Less well known is the work by a group of scientists who failed to realise that Schrodinger was talking about a “thought experiment” 10, and did it. Box, radioactive source, bottle of poison, everything. And the cat, of course.

They left out one important consideration, though. While the observer might not know what was going on, the cat in the box damn well would. We can assume that if the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, then the inkling that, any minute now, some guy in a white coat is going to lift the lid and there's a fifty-fifty chance that you are dead already, does wonders for the brain. Spurred by this knowledge, and perhaps by all the quantums floating around the laboratory, the cat nipped around a corner in space-time and was found, slightly bewildered, in the janitor's cupboard.

Evolution is always quick to exploit a new idea, however, and this novel way of getting out of tricky situations was soon passed on to its offspring. It had a large number of offspring.

Given its new-found talent, this is not surprising.

The important gene was so incredibly dominant that now many cats have a bit of Schrodinger in them. It is characterised by the ability to get in and out of locked boxes, such as rooms, houses, fridges, the thing you swore you put it in to take it to the vet, etc. If you threw the cat out last night, and this morning it's peacefully asleep under your bed, it's a Schrodinger cat.

There is a school of thought which says there is in fact a sort of negative Schrodinger gene.

Whereas your full-blown Schrodinger can get in and out of the most unusual places there are cats, it has been pointed out, that would find it difficult to get out of a hoop with both ends open. These are the cats that you normally see, or rather, you normally hear behind fridges, in those dead little areas behind kitchen storage units, in locked garages and, in one case known to us, inside the walls (dreadful Edgar Allan Poetic visions led to a hole being knocked into the cavity a little way from the noise, which of course caused the cat—definitely a Real cat—to retreat further from the noise; it came out 24 hours later, dragged by the scent of a plate of food). But we are inclined to believe that this is not so and that these are merely examples of Offside (see “Games cats play”).

However, this ability, which most Real cats' owners will have noticed (and what about when they're missing for a couple of days, eh, and come back well fed? Have they just been panhandling round the neighbours, or did they nip along to next Wednesday to enjoy the huge relieved “welcome-back” meal you gave them?), leads on to interesting speculation about:

The Cat in History

The books will tell you that cats evolved from civet ancestors about 45 million years ago, which was definitely a good start. Get as much distance between yourself and the civets as possible, that was the motto of the early cats. The civet cat has been a very nervous animal ever since it discovered that you can, er, derive civetone11 from it and use it in scent. Exactly how this is done I don't know and do not wish to research. It's probably dreadful. Oh, all right, I'll have a look.

It is.12

So, the story goes, the cat family pushed on with the evolving as fast as possible, going in for size, speed and ferocity. There's nothing like the fear that you might be mistaken for a civet for giving jets to your genes, especially when you know it's only a matter of millennia before your actual proto-hominids start wandering around the Holocenic landscape with a bottle, a knife and a speculative look in their eyes. They also spread out a bit but missed Australia, which had just gone past on the Continental Drift; this explains why the rats grew so big. Some got stripes, some tried spots. One well known early variety developed its very own do-it-yourself can opener a hundred thousand years before cat food came in tins, and died of being too early to take advantage of this.

And then, suddenly, small versions started toturn up and go mee-owp, mee-owp at people.

Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new “fire” stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst ofthem wanders into the cave and starts to purr.

More amazing yet, it didn't get et.

Dogs you can understand. They're pack creatures, humans are just another, brighter, pack leader. Dogs are handy for helping you run down things that are faster than you are. But cats—well, from Early Man's point of view, cats are good for nothing.

The first cat to approach the cave survived, in fact, on sheer surprise value. It was the first animal the man had ever seen that wasn't either running away or bounding towards him and dribbling. It liked him.

And the reason it felt this way was that the cat already knew that humans liked cats.

Here was a household in the country.

Households in the country attract cats. It's one of the fundamental wossnames of Nature. See the point? We know that Real cats can wander at will through time and space, and this cat was probably en route between feeding bowls before it took a wrong turning.

After all, what's the alternative? That Early Man had nothing better to do with his spare time than look at a wild cat and spot that this horizontal-headed, yellow-eyed, spitting menace was just the thing the cave needed? No, our theories demand that it went the other way, that wild cats are domestic cats that went feral thousands of years ago, probably because they were upset about something, possibly the continued non-invention of the fridge.

Cats make ideal time travellers because they can't handle guns. This makes the major drawback of time travel—that you might accidentally shoot your own grandfather—very unlikely. Of course, you might try to become your own grandfather, but having watched a family of farm cats, we can tell you that this is perfectly normal behaviour for a cat.

Sex

Well…

…of course, it all depends how Real the cat is, ifyouseewhatimean…

Er…

You see, if you have a gentleman cat and a lady cat who…

The point is…

In short, pedigree cats breed, Real cats mate. Breeding is best left to professionals. Mating, on the other hand, is done by cats.

Breeders seem to be invariably ladies and while totally mad are nevertheless entirely charming people, whose houses can be distinguished by the neat sheds in the garden and the fact that the cat food comes, not in tins, but in a lorry.

Most Real cat owners seldom if ever encounter them. It may occasionally happen that they come into possession of an animal whose looks and history suggest that she shouldn't be a candidate for the vet's attentions or those of the huge mad feral tom which hangs around the garden, and after the expenditure of a sum of money which makes male members of the family fantasise about the differences between the cat world and ours, you come back with figures chiming in your head—because you've been told how much the kittens should go for. Something like: X litters per year × £Y per kitten × save some females × X more litters = ££££1111

Real cat owners know that life isn't like that. Keeping pets for profit is never profitable, whatever the paperwork says. Life becomes full of rolls of wire netting, feed bills, alfresco carpentry and huge bills from unexpected sources, and your horizons become bounded by, well, the horizon. Who looks after the cattery so that the cattery owner can go on holiday, eh?