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When we first brought Hector home he wailed — with a sobbing so despondent that I almost handed myself into the local police station for animal cruelty, interspersed with a pitch-perfect imitation of the kid from The Exorcist — for the entire journey.
And it wasn’t a modest journey either, from far north to deepest south London. I spent it terrified — both for my Uber rating and for everyone’s welfare — and scrolling through reviews of the cat carrier I’d jammed him into (a glamorous Chanel-inspired satin padded number with gold hardware, the last one in the shop) to see several people recounting how their pets had clawed holes in them and escaped in their car.
Over the next few days he was shy, then livid. He bellowed through the night; a volume far beyond what you’d expect from a high-end speaker of the same size. We tried to soundproof the bedroom door with pillows to get some sleep, and when that didn’t work we thought letting him in would calm him. Instead he climbed on to our chests and did his bellowing directly into our faces.
I very soon realised — at first thanks to the lack of soundproofing insulation in our flat’s ceilings — that a cat is not something you can keep to yourself. He became a constant presence in the lives of our neighbours as well as ours. Even more so since he settled into being such a curious and gregarious companion. I’ve met people thanks to his japes, and he’s one of the reasons I feel so much at home where I live.
I was reminded of the cat’s status as a community asset by recent viral footage of the Iowa City Kitty Walk. Inspired by the annual Minnesota Cat Tour, which started as a joke in 2017, local cat owners volunteered to be part of a route through the city. They brought out their pets on leads (with varying degrees of co-operation) or simply made signs for their windows introducing their cats to the crowd.
On the tour were around 75 locals who came together simply to cheer at other people’s pets. But there’s nothing that unites the world like a cat video: over the coming months there were thousands more admirers online, including me, on yet another gormless Instagram Reels binge, 4,000 miles away and with no plans to visit Iowa City (although I’m sure it’s lovely).
A cat is a universal icebreaker, and mine makes a complete nonsense of my anxieties about meeting people or hosting. Any seated guest receives a lapful of cat, and if we’re standing in the kitchen having drinks with friends Hector will insert himself neatly into the circle, as though listening politely to our drivel. My neighbours, one hot summer night, found him making himself at home on their sleeping heads after climbing through the window. He has a relationship with some dogs nearby — apparently winding them up by staring at them through the window.
According to the charity Cats Protection, more than a quarter of UK households have at least one cat. Hector is just one of many local creatures — little provocateurs with no regard for private property — who facilitate glimmers of neighbourliness.
In my previous homes, I’ve never known my neighbours. But, recently, I’ve met people after they texted me to say they’d found my calling card in their gardens (a furiously scratched off quick-release collar with my number on it). I know nearby cats by name — there’s a local Facebook group dedicated to them, filled both with found and lost notices and simple posts of appreciation (the pair of cats who hang out near the train station garner many paparazzi-style shots).
There was one cat who would wait outside our cat flap, seemingly homeless and starving, but after I tracked down his owner it turned out he was just calling on his playmate to come out and eat bugs. Sometimes this feline community spirit becomes a bit of a rager: a friend with a cat cam once discovered three strange mogs urinating and rolling around in her flat in the middle of the night while her own cat looked on.
Hector is an outdoor cat. So much so that I sometimes think he believes me to be the domestic pet. Every time he sees my husband or me in the street he wears an expression of complete bafflement and embarrassment. He once tried to drag a deflated football through the cat flap, presumably for our enrichment in confinement.
But an indoor cat can still provide a public service. I’d rightly be put on a list if I watched a human neighbour, through their window, sleeping, but no matter the sour mood I’m in it’s always cheering to pass a cat, tucked snoozing inside the curtains or aloofly looking out. At a recent party I was at, in the small hours of the morning, there was a shout of “look at that” — cue 20 people rushing to view two plump beasts in the flat opposite. And they love staring back. Bin day is basically a trip down the Imax for cats.
A cat tour is a little twee, sure. And some people (perhaps justifiably) view cats as nothing more than invasive flowerbed defecators. But sometimes all that’s needed to bring people together is seeing Eggs in the window, or Jerry on a lead, or Captain Jimothy, who, his young handler explained, loves to lick plastic bags.
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