I’d never really been a cat person prior to meeting my husband and his rescue cat, Isis. In fact, before I became a wife and mother-of-three (kitties), I was one of those people that basked in the delight of semi-taunting my feline-friendly acquaintances for their partiality for paw and whisker.

As far as I was concerned, there were only two kinds of cat owners:

1)      Lonely, post-menopausal and, frankly scary, women who likely dressed their furry charges in Victorian style bonnets before parading them around parks in SilverCross perambulators.

2)      Chronically lazy (and equally lonely) 30-something women looking for a low maintenance child that would be slightly more difficult to accidentally kill than a human baby. If this category ever achieved their primary aim of acquiring an investment banker boyfriend, a cat child could quite feasibly fend for itself during weekend escapes to aforementioned boyfriend’s country house. A human baby, however, would most likely howl in its own waste until removed by social services.

While the first group would give their beasts rather innocent and jovial names for their pussycats such as Binky and Thomas, the second group would plummet for a more literary choice as a means of drawing attention to their intellectual prowess (and allure investment banking boyfriends). Of course no man worth his weight would go anywhere near a woman that came with a cat called Coriolanus or Iago (or so I would snigger to myself).

Since forming this opinion, I have spent the past five years most decidedly eating my words…and desperately trying to prove to my (now very smug) feline loving peers that I most definitely DO NOT fall into either one of my own, tragic, cat-lover categories.