Sphinx

I’ve always been much more of a cat person than a dog person; no offence to the memory of dear old Bailey the neurotic greyhound, or to the various dogs of family members and neighbours, but it’s cats that I can’t imagine living without.

Partly it’s just a matter of upbringing, with Minou being the one person who understood and sympathised through much of my childhood and adolescence, but it’s also something to do with temperament; I can respect cats, and feel that it’s a relationship of equality and reciprocity (yeah, I wish…), whereas the basic slavishness of dogs, their expression of pathetic misery when they’re told off, the feeling that one could mistreat them horribly and they’d still be begging for forgiveness and affection, make me incredibly uncomfortable. Just as in the postcard above… Dog: “They feed me, they look after me, they worry about me… They must be gods.” Cat: “They feed me, they look after me, they worry about me… I must be a god.”

What has dawned on me this morning is that this is not a matter of identification but of wish fulfilment – or, rather, of the wrong sort of identification. I would love to be confident, independent, self-sufficient; instead I am pathetically grateful to university management for allowing me to run around and chase sticks for their entertainment, for the scraps of food they deign to offer, for the opportunity to show how loyal and dedicated I am. They pay me, they give me scope to teach and write, they must be gods – or, worse, we must all be part of the same pack, all working together for the same common ends. I think it’s called imprinting; get an academic young enough, and they’ll think the university is its loving parent.

Be more cat…