As a small boy, living first in Japan and later in France, I had strong recurring fantasies of a whole world inhabited only by cats.

I designed passenger liners and warships manned by them.  The ships  had cabins with cat-sized bunks.  The cat navy had its own romantic uniforms.  In this imaginary world there was also a cat air force - felines riding on saddles strapped onto seagulls that flew in perfect formation.  There were cat train drivers, horse riders and priests and, of course, ruling over them all was the King of the Cats.  There was a cat national anthem that I hummed but, lacking an ear for music, I could rarely make the tune sound the same.

To those who disapprove of giving human attributes to animals, I can only quote from my own experience:  If you think of animals as people when you are a child, you grow up loving them more, not less.

My father was British and my mother French.  My first cat memory is of being made to dress up like one at a children's fancy dress party in Yokohama, Japan, where my father had a business.  My mother had a brown velvet suit made for me with large triangular ears and a long brown tail that seemed as big as I was.  Wearing it was a bit of an ordeal and my love for cats nearly suffered a blow from which it might never have recovered.  On stage, as the audience beamed, I made a few pitiful attempts to mew, then burst into tears!  But, as the Jesuits say, 'give us the child and we will create the man.'

A love for cats can sometimes make you stand out in a crowd.  My first career was in journalism and in Rome, where I worked as a Reuter correspondent, it caused me one day almost to be arrested by the carabinieri.  When it rained really hard, hundreds of the city's cat colony would be trapped on the marble monuments by floodwaters.  With a girl friend, I used to fill up a suitcase with hamburgers and toss them at the marooned cats.

Because of my French background, I had been a hopeless cricket player at my English school.  I was a poor thrower and many of the hamburgers fell short, to be lost with a splash in the water, much to the dismay of the cats.  Unfortunately a policeman mistook my manna from Heaven as an attempt to desecrate a public monument.  Perhaps he thought the hamburgers were unexploded grenades!  The day was saved only by producing my Italian Ministry of the Interior press pass which fortunately was very impressive looking.

Back in 1869, a French writer about cats, Champfleury, counted 63 different types of meows among cats of his acquaintance.  Over the years, feline experts have come up with a host of different tallies. But all of them seem to agree on one thing.   There really is a cat language.

As cats rarely meow to each other, except on specific sexy occasions, it is obviously a language they have devised specially since the start of their voluntary domestication to communicate wishes - or commands - to their humans.  I discovered from my research that Merlin's deep purr like all cats' was of the same frequency as an idling diesel engine, 25.9 cycles per second! 

When he became a photographic model, it was always Merlin alone who decided the length of each photo session.  Sometimes he sat patiently through two or three rolls of film.  But if he was bored, he would indicate that the proceedings were at an end by tossing off his headgear with a quick shake of the head.  Michael Weigall, Merlin's photographer and impresario

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