The Life and Love of Cats

by Lewis Blackwell (Wild Dog Press / Helco)

Brian, colleague and cat lover, took one look at this magnificent book and said delightedly: “Oh look, kitty porn.”

He then paged through all its 200-plus pages, oohing and exclaiming. It’s that kind of book – if you’re a cat person, you’ll want it. If, like me, and your cat died two months ago, you’ll probably want another cat.

The pictures are brilliant, capturing the carelessness, aloofness, charm, curiosity, plaintiveness, grace and playfulness of felis catus.

A host of photographers have contributed to its pages, and all display an innate understanding of the felines with whom we share our homes.

Lewis Blackwell, author of “ The Life and Love of Trees”, has written the text around the framework of cats’ nine lives: for the first three lives, he contends, they play; for the second three lives they stray; and for the third they stay.

Being a cat lover is hard, he says.

There is always a touch of doubt that your cat loves you quite as much as you love it. “It is one of the attractions and frustrations of living with cats that they so obviously work well alongside us and yet adhere to a different logic.”

Whatever it is, people love cats. Blackwell says that in the US they spend $4 billion a year (roughly a gob-smacking R64bn) on cat food, a billion dollars more than they spend on baby food.

Blackwell has written serious chapters on cat topics such as evolution, domestic and wild cats, breeds and so forth, but also is given to cat-typical epigrams, such as “In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods. They have not forgotten this”; “it always gives me a shiver when I see a cat seeing what I can’t see”; and little verses: “Cats sleep anywhere, any table, any chair. Top of piano, window ledge, in the middle, on the edge.”

There’s a chapter on cat senses, which includes humans’ belief in their supernatural powers – think of the witch’s coal-black familiar.

There is lots of interesting stuff to read in this book, but its glory is the pictures.

I defy even the most hardened non-cat lover to leaf through the section titled “the smallest feline is a masterpiece”, page after page of kittens, and not mutter one “awww”.

There are pictures of cats sleeping, cats pouncing, cats yawning and cats prowling, cats looking wistfully out of a window, and anxiously in.

Although most of the cats are domestic, there are pictures of their wilder and bigger cousins too – tigers, caracals, leopards.

It’s the suspicion of wildness that is the attraction of cats to us, suspects Blackwell, and quotes Rudyard Kipling in the “ Just So Stories”: “He will kill mice and he will be kind to Babies when he is in the house, just as long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, and when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.” – Vivien Horler