How to be a Brit

In fact, today you may tell jokes about Jews, black people, Scots, the
Irish, dentists, policemen, dictators, our own politicians and even cats; you
may tell drinking jokes, jokes about adultery and shaggy-dog stories. In other
words you may joke about anything you choose except homosexuals. That is the
one sacred cow, the one taboo. Should you break that taboo, however innocent
your joke, any homosexual present will attack you with flashing eyes for being
a reactionary fossil, an insensitive twerp and an enemy of progress. I wouldn’t
even mind that. They are humourless — so what? That is their business. But why
on earth don’t they call themselves gloomy, lugubrious, dejected, glum, mopish,
sullen or grim? Why gay, the one thing they are not?

ON CAT-WORSHIP
     
     
    Having joked for
decades about how the English worship the cat, like the ancient Egyptians only
more so, I have fallen for the cat myself. It has become my sacred
animal.
    It all started with a
little black cat visiting me. ‘I like it here,’ she declared, and kept turning
up. I thought it would be courteous to call her by a name when talking to her
but I had no idea what her name was. I had to call her by the generic name of Cica, the Hungarian for pussy. (Later, she started spelling her name Tsi-Tsa
because she spells everything phonetically.) I felt embarrassed at not being
able to offer her anything to eat, just as one feels the need to offer a cup of
coffee or a drink even to casual visitors, so I started buying cat-food. I did
not know then what I know now; that this is the way of stealing somebody else’s
cat.
    One day I was caught
red-handed. In a little supermarket I had a tin of cat-food in my hand when a
nice-looking blonde lady came up to me, threw a glance at the object in my hand
and asked me somewhat pointedly if I was the gentleman who lived in that little
red-brick house round the corner. I admitted I was he. ‘My cat keeps visiting
you,’ she said firmly. ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I started feeding her not
realising that I was not supposed to do so. Too late now. She expects to be
fed.’
    ‘That’s all right,’ said
the kind lady. ‘We can share her from now on.’ She added: ‘This would have been
a tragedy two years ago. I have a son who just adored that cat. But he is
fourteen now and he has reached an age when he is more interested in girls than
in cats.’
    ‘That’s perfect riming,’ I
told her, ‘because I have reached an age when I’m getting more interested in
cats than in girls.’
    So we shared Tsi-Tsa.
That’s how I got hold of half a cat. Friends started guessing which half of her
belonged to me. The Tsi or the Tsa? There were some ribald
suggestions that it was the Tsa. Then difficulties arose in her original
home: a new tenant on the ground floor kept locking the door against her and
she could not get in and out. She got fed up with that and moved over to me
completely.
    By this time I was a great
admirer of her sovereign views, her incorruptibility, her coolness to human
flattery; her aloofness; her arrogance; her playfulness (when she wanted
to play); her affectionate nature (when she needed affection). Some
people asked me why I kept a cat. But I did not keep a cat. It never occurred
to me to keep a cat. She has chosen me and moved in. You can keep a dog; but it
is the cat who keeps people because cats find humans useful domestic animals.
    A dog will flatter you but
you have to flatter a cat. A dog is an employee; the cat is a free-lance.
    I was hurt when some
cat-lovers started making derogatory remarks: ‘You have only one cat?’
they asked. Then Ginger turned up. I had to call him Ginger because once again
I did not know his name. He claimed to be terribly hungry, so I had to feed
him. It turned out eventually that he was no stray, he belonged to a lady next
door, he has a good home but a voracious appetite. So he turns up for his
breakfast every morning and knocks on my door with his paw when he arrives. As
Tsi-Tsa is madly jealous, Ginger is fed in the patio. He is generous and
sometimes he arranges breakfast-parties for other cats. Always the same two
cats are invited and they eat together in a pleasant and friendly manner. It is
all rather formal. I was told by neighbours — who know all the cats in the
neighbourhood — that one of the guests is actually Ginger’s son, the other his
sister-in-law.
    Other cats know about these
feasts. They keep turning up and looking at me with an