Do you know where your cat spends its time when it's not at home? It's worth checking with more distant neighbours that they don't have a cat with the same size and colouring. It can happen. We once knew two households who for years both thought they owned the same cat, which spent its time commuting between food bowls. A sort of menagerie à trois.

An interesting fact about acquiring cats is that the things are, by and large, either virtually free or very expensive. It's as if the motor industry had nothing between the moped and the porsche.

Forget all the business about Blue Points and Persians. Real cats are likely to be:

A dying breed. Once upon a time every decent barn supported a thriving, incestuous colony of them, depositing small nests of mewling kittens amongst the hay-bales, and there's still a few around. Worth getting if you can. They often look like flat-headed maniacs, but they've generally got a bit of sense. Not usually found on the kind of farms that are apparently made of extruded aluminium, but still scratching a living here and there.

There must be a breed of these. Most Sub-Post Office cats (qv) are black cats with white paws. They are always called Sooty.

Usually grey, and often seen in the newly seeded bit of the garden with a strained expression on their faces. Normally called Yaargeroffoutofityarbarstard (see “Naming cats”).

They have fangs, crossed eyes, enough scars to play a noughts and crosses championship on, and ears like old bus tickets. They're invariably male. Boot-faced cats aren't born but made, often because they've tried to outstare or occasionally rape a speeding car and have been repaired by a vet who just pulled all the bits together and stuck the stitches in where there was room. Most Boot-faced cats are black. Strange but true.

Your basic Real cat. Backbone of the country cat population.

Like farm cats, now ambling their way into history. They were once kept because they did a useful job of work, but now they're often the subject of friction between management, who want them out because they don't fit in with the new streamlined image of United Holdings (Holdings) plc, and staff, who don't. Usually someone called Nobby or Dotinthecanteen smuggles in food for them. Some factory cats get to be quite famous and have their pictures in the staff newspaper when they retire. The picture always shows Nobby or Dotinthecanteen holding a saggy black-and-white cat which is staring at the camera with quiet, self-satisfied malevolence.

On retirement, they set up home with Dotinthecanteen but saunter down to the old firm occasionally and hang around while the working cats are going through a busy patch, telling them how much better they feel these days, wish they'd done it years ago, of course you lads don't know what it was like when Mr Morgan was manager, what a tartar he was, if he saw so much as a mouse doodah he went spare, you were kept at it in those days…

…and then they saunter back home, and have a nap.

Always fluffy and white, with a diamond-encrusted collar. Other qualifications include the ability to yawn photogenically when the camera is on them and complete unflappability in the presence of people dropping through the floor into the piranha tank. We've all seen Arch-villains' cats. However, it's not the easy life that it appears to be. For one thing, the people who design the megamillion underground yacht bunkers and missile bases in which the arch-criminals live never think to include a dirt box. If they did, it would be surrounded by landmines and have ingenious and unpleasant traps buried in it. And Archvillains' cats never use a cat door. This is because they know what happens to people who go through doors.

Arch-villains' cats are not Real. This is obvious to anyone who cares to examine the facts. Next Christmas, when once again the TV reminds you that a saviour was born on Earth and his name is James Bond, look closely at the sets. You will find there are no:

a) dead birds under the laser-driven spy splitting table

b) scratch marks on the megamissile control wheel

c) forlorn squeaky toys lying around where people can trip over them

d) half-empty tins of suppurating cat food in the cryogenic unit.

Somehow, it's hard to imagine your average Arch-villain owning a Real cat (although some members have pointed out that many Archvillains have leather gloves on their hands, and/or only one eye, so maybe they have Real cats at home they try to fondle after another hard day of holding the world to ransom.)

Usually black and white. And they often have an amusing speech impediment. If your cat can read newspapers, it is a Cartoon cat. If it can get hold of a stick of dynamite by simply reaching off screen, it is a Cartoon cat. If it wears a bowtie, it's a Cartoon cat. If, when it starts to run, its legs pinwheel in the air for a humorous few seconds making binka-binka-binka noises, it is a Cartoon cat. If you are still uncertain, check to see whether the people next door have a bulldog called Butch who has spikes on his collar and is usually to be found dozing outside his kennel. If they have, you'll know what kind of cat you've got.

A sub-species of Factory cat. Can be any colour in theory, are almost always black and white in fact. The significant characteristic of this breed is an ability to spread out when asleep, like a rubber bag full of mercury. They're gradually fading out, made redundant by the loss of the very shops they tended to inhabit and also by the Public Health laws, which are not drafted to accommodate the kind of animal that considers its natural role in life to go to sleep on a pile of sugar bags. I used to be taken into a shop where a Sub-Post Office cat used to sleep in the dog biscuit sack. You'd reach in to pinch a bikkie and there'd be all this fur. No one seemed to mind. (Whatever happened to those dog biscuits? They were real dog biscuits, not the anaemic things you get in boxes today; they were red and green and black and came in various interesting shapes. The black ones tasted of charcoal. That's modern times for you. Our grandparents had oil lamps and gas lights to look back to, we've got dog biscuits. Even the nostalgia isn't what it was.)

Oscar's 2,000 Mile Purr-fect Trip says the heading in the local paper. Or something like that. At least once every year. In every local paper. It's a regular, like “Row Over Civic Site” or “Storm As Schools Probe Looms”.

So many stories like this have turned up that researchers from the Campaign for Real Cats have been, well, researching. The initial suspicion was that here was a hitherto unknown breed of Real cat, possibly a sideshoot of the now almost extinct Railway cat. It'd be nice to think that there was today an Airline cat, although perhaps not, because warming though the idea is, the thought is bound to occur to you at 30,000 feet that it's probably got a favourite sleeping area somewhere on the plane and it is possibly somewhere in the wiring. Or perhaps there is now a Lorry cat undreamed of by T. S. Eliot. Felis Freubaf, an international creature, loitering in the cabs of the world and growing fat on Yorkie Bars. Or it could be further proof of the Schrodinger theory, since from a quantum point of view distance cannot be said to exist and all this apparent space between things is just the result of random fluctuations in the matter matrix and shouldn't be taken seriously.