, and become, in the process, writers and poets.

Many famous writers, I have read, have ploughed their literary furrows in the company of a cat and have no doubt found solace in the affectionate fussing and mithering that a cat, if in compliant mood, can afford the needy when, for example, the blights of writer’s block, or bad – or worse, no – reviews strike.

I’ve lived with cats for fifty years, written in their company for the last twenty, often sought their response to a choice phrase, and occasionally observed their head move from side to side as they’ve watched my words chase the cursor across a screen. Inevitably, cats have sauntered through my imagination and landed parts in some of my writing.

Here are a couple of verses from Concerto, in which the leading protagonist, Charlie, gives internet dating a whirl to lift his spirits during a COVID lockdown and makes the acquaintance of Charlotte, whose cat Cribbage is the apple of her eye. Charlie reckons his chances with the beautiful Charlotte would surely be improved if he himself was a cat owner, so when the world returns briefly to normality he pops along to an RSPCA rescue centre where he’s persuaded to give a forlorn old nameless tomcat a home. In an attempt to be sympatico with Charlotte and her cat, he names his cat Poker. Man and cat begin their journey together… and along the way Charlie discovers what it means to live with a cat.