Cat nutrition

Is it just my imagination, or are cats living longer these days? I don't know about dogs - I think it depends on the breed - but your good old moggy is living to a ripe old age.

The photos show the first cat I ever knew, a ginger and white neutered tom called Sandy. (By the way, that's me holding Sandy and my sister with the Beacon Reader.) He was highly intelligent and taught us to play games, rather than the other way round. He would crouch in the bath, we would enter the bathroom on hands and knees, then he would jump up and pat us on the nose. We would play hide and seek with him in the garden, taking turns hiding and creeping up on one another. Sadly, Sandy died at the age of only ten, when I was about fifteen, having got an abscess on his spine following a bite from another cat which resulted in paralysis and having to be put to sleep.

That broke our hearts. "We're never getting another cat," declared Mum. Three years later, when I was away at university, my sister, known on this blog as Merrylegs, brought home a little tabby scrap from the stables, nestling in her riding hat. "You can look after it, I'm having nothing to do with it," said Mum, unwilling to give her heart to another cat again, only to have it broken.

Three years later, Merrylegs too went off to uni, leaving Mum with Cloudy, as he was known by then. Well, he soon won her over and they bonded bigtime. Cloudy was Mum' constant companion. Everywhere she went, there he was also. He would even wait for her outside the loo door. She would throw silver foil balls for him to fetch like a dog. He lived till 14 when we got up one morning and found he had died in the night. Mum's heart was so badly broken this time that she never did have another pet.

Fast-forward to the 1990s. when I met Mr Grumpy. He had two cats, Bastard and Trollop. Bastard lived to 23, Trollop to 21. Flad is now 12 and runs around like a kitten, chasing moths. My theory is that cat food has improved so much from the old days, and is now brimming with so many vitamins that cats are much healthier, especially if, like Flad, they supplement their diet with mice. Is there anything in this theory, do you think? How long have your cats lived for?