Everyone Loves Sid

My wife told me we'd be going to Brackenridge Park on Wednesday evening because Sid had hired a clown. Our Wednesday evenings at Brackenridge Park had been a regular event over previous summers. Bess's mother would pick Junior up from school, and Bess herself would come home from work, and we would all meet at the park to watch Sid run and to cheer him on. Every Wednesday runners from all over San Antonio would meet to run two miles through the woodland surrounding the park between half past six and seven; and Sid was always amongst them. For innumerable reasons we had fallen out of the habit this year, although Sid was still there every week, and this time he'd hired a clown.

'Why has he hired a clown?' I asked.

'To keep the kids entertained,' Bess told me.

It seemed as good a reason as any, so I didn't give it any further thought.

Sid is probably the closest I have to a father-in-law. My wife's biological father is still alive, but the two of them have had a chequered history. He separated from Bess's mother a couple of years after the birth of their two children, and eventually ended up getting remarried to Johnny Cash's cousin. My wife still speaks to him, although they've never really been what you would call close. Bess's elder brother on the other hand won't even acknowledge the fellow's existence. I met him once, but the last couple of years have not been kind. He didn't understand who I was, and he didn't even seem to recognise his own daughter. He has good days and bad days, and that was one of the latter.

Sid isn't really my father-in-law. Aside from the above, he and Bess's mother never married, and to be honest I'm not even sure quite what shape their relationship has taken over the years and I'm not inclined to pry. What is certain is that he has been a good friend to the family, and that everyone thinks he's great. My wife has a theory that she was initially coaxed into running as a pastime in the hope that it would soak up some of the excess energy which made her such a lively child. Whilst it's debatable whether this actually worked, it instilled in her a lifelong appreciation of running, and by association a generally high standard of health. Sid took Bess under his wing when she was about eight and got her running regular marathons, and he did the same for her brother who memorably aced the full 26.2 miles in three hours and ten seconds at the age of ten, beating Sid's own personal best of three hours and twenty-nine seconds. Sid, now into his seventies, continues to run, having been a runner all his life, and has been known to finish the two mile Brackenridge Park circuit in thirteen minutes.

I first encountered Sid three years ago when I came to live here. It was a memorable experience, although we barely exchanged a word when we first met one afternoon at the IHOP restaurant on Broadway. Being from rural Warwickshire in England, I don't have a wide experience of Jewish people beyond a few isolated individuals and whatever I've picked up from the media. Whilst I'm aware that this will probably sound ridiculous to some, just as it now does to me, I never imagined that Texas would have any sort of significant Jewish population, but it turns out that it does. The only reason this makes any difference at all is because this made Sid appear quite exotic to my eyes, as I suppose I may also have done to his. He seemed characteristically Texan in most respects, improbably tall and with a tendency to deliver slow, thoughtful sentences punctuated by lengthy, possibly contemplative pauses. Contrary to the image fostered by all those John Wayne films, there is gentle quality to the stereotypically huge Texan male, and it is a quality one might not have any good reason to anticipate; but as I have found again and again, nothing in this state is ever quite as it may appear from the other side of the border. Hollywood Texans will be brash and demonstrative, but the reality is that most of the year is far too hot for such nonsense, and I've yet to meet any significant quota of Texans so insecure that they feel a need to live up to the bullish stereotype.

Sid has therefore been the most characteristically Texan man I've thus far met in many respects, and he's also Jewish, which makes him immediately interesting and exotic from my point of view; although it's difficult to quite say why this should be without my worrying that it will sound a bit weird. Never mind.

We arrived at the park, myself, my wife, and Junior. We fed the ducks, and then wandered around to the trestle tables set up for the runners who, finishing the two miles, would soon come along for water or soda or something to eat. There weren't too many people yet, but there were some younger children and the clown.

'Sid hired Daisy Bee!' my wife exclaimed, incredulous.

'What language are you talking?'

She indicated the woman in the face paint and huge red shoes presently bending colourful balloons into animal shapes. 'That's Daisy Bee. She costs a fortune. We hired her for your second birthday, do you remember?'

My wife now glanced back at her son, who didn't remember and so shook his head. I didn't remember either, all of this having been before my time.

'She costs a fortune?'

'Like a couple of hundred dollars, but she's very good.'

We took to a bench as the first of the runners arrived, exhausted but happy to have crossed the finish line. The notion that Sid had splashed out on a top of the range clown just for the random entertainment of what was presently only a handful of children began to seem a little thin, and particularly given all the hot-dogs presently being barbecued, and the big, square birthday cake on the table.

Realisation dawned.

It had been Sid's birthday the week before, but it seemed he had decided to celebrate tonight, here and in the park. Being Sid, this was a detail he had neglected to mention. Always the man of mystery.

More and more runners arrived, swelling slowly to a crowd. We looked over towards the finish line hoping to see Sid - head and shoulders above everyone else - just as it had been when our Wednesday evening at the park had been a regular fixture. It was getting dark, and although we couldn't see him, his name bobbed up from the hubbub of conversation.

Daisy Bee was now making balloon parasols, shrieking away to a growing flock of giggling children. 'I don't know what he looks like,' she told one of the runners as she worked the balloons. 'All I know is some guy called Sid hired me.'

The sound of the crowd swelled on a moment of excitement. Sid had been spotted. We looked over towards the trees and saw a tall man. Somebody had stuck a large novelty pimp hat upon his head, all floppy dayglo felt and feathers. He came towards the tables at his usual leisurely post-athletic pace to a wave of applause. It was like being backstage at a rock concert, but with running as the medium which had brought us together. Everyone loves Sid, I thought to myself.

By the time we'd made our way through his crowd of fans and admirers, he'd already swapped his flamboyant hat for an elaborate Daisy Bee creation, something like a papal mitre in coloured balloons.

'Mr. Burton,' Sid smiled and observed the usual lengthy pause before concluding the greeting. 'Glad you all could make it.'

'Happy birthday, Sid,' we told him.

We talked a while amongst the chaos of backs slapped and cake passed across shoulders on paper plates. Sid introduced us to Mark, his nephew who had come all the way from Memphis to be here this evening; and he introduced us to everybody else as his family; and I'd never really considered it before, but I guess we were.

Everyone loves Sid.

Hey! Hey! We're the Benders!

During the warm summer evenings of 1981 my friends and I would  hang around Shipston's sportsfield on the London Road. The sports field comprised tennis courts, football and rugby pitches, and a club house from which we were excluded, being just fifteen, or I suppose sixteen in the case of Pete and Steve. We spent most of our time sat upon the swings of the children's play area, there being no children around to make use of them at that time of evening. This displeased Biddy Crump, an elderly pear-shaped woman and Daily Mail reader who lived opposite the entrance to the sportsfield. Her husband had been Geoff Crump, one time mayor of our small market town; but he'd passed on some years before, leaving her a widow and custodian of his beloved wellington boots, so local legend had it, specifically a fairly implausible local legend which held that the woman presently had her husband's beloved vulcanised footwear mounted in a cabinet and on display in the living room.

'Get off them swings!' She scowled at us from afar as she ambled across the car park towards the clubhouse. 'They're not for big boys like you!'

Had we been slightly younger, we might have taken more notice, but we were teenagers, and the edict had been delivered in a comical rural accent by someone with a funny name who, as widow of a mayor, presented herself as an authority figure and therefore a legitimate target; and an authority figure without any actual authority so far as we could see. Furthermore, we were sat upon the swings talking. None of us smoked, nor had we developed any premature alcoholic tendencies. We weren't in the habit of vandalising anything or terrorising anyone for chuckles. As usual, we were minding our own business, trying hard to squeeze some fun out of living in Shipston-on-Stour.

Sometimes we would answer back - and Pete tended to be the one with the wittiest replies in this capacity - or we would wander off to investigate the corner of the field in which a new quota of recently used condoms would appear each time we went to check. We would stand around and speculate as to who had been doing a deed about which we could only dream. At other times we would simply ignore Biddy and so she would waddle angrily towards the clubhouse, threatening to fetch Ted Hunt, proprietor of the establishment. It was an empty threat given that Ted Hunt didn't care enough to subject himself to our protests, peppered as they would be with insults built upon the unfortunate rhymes to which his surname lent itself with such ease. Eventually, having concluded whatever business she had at the clubhouse, Biddy would have to make the return journey, pretending not to notice that we were still there so as to avoid acknowledging the futility of the earlier exchange. Sometimes Pete would shout her name at astonishing volume as she disappeared from view. She would come back from around the corner and stare for a moment, unable to retaliate. Pete progressed to shouting her name backwards, pronouncing it Yiddib, an ingeniously pointless insult, we all felt, specifically designed to bewilder its victim.

With hindsight, it may seem harsh or unfair to some, but we had become a little territorial with regard to our right to sit on the swings and talk rubbish of an evening. There was Pete, Graham, and myself, our numbers occasionally bolstered by Eggy, Dean, Steve, Sid, Mark, Anders, Cloppo, Dean's little brother, or Janice, who was Dean's girlfriend. We didn't really have anywhere else to go, and it wasn't like we could all pile around someone's house in such numbers. We tended to avoid the square as it was usually full of local bikers and their younger admirers, kids our own age with denim jackets upon which were painted the covers of albums by Whitesnake or Rainbow, kids who always seemed to have something to prove.

These kids regarded at least a few of our own group as essentially homosexual and thus sorely in need of punishment. I myself was quite a scruffy child with my worn anorak and saggy corduroy trousers which I distinctly recall having been held up with baling twine at one point. My hair was not long, but I was very much a stranger to both brush and comb, at least sufficiently so as to have earned the nickname Worzel Gummidge after the popular television scarecrow played by Jon Pertwee. Pete and Graham were both of smarter appearance, and Pete in particular aspired to being a mod in keeping with his sartorial impulses. We were doing okay in school, if not spectacularly so, and couldn't really be considered stuck-up toffee-nosed swots unless your standards were so low as to define the act of wiping one's own bottom following defecation as la-di-da and ostentatious. We didn't generally like team sports. We kept ourselves to ourselves, and we all fancied girls - possibly excepting Sid who never really engaged with that one subject and seemed tellingly keen on musical theatre; but nevertheless, we were the gay boys, or the benders - as was probably the most popular term of the time. We didn't smoke, drink, or get in fights, and we listened to bands like Crass, Joy Division, the Stranglers or even Secret Affair in preference to affirming our heterosexuality with a big denim soundtrack of Queen, Judas Priest and proper music of that kind. We weren't homosexual, but we may as well have been for all the difference it made, and we felt somewhat outnumbered by the bikers, the heavy metal kids, and their legions of little followers.

If the sportsfield was not exactly our territory, we nevertheless felt a little safer there. Within plain sight of the clubhouse, a shitty Ford Cortina might occasionally dispense older kids who would pause to remind us that we were gay bum boys before heading into the clubhouse to discuss the size of each other's choppers over a jocular pint or twenty, but this was better than a shitty Ford Cortina pulling up at the side of the road to dispense the courier of a battering because one of us had looked at him funny. On one occasion a group of much younger children, possibly having been brought there by shitty Ford Cortina and bribed to befuckinghave with a pop and some crisps whilst dad discussed penises with his drinking buddies, decided that we were all bare bummers and ran around shouting this verdict, despite our all being fully clothed. This was difficult to take seriously, so Graham threw himself into the role, protesting that this was, after all, no longer the nineteeth century. These denim-clad offspring of Whitesnake fans were so appalled by the possibility that maybe we really were bare bummers that they went to play elsewhere, on the other side of the tennis courts.

More unnerving was the arrival of Bonnie, Janice's much younger sister, and her friend Joanne. They would have been about thirteen, and seemed keen to score points with the older boys and bikers, and they had apparently decided that we were easy targets.

'I've seen more cock on a dead sparrow,' Bonnie smirked at us from the roundabout, having finally caught our attention. We had been hoping that she and her little friend would get bored and piss off, but it wasn't to be. Bonnie smirked a lot, and her features were well-suited to it - like a sort of fish-faced young offender luxuriating in the knowledge of being a girl and thus traditionally immune to the kind of retaliation her comments might warrant under other circumstances. We told her to fuck off, but it didn't bother her, inviting only the somewhat obvious response of just who was going to make her fuck off, and which army they intended to enlist in furtherance of this objective.

Joanne, her sidekick, would underscore each comment with guttural laughter. Hur hur hur hur.

More cock on a dead sparrow - the accusation was bewildering, as none of us could really care less about this weirdly vicious little creature's estimate of our collective masculinity. Someone probably made a comment about the reproductive organs of the common sparrow being mostly internal, so the comparison seemed poorly made, but Bonnie seemed to take all those long words as proof of her original statement.

'Hur hur hur hur,' Joanne chuckled because we were all big queer benders or whatever.

Why us?, I wondered. These girls went to our school, and now they really seemed to be going for the jugular. Had any of our group even done so much as noticed them before, or were they simply joining in with the town consensus? After a while they seemed to lose interest, but hung around by the slide and the roundabout. At one point, Bonnie somehow fell over and, laughing, registered a loud complaint about having hurt her quim, and she actually used the mediaeval term. I got the impression she wanted us to hear, and I found it surprisingly unpleasant to listen to a thirteen year old girl who had apparently adopted the vocabulary of a seasoned author of down-market pornographic copy.

They started in on us again, this time with Joanne enthusiastically joining in to catalogue our numerous imagined failings as men. This seemed a poor decision on her part given that whole deal about people in glass houses not throwing stones. She was a bullish girl with a head the shape of a huge unshelled peanut and a deep, gruff voice.

'She's more of a man than all you lot put together,' Bonnie smirked.

There was moment of silence as everyone gave serious consideration to the comparison. Graham muttered something along the lines of how he didn't think anyone could argue with that.

Another moment passed before the laughter erupted in force. Pete laughed so hard that he fell off the swing as Joanne's heavy brow lowered to define the frown of a small, female Incredible Hulk.

'Oh dear.' Steve tried to speak through the tears, addressing Bonnie. 'You've really dropped your friend in it there.'

They left, because there was no coming back from that one. They had shot themselves in the collective foot, and from then on, each time one of us passed either girl in the school corridor we would be subjected to some reiteration of the theme of our being gay homosexual benders. Such comments were countered with reference to the ambiguous sexuality of JoManne, as we came to know her, or by singing a few bars of the Song of the Volga Boatmen, or beating our chests and roaring like gorillas, or lowering our voices as far as they would go and simply retorting with the words deep voice, drawing the syllables out as though it were a Gregorian chant. Eventually it worked, and the girls got bored, and hostilities ceased.

With hindsight, we said some truly horrible things. Joanne may have been entirely happy about her own appearance, or we may each have contributed to some later body dysmorphia, or she may have had a terrible home life which had driven her to take it out on us, or she may simply have been too fucking thick to understand the flaws in her own bullshit small-town mentality; but what has been said has been said, and it was all a long time ago, and in any case, we didn't start it.

Are Cats Better Than People?

We took Nibbler to the vet. Nibbler is one of our five cats, specifically the one the vet had erroneously registered as being called Burton, and just Burton - as in Burton the Cat. This was because nine months earlier my young stepson, when asked by the same vet as to the name of the mangy looking kitten he'd just brought in for his jabs, said it was Brave Burton Buzzini, giving the cat both our surnames; so they had assumed the first part was purely adjectival, like saying he was cute or inquisitive.

Junior found the cat known to our vet as Burton beneath a car in the parking lot near San Antonio zoo last summer. He was with his grandmother who, having at least twenty cats of her own, was hardly disposed towards discouraging the kid from crawling under the vehicle to rescue yet another pitiful ball of mewling fluff, this one distinguished by black fur and a bald patch on his head. Junior, having found the cat, named him Brave - purportedly in reference to the courage the kitten had demonstrated in being motherless in a San Antonio parking lot, although it seemed something of a coincidence given how much Junior had recently enjoyed the similarly named animated film about a mediaeval ginger girl triumphing against Celtic adversity. I never warmed to Brave as a name, uncharitable though that may seem - it struck me as pretentious, and reminded me of my former neighbour Gary who would make announcements regarding the proposed titles of pets he was yet to acquire.

'I'm gonna buy a husky,' he once told me wearing the grin of a man with enormous plans. 'I'm gonna call her Snow!'

Brave was small and energetic, spending much of the day launching himself claws out at my trouser leg, then hanging there meowing like something from one of those games where you hurl a ball of velcro at a wall of felt - assuming such a game exists and I didn't just imagine it. Aside from the lack of an antenna, he resembled Nibbler, the diminutive alien from the Futurama cartoon series, and the nickname stuck because it was funny and seemed to fit. He grew up to be large and muscular whilst retaining the personality of one of the Bash Street Kids, and a patch of white grown to the shape of a skull and crossbones would not have looked out of place in the black fur of his underside.

I tend to think pets find their own names by virtue of what ends up as most popular amongst those present with the vocal apparatus required to form the necessary syllables. Certainly this had been the case with the two senior members of our cat family. My wife had lived with Gus for more than a decade before we met - a stately grey tabby named Asparagus after a cat in a T.S. Eliot poem, shortened to Gus like the crystal meth tzar from Breaking Bad because it seemed to suit her character, the name rather than the profession.

Next came a Maine Coon kitten whom Junior named Scarface after a Native American culture hero he'd been studying at school. The choice startled me as I had quite independently written a novel in which a boy names his Chihuahua Scarface after the Houston rapper and former member of the Geto Boys. I was glad that neither of our Scarfaces were directly inspired by Als Pacino or Capone because I'd always hated the film and it seemed like a terrible name for a cat. As Scarface grew, briefly suffering an unfortunate bowel problem which caused him to fart out huge eye-stinging clouds of bum gas at regular intervals, he picked up the nickname Little Fluff, which abbreviated itself to just Fluff or Fluffy for use on less formal occasions. We'd worked with the idea that he was just a regular hairy cat until someone noticed that he hadn't stopped growing at the usual age and has since come to resemble cats pictured on the internet and identified as Maine Coons - named because early and presumably simple Europeans settling in Maine believed these huge moggies had resulted from the improbable union of raccoons and domestic felines. He's now three years old and, just as the internet promised, is still growing.

Maine Coons are described - rather sappily in my opinion - as gentle giants on at least a couple of websites. Sure enough Fluffy is big, and it's difficult not to feel sorry for him when he's bullied by pushy kittens at feeding time. We'd initially kept Nibbler in isolation when he first arrived, fearing that the mighty Fluff would smite him with a single blow of one huge oven-glove sized paw; but it turned out that Fluff was more scared of Nibbler than the other way around despite being about ten times his size; which also served to cast doubt on the other truism, that these cats are exceptionally intelligent. Bess scoffs at this claim and points to Fluff as he sits facing a door left only a little way open, patiently swishing his raccoon tail. She tells me that, unlike every other cat in the world, Fluff hasn't yet grasped the mechanics of pushing a door that's already a little way open when he wants to go through. I tell myself he could open the door if he wanted to; he just doesn't see it as his job.

With the arrival of Nibbler, we drew a line. Three cats were enough for anyone, and we didn't want to end up on one of those TV shows. Inevitably, mere weeks later at Brackenridge Park as we were about to climb in the car and return home from watching Sid on his weekly run, a tiny grey kitten emerged from the bushes. She was skinny but like Siamese cats often appear skinny, and certainly older than Nibbler had been when we found him; and friendly with a glossy coat, so we told ourselves through gritted teeth that she seemed healthy and happy and almost certainly lived in the park, and in any case we really didn't need another cat. Neither of us slept very well that night, and my wife announced having something to confess as she arrived home from work the next day. She'd been back to Brackenridge to see if the kitten was still there, reasoning that if not, then she really did live in the park and could look after herself.

'Thank God for that,' I said. 'I've been worried too. So did you see her?'

Bess opened the passenger door of the car and the kitten emerged from beneath the seat blinking huge golden eyes.

'How do you feel about Grace as a name?'

I liked it, not least because it was a real name and it meant Junior couldn't barge in and formally christen the kitten after some horrible Pokémon or Skylanders character; and yet even Grace didn't stick. Being roughly the same age, she and Nibbler took to each other immediately, playing with such vigour that there were times when we wondered whether we shouldn't separate them. Nibbler didn't seem to know when to stop, and Grace had effectively become his squeak toy right down to the bat-like noise she made when they were wrestling; and so she became known as Squeak Toy, Squeaky, or occasionally Bunnymouse after Bess addressed her as a bunny-mouse-bushbaby-fennec-fox-thing or whatever the hell you are, these all being creatures to which she bears passing resemblance with her soft grey fur, big eyes, and large rounded ears.

We told ourselves four was more than enough, but then came Flappy the bird who, as the name implies, wasn't actually a cat

Recently I've come to notice much lip service paid to the received wisdom that selfish Nazis with domestic cats are responsible for the destruction of all birds on planet Earth; and so the internet is frequently ablaze with keyboard politicians reminding us that Adolf Hitler also preferred animals to humans, and that anyone who donates money to a cats home whilst there remains one starving orphan in the world should immediately be put to death.

Firstly, call me a dangerous anarchist if you will, but I'd politely point out that the idea that a person who likes cats - or indeed any other animal - must necessarily prefer them to humans, having presumably worked out some sort of comparative ratings system, is crazy. There may well be one or two people out there who prefer cats to representatives of their own species, but as a general statement it's like saying there are people who prefer lasagne to Poland, or magnesium to the Dave Clark Five. In the event of your framing my person within some comically improbable scenario requiring a choice made between the life of a cat and the life of a human I would have to ask what the hell is wrong with you? If you believe the dominant moral concern of such a situation to be which of the two I would save, then frankly you should seek psychiatric advice.

Secondly, hunting is a skill which cats are taught by their mothers, and those separated from parents as kittens simply don't acquire that skill. Birds caught by such cats are the exception rather than the rule, and are more often than not fledglings just out of the nest and at a major disadvantage. This doesn't in itself reduce gratuitous bird murder to a matter of no consequence, but it's hardly the avian apocalypse imagined by at least one finger-wagging old tosspot who, upon learning of a feline presence in my home, suggested and you wonder why there are no song birds in your garden.

I hadn't wondered, because actually there are a ton of songbirds in my garden, which hopefully serves to illustrate how one should take care when dishing out condescending platitudes based on what some bloke said on the internet.

But of course, there are always exceptions and Flappy was a fledgling sparrow caught by Nibbler. We managed to rescue him before any lasting damage could be done, or so it seemed. He was just one small bird, but it was still quite upsetting. We duly fitted the cats with collars, but they chewed through them, so we do our best to keep them in during days when fledglings are about. This generally works, although if Jurassic Park has taught us anything it is that nature is unpredictable.

Bess cleaned up the baby sparrow, disinfecting where Nibbler had drawn blood being as infection from bacteria in cat saliva is supposedly the most common cause of death in such rescued birds. We kept him in a large cage in our bedroom, regularly feeding him the recommended mixture of mashed up cat food and ReptoCal nutritional supplement on the tip of a drinking straw every hour. He did well, and began to sing and chirp, hopping about in the cage or on the bed when we let him out, learning to fly and flapping his wings with what looked like excitement each time we came to feed him. Junior named him Hawkeye because the Avengers movie had just come out, which we ignored, calling him Flappy, which is probably ironic in some sense, being inspired by when a much younger and less portentous Junior would name animals after their most obvious characteristic, Wriggly the snake, Swimmy the fish, Fuzzy Larry the caterpillar and so on.

After a couple of weeks it got to the stage where we were watching for the tell-tale signs of Flappy being ready for release back into the wild; and he was almost there until one Saturday we came home to find him dead at the bottom of the cage. There'd been nothing to indicate he was anything other than fully recovered and bursting with health, but mortality is apparently high amongst rescued birds because even temporary captivity is in itself simply too stressful for them. We felt terrible. I burst into big manly tears on several occasions. That was a horrible weekend.

On the Sunday afternoon, Bess and Junior went out for a drive so as to allow me to listen to my Joy Division album in peace, returning with a solace kitten. This was also how Fluffy first came into the picture - as a response to the sort of intense personal pain which drives some of us to self-medicate with cats. The kitten was tiny, grey and stripy, rescued by a friend of my wife from a psychotic neighbour who had taken the litter of three from a local feral cat and was keeping them in a bucket of excrement prior to throwing them over a drop of fifty or so feet at the back of her house.

Junior had already named the kitten Kirby after a character in a computer game, but for once it seemed to fit, and it was at least an improvement on Mario, his first suggestion.

So we now have five cats, and I probably do like them more than I like a great many people I've never met, and at least a few people I have met, or whose moronic utterances I've found myself reading on facebook. I live with these five cats, so if I didn't like them more than I like a complete stranger, there would be something wrong with me, something fundamentally lacking in my character.

What is the point of a cat?, one particularly toxic facebook twat asked, enraged presumably by the idea that other people might hold different views to her own, where are all the sensible people who know that the right place for a cat is in a sack at the bottom of the river Thames?

I suggested that as a joke, this one wasn't particularly funny, and she told me that she wasn't joking.

See, that just makes you a cunt so far as I'm concerned.

It's not even specifically about cats, as I see it, and certainly not about giving money to stupid moggies when there are kids starving innit; it's about the basic ability to empathise, and to be able to take care of something less able to defend itself regardless of personal investment. It's about not being a cunt, and not burning ants with a magnifying glass because you think it's funny. It's a fairly basic human quality, but one that is easily swept aside by even low-level bullshit like the drive to gain moral ascendancy over one's peers, the sort of thinking by which a deluded individual claims to know what is best for everyone else; people who ironically would seem in some small way to justify the choices of those who really do like cats better than humans as a general principal.

That said, five is definitely enough.