Surveillance

I was watching this evening a programme about cats. With the aid of GPS tracking systems and tiny cameras fitted in their collars, the ramblings of a community of 50 cats around their home territory were revealed in intimate detail. I was thinking it might be informative to attach something of the sort to my own cat. It may help to make some sense of the mysterious secret life she leads. To be honest, most of her day is not at all mysterious or secret, as I can see her spending hour after hour asleep on the sofa, or on the bed, or on her cat chair (being an elevated fluffy circular platform barely large enough to accommodate her when she is curled up; and yet she never – well, rarely – falls off).

But there are times when she disappears through the cat flap – just this minute, for example – and lopes off to patrol the garden, and presumably the neighbours' gardens. You can see her sometimes sitting on top of the shed; watching. It can be quite unnerving, in a way. You feel under observation. Clearly, you may be disappointed to learn from news reports in recent days that all your emails and tweets and social mediating may be open to scrutiny by national intelligence agencies. But all of this shades into insignificance when you are faced with a cat staring at you all day.