This weekend I went to the Siamese and Shorthair cat show. I wanted to see if my Siamese cat Mr. Puck (a Blue Point) really is a total freak or whether there are others like him. I thought about taking Mr. Puck on the cat leash my mother in law gave me so that he could see he wasn’t alone in being skinny and big eared, but that’s frowned upon.

The leash is actually a little impractical in our neighbourhood - I can just imagine walking Puck past the pit bulls of the Mongrel Mob down the road and waving out a cherry, ‘Good Morning!’ Sheer incomprehensibility might be only thing that would save us, the students next door once yelled ‘what the f*$k is that?’ when they caught sight of Mr. P raiding their discarded pizza boxes. He does rather look like a large big eared rat.

It turns out that Puck is average on the loud and whiny meow front but on his own in digestive problems resulting in vomit (this could be due to his rubbish raiding habits). I thought the other colours and varieties of Siamese: chocolate point, Seal, Havana, Oriental and Balinese were OK, but a bit too perfect. It’s the flaws that make for real beauty. My friend Mr. Smith, actually an alien left behind to collect data about planet earth until he is beamed up by the Mothership, is convinced that Siamese cats built the pyramids, hence their pictures on the walls of ancient structures and accuses Puck of scanning his brain for information. Mr Puck couldn’t scan a room for chicken. He is so cross eyed it is sometimes hard to tell what he’s staring at.

There were many cat breeders and fanciers at the show. These people are identified by cat hair covered jumpers, scratched hands and an unusually high pitched way of talking. One resembled the disgruntled Ruddy Abyssinian she was holding. It takes a solid sort of devotion to croon lovingly to an animal that is giving you a look that clearly says ‘I want to rip your throat out’. Many of the women’s pussies had won ribbons and nobody made the slightest joke about it.

That isn’t true of course. The Economist simply couldn’t help himself and made many jokes about the cats being award-winning pussies, which seemed to fall on deaf ears; I expect the cat breeders had heard it all before. I once put ‘free Asian pussy’ into Google and come up with a picture of a Siamese cat. Mr. Puck may not win any ribbons, but he has a lovely dispositon for someone who eats flies and still needs a litter tray for number twos. And they say people take after their pets.