Evening Standard: Jul 87

My cat Colin has been fighting the tall, rangy, battle-scarred black tom I call Clint Eastwood for about the last six months. Colin doesn't read the cat books so he doesn't know that in cases like this, where territory is in dispute rather than girls, a single battle should decide the issue.

Once one of the combatants submits that should be the end of the matter and the winner is allowed to pee on the flowers. Clint, though, is an unusual cat. He walks as though he's got a six-shooter holstered on each thigh and tied down, always the sign of gunfighter, and his persistence is amazing.

I've wondered in the past if he's trying to get an important message through to me, which Colin is preventing. He has torn up my newspapers before now and often sits on top of the television swishing his tall across the screen like a windscreen wiper. He could be operating a kind of censorship.

Now I may never know if Clint is trying to tell me something. When Colin caught a cold recently I put a dab of Vick on his little chest, hoping the fumes would waft upwards and clear his head. I was just wondering if he ought to be wearing a woolly vest as well when he got the radar click that tells him Clint's about.

He went through the cat-flap like an Exocet and confronted his arch-enemy on the roof of the shed: an historic battleground. As soon as they closed, though, Clint sniffed, stopped with all four legs braced, howled once and fled and I haven't seen him since. He must think that if Colin is prepared to go for chemical warfare he may try to nuke him next time he calls.