I do not want to write this piece. Not only is it going to be a really gruesome piece, which means that many of you will not want to read it especially if it is your habit to prop The Times against the cruet set while you spoon down your morning roughage but it is also going to be the sort of piece which generates sackfuls of replies, many of them written in the spidery hand and emerald ink of the completely demented.
That is because the piece is about cats. You will therefore instantly appreciate that though neither I may want to write it nor you to read it, duty miaows. For British cats are suddenly more important than they have ever been, not simply for themselves but for their prime position as cultural signifiers, now that their population, as of this year's pet census, outnumbers, for the first time, that of dogs. I do not know why this has happened, they do not fetch our slippers, they do not bite our burglars, they do not even bring our sticks back, yet nonetheless cats have now achieved a national significance second, quadripodally at least, to none.
But it is not, it seems, significant enough. I know this because, when I went to my gate this morning to collect the milk, there was a dead cat in the road. At some earlier point it had been flattened, and it was all too pitiably evident that the later the morning had grown, the flatter had grown the cat, so that matters had now reached a point where some kind of expert would be required to separate it from the tarmac. And, furthermore, to notify the bereaved. So I rang the police.
To discover, to my astonishment, the insignificance of what is now man's best friend. For while the police will pull out all the official stops to deal with a dead, or merely missing, dog, when it comes to cats, de minimis non curat lex.
The cat, alive or dead, has no constabulary status. It is, I was informed in the Bill's drear jargon, non-notifiable. So what do I do? I said. You phone Barnet Council's Highway Cleaning Department, said the Bill. They, it added tenderly, will send a bloke round to scrape it up.
Scrape it up? Someone loved this cat indeed probably still does, not yet knowing that it will never again pop through the catflap, having reached a state where it could as easily be slid under the door. The ex-owner should be compassionately told what had happened, not left to speculate and fret, or wander the streets day and night calling its name, putting out bowls of milk or marrowbone jelly destined only to attract unpet flies. More yet, they should be told that it was dead so that they could grieve, and, more still, be given the opportunity to retrieve their loved one, roll it up, and bury it in some dappled garden spot, erect a headstone, bedeck the poignant mound with catnip, all that.
What am I to do for the best? Two hours have passed since I rang the Highway Cleaning Department, but their grim scraper hasn't yet arrived, and I can't decide what to do when he does: ask him for the scrapings even though he is sure to claim he is not empowered to release these under Section 12 of the Highways (Scrapings) Act 1934, folding money may sometimes spot a loophole and divine some way of finding their proper resting place? If so, how? Wait for a note to be put on a gate about a missing cat, with a description now utterly unhelpful and a name to which it is no longer in a position to answer? Put one on my own asking if anyone has lost a tyre-coloured moggy three feet square? And how long, never mind where, should I be expected to keep feline remains, the weather still being mild for the time of year?
Two further cars have just rendered the problem yet more insoluble: by the time the Council turns up, it could be a question of cat, what cat, I trust this is not some kind of prank, we are up to here with hedgehogs as it is. So can any good emerge from all this? Well, just possibly, for though this cat's fate is sadly sealed, it may unseal the fate of others: I ask for the law to be changed to make cats notifiable, so that they fall within the reach of its long arm. That is why I have written this piece.
Despite a strong suspicion that the Bill will have wanted me to write it even less than I did.